Because we have editors and fact checkers!

A few months ago, the CGSC held a "get to know the media" panel.  It was one that was, blatantly, absent of any representatives of social media.


I stood up and asked this esteemed panel what they thought of bloggers as citizen journalists.  The answer from the AP rep was along the lines of "One of the things that separates us is that we have editors and fact checkers, so our stories are almost always correct."  This, apparently, is why they so very seldom issue apologies or retractions when they are wrong; because the news cycle continues on, and no one would be interested to read their retractions and corrections.

Apparently, it doesn't take a journalism degree to know that Cavalry is a military term descriptive of a highly mobile military unit whose primary missions are exploitation, pursuit, and reconnaissance, and Calvary is the place where the Romans nailed that guy to the big plus sign.  When the esteemed editors of the AP get the simplest things wrong, how can they be trusted to accurately report specifics of things which require a depth or breadth of knowledge?

I figure the editors sucked at things like science to begin with, which is why they A) are journalists and B) buy in to the whole AGW nonsense.

Here's some science for you, since they can't understand it enough to write about it:

Natural gas consists mostly of methane.  Burning hydrocarbons like methane is called combustion.  In a combustion reaction, carbon dioxide and water are formed as products. Here is the balanced chemical equation for the combustion of methane:

CH4(g) + 2 O2(g) -----> CO2(g) + 2 H2O(l)

Every 1 molecule of methane (CH4) requires 2 molecules of O2 to combust or "burn" - this produces 1 molecule of carbon dioxide gas and 2 molecules of liquid water (H2O)

So...

BURNING NATURAL GAS PRODUCES CO2.

But wait, apparently the AP's "Energy Writer" Mark Williams, and his editors, suck at math, too:

"a 90-year supply is under our feet."
"it's becoming the fuel of choice when building new power plants."
"The only question is whether enough gas can be delivered at affordable enough prices for these trends to accelerate."


If we have a 90-year supply at current consumption rates (as stated in the article) and we expect to see very large increases in consumption for the next several years, just how does that 90-year supply manage to last 90-years?  If the rate of consumption doubles every 20 years (a wildly conservative estimate), then it works like this:


2010:  90yrs supply
2030:  70yrs supply @ 2010 rates, 35yrs supply@ 2030 rates
2050:  40yrs supply@ 2010 rates, 15yrs supply@ 2030 rates, 7.5yrs supply@ 2050 rates
2070:  20yrs supply@ 2010 rates, -5yrs supply@ 2030 rates, -12.5yrs supply@ 2050 rates





If Al Gore's AGW is supposed to be caused by CO2, just how in the hell does burning methane and making CO2 help in "the glowball warmening" fight? 

Here's the (since corrected) link to the article:  http://tinyurl.com/y9pftut 

And the article (with well-fact-checked and researched title) below: 
 

Asshats.

Of course, if all the electricity use of the USA was distributed evenly among its population, and all of it came from nuclear power, then the amount of nuclear waste each person would generate per year would be 39.5 grams. That's the weight of 7 U. S. quarters of waste, per year. A detailed description of this result can be found here. If we got all our electricity from coal and natural gas, expect to have over 10,000 kilograms of CO₂/yr attributed to each person, not to mention other poisonous emissions directly to the biosphere (based on EIA emissions data).

--Chuck