Many Americans assume that if a story has been in the news section of a reputable English newspaper, it has been fact-checked.
Ah.
No, this isn\’t true.
As Mr. Hari\’s columns in a reputable English newspaper so elegantly remind us.
Umm, actually, as Mr. Hari\’s column in The Nation also demonstrates.
Buried in the hard Arctic permafrost is a massive amount of the gas methane, which causes thirty times more warming than carbon dioxide.
23-25 times, not 30.
Are you sure? The US National Science Foundation – one of the most distinguished organisations in US – and the three distinguished climate scientists I called to check it with said it’s thirty times:
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=116534
They seem more reliable sources than you or I for the potency of methane.
“fact-checked” in the US doesn’t mean that they rush to the lab to measure it – it just means that if someone tells you a porkie you can find a second liar to agree to it. Of course, that remark is general and not directed at the child Hari.
“They seem more reliable sources than you or I for the potency of methane.”
The article is wrong. Those figures don’t take into account how CH4 interacts in the atmosphere and contributes to warming. To do it properly requires an understanding of the lifecycle of CH4 in the atmosphere and how it breaks down. People have done that work, and the results are widely available from authoritative sources:
http://www.ieta.org/ieta/www/pages/index.php?IdSitePage=123
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/downloads06/06FastFacts.pdf
http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=285
Many Americans assume that if a story has been in the news section of a reputable English newspaper, it has been fact-checked.
Scott Burgess wasn’t one of them, as Hari found out to his peril.
I would imagine that ‘buried in the hard arctic permafrost’ it does no warming whatsoever.
Not 1 time,s not 23 times, not 25 times, not 30 times. None.
Ahh, I miss the Scott Burgess blog… 🙁