Gas Planet
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Scientists Square Off Over Fracking's Impact on Climate
Last year, a scientist from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York published a paper in a scientific journal. The journal is called Climatic Change. Robert Howarth is the scientist who published the paper. He teaches environmental scientist at Cornell. He got the idea for the paper about three years ago. That’s when the region around Ithaca was drawing interest from the oil and gas industry because it sits on top of the Marcellus shale—a vast deposit of natural gas.
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Methane Hunters
Scientists question how much gas is leaking from shale gas wells. Right now, no one can say for sure. But reporter Reid Frazier joined a scientist on his search for methane from the gas industry.
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Methane the Potent
Methane comes from a lot of things, not just a gas well. It bubbles out of swamps, landfills, and rice paddies. Believe it or not, cows are a major source of methane. A recent study said it was up to 100 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. To explain why, the story begins not on earth, but in space.
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A Biography of Methane
To understand why natural gas behaves the way it does, you have to dig up a bit of its past. We go back 385 million years ago when the Marcellus shale was formed.
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Fracking: A New York Perspective
In New York, the decision whether to allow hydrofracking has taken four years. There, people on both sides of the debate have studied the pros and cons, and have drawn very different conclusions.
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Turf Wars
Last year, a scientist from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York published a paper in a scientific journal. The journal is called Climatic Change. Robert Howarth is the scientist who published the paper. He teaches environmental scientist at Cornell. He got the idea for the paper about three years ago. That’s when the region around Ithaca was drawing interest from the oil and gas industry because it sits on top of the Marcellus shale—a vast deposit of natural gas.
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The Future of Energy
Nathan Hultman, a scientist at the University of Maryland, has thought a lot about shale gas, climate change, and energy policy. It’s not so much the emissions he’s worried about with shale gas, but the impact it will have on a cleaner type of energy.
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The Sounds of Science
For over a century, scientists have known that gases in the atmosphere can trap heat, making the planet warmer. To illustrate this Greenhouse Effect, we recorded a pair of singers, David Jennings-Smith, a singer with the Pittsburgh Opera, and Pittsburgh vocalist Angela Morelli.
