The environmental "surge" you're not hearing anything about....

than any MSM outlet is reporting.

"Meanwhile, a strong natural gas odor was reported this morning in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Jersey City, Weehawken, and Newark. Last August, a similar unexplained gas odor sent people to the hospital in Staten Island and Queens. Although methane is odorless, natural methane venting is often accompanied by the venting of acrid hydrogen sulfide, a byproduct of bacterial decomposition."

Somehow the reader assumes that the NYC/NJ events are related to methane hydrates--esp. with that H2S business. But these two facts unrelated to each other don't make the paragraph any more relevant to his topic.

You don't get a natural gas odor from hydrogen sulfide: That's the usual 'rotten egg' odor.

String along unrelated facts knowing that people assume that somehow they're relevant and support your point, and you get people to build your fallacies for you. *-speak redux.

just wondering -- since most people don't know the chemical difference, aren't they going to say "natural gas" odor, regardless?

But I've smelled both, and there's no way I could confuse them. The stuff they put in natural gas to give it an odor contains sulfur, but they're different.

A lot of people have smelled both rotten eggs and natural gas. I've never heard anybody mix them up. Except Madsen, but his mixing them up when it serves his interest doesn't surprise me.

(To be honest, my sense of smell is sufficiently screwed up that I think that doped natural gas smells kind of nice. Not rotten eggs, however.)

Those are two different smells. They could be confused by the untrained nose, perhaps, but surely in all of NYC there is at least ONE trained nose.

Not only that, but natural effusion of gasses due to temperature flux does not seem to be a "one day" thing, but gradual and detectable. The NYC situation doesn't seem to fit the mold.

And if it is Madsen, another reason to doubt the connection. That feller is not one of our shining examples of journalistic integrity.

I'm not saying this isn't it, but I'd really like to see some footnotes from some scientists.