Summary: Welcome to another packed Radio Ecoshock show. I'm your tour guide, Alex Smith. This week we look into why the U.S. government, and governments around the world, continue to kid themselves about the power of methane, the number two global warming gas in the atmosphere. With a threat this serious, coming from the melting Arctic, warming oceans, fracking, agriculture, and all or natural gas use - it isn't "kidding". It is lying to ourselves at great cost. A group of esteemed scientists have written to top levels of American government calling for a change toward reality on methane. Then we'll investigate some of the costs of carbon pollution, with seasoned journalist and author Mark Shapiro. His new book is called "Carbon Shock" The show wraps up with a turn toward the spiritual, a kind of scientific change in our whole story. Andrew Beath is our guest. Onward and upward. Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB) Or listen to/download this program right now on Soundcloud! SCIENTISTS WARN AMERICAN GOVERNMENT ON METHANE While the world's focus is on carbon dioxide, a group of powerful scientists have written an urgent letter to the directors of five U.S. government agencies. More than 21 scientists wrote the letter on July 29th, 2014. It's just now surfacing in public, brought to my attention by Paul Beckwith. The scientists worry the American government, like other governments around the world, is not paying attention to the big risks posed by methane. That's methane from the Arctic, as you've heard on this program, but also methane from gas fracking, which our guest Robert Howarth warned us about years ago. One of the lead agents behind this letter is Anna Moritz, known as Mickey. She's a legal fellow at the Center for Biological Diversity. Moritz has published a lot, including as co-author of this just released paper on "The Worst Case and the Worst Example: An Agenda for Any Young Lawyer Who Wants to Save the World from Climate Chaos". She's also a co-author of the university level book "Climate Change: A Reader". This letter is one of those rare historic and extraordinary warnings from scientists to top levels of government. It reminds me of the letter written by Albert Einstein to President Roosevelt, warning atomic power is real, and could be used to make a super-bomb never seen before on Earth. Now we have the methane bomb. Read the letter for yourself here. THE METHANE SITUATION: A LAYMAN'S PRIMER I am not a scientist. I've learned from my guests and research. I welcome any corrections to this primer. Here is the situation in a nutshell: carbon dioxide is measured as a global warming by it's climate forcing over a 100 year period. That is given the value of 1. There are other greenhouse gases that are many time more powerful than carbon dioxide, so they get a higher number which is meant to compare them to CO2. Methane (CH4, also known as "natural gas") deteriorates in the atmosphere, devolving into more carbon dioxide, among other things. The life of methane at it's most powerful levels is around 12 years. In order to compare methane to carbon dioxide, it was given a comparative number of 20. If we look at the warming potential of methane over 100 years, pound for pound, or kilo by kilo, it would be 20 times more powerful at trapping warmth than CO2. Here's the trouble: during it's (approximate) 12 year life in the atmosphere, methane is actually at least 86 times as powerful as the same amount of CO2, according to the most recent science, and it's very good and dependable science. Other scientists suggest that for very short periods, perhaps a year, methane could be 150 times more powerful than CO2, or even higher. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has moved a bit, raising methane's Global Warming Potential (GWP) from 20 to 34 - but that's still based on 100 years, and is still misleading and dangerously low. Previously, say in the 1990's, government
