Representative Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) was raving on the floor of the House yesterday. “We’re talking about Eric Massa 24/7 on the TV. We’re talking about war and peace, $3 billion dollars, a thousand lives and no press? No press?”

Mr. Massa is the recently resigned congressman from New York who may or may not have groped staffers. That question has gotten plenty of new coverage. The debate over the war in Afghanistan – as Mr. Kennedy complained – gets virtually none.

He’s got a point. Our infotainment news culture has lost its way. The mainstream media has forgotten how to edit – that is, to determine what’s important and what’s not. Where Ms. Massa’s hands have been will affect the future of almost no one, while young Americans face – and too often embrace – death half a world away.

A few weeks ago, when Washington, DC was hit by serial snowstorms, much of the yahoo media (I’m looking at you, Fox News and increasingly, at you, CNN) declared – along with the some of our stupidest members of Congress – that it proved global warming was a hoax dreamed up by Al Gore and the environmental groups.

Here in Vermont, where winter usually overstays the calendar by a month, the snow is gone. It’s been in the 40s and 50s for two weeks. That’s no guarantee we won’t get another big snowstorm – we probably will. (None of us dare put shovels in the shed.) The current balmy weather here doesn’t prove global warming is real any more than a few snowfalls in DC prove it’s false.

So where should we look for evidence or proof or hoax? How about Science magazine? Last Friday, Science published a paper on the venting of methane from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas. It traps approximately 20 times as much heat in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Huge deposits of methane are – or have been – trapped beneath the permafrost of the arctic.

Here’s an attempt at a laic translation of the paper’s abstract:

“Remobilization to the atmosphere of only a small fraction of the methane held in East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS) sediments could trigger abrupt climate warming, yet it is believed that sub-sea permafrost acts as a lid to keep this shallow methane reservoir in place.”

(If even a small portion of the trapped methane gets out, it could set off a feedback loop, i.e. some methane gets out and warms the atmosphere enough to release more methane, which warms the atmosphere enough to release more methane, etc. etc. until there’s no stopping it.)

“Here, we show that more than 5000 at-sea observations of dissolved methane demonstrates that greater than 80% of ESAS bottom waters and greater than 50% of surface waters are supersaturated with methane regarding to the atmosphere.”

(We measured and measured and measured again and there’s significant levels of methane in the water.)

“The current atmospheric venting flux, which is composed of a diffusive component and a gradual ebullition component, is on par with previous estimates of methane venting from the entire World Ocean.”

(OK, “diffusive component” and “ebullition component” are obscure terms, but “on par with previous estimates of methane venting from the entire World Ocean” is clear enough. You get the picture.)

Sounds pretty grim, huh? Perhaps it is. We don’t know for sure. Is a) methane escaping at an accelerated rate or b) have we only recently started taking precise measurements? (In this case, b), which does not preclude the possibility of a) also being true. We’ll need more measurements to know.)

Greater than the methane venting of the entire World Ocean? Also sounds bad, but is less than the methane produced by the cattle herd-and-feedlot population we have caused to grow so enormous. (Contrary to popular humor, it’s their belching, rather than their farts, that contribute most of the methane.) The arctic and oceanic methane venting is also probably smaller than the methane released via the oil industry.

Still, none of this is good news and it’s worse news that we pay more attention to Fox News video of an igloo on Capitol Hill than we do to Science magazine writing about Siberian methane venting.

In my first post this year, I wrote about people who don’t “believe” in global warming, noting that real phenomena cannot be wished away. On the other hand, the ignorance and inaction that flows from wishful thinking can make global warming all too real.

© Mark Floegel, 2010