The BBC website hosts handy revision notes for our kids. Who vets the information? Some time ago I posted about their claim that melting sea ice raises the sea level, Archimedes be damned. Now we find that the BBC thinks that dinosaurs invented space travel and colonised Saturn’s moon Titan, forming it’s seas of methane after they died. The idiocy is unbounded.
There’s more
Coal was made from trees, yes. But the BBC want us to believe all the oil and gas is made from melted down dinosaurs and plankton? You couldn’t make it up. Oh, they did.
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
The pseudoscience is the abiotic theory of hydrocarbon formation.
Simply because hydrocarbons are found on Titan, doesn’t mean the same formation processes occur there & here.
The point surely is that fossils are not essential to account for the presence of methane.
Even Pluto tested positive for methane.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto#Atmosphere
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Paper: Exploring the spatial, temporal, and vertical distribution of methane in Pluto’s atmosphere
The source of methane gas is probably the large scale CH4 ice deposits, especially at high Northern latitudes.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0019103514001535
That doesn’t tell us where the methane in the ice deposits came from, but dinosaurs and vegetation can probably be ruled out 🙂
Adam Gallon says:
March 5, 2019 at 8:34 am
The pseudoscience is the abiotic theory of hydrocarbon formation.
Simply because hydrocarbons are found on Titan, doesn’t mean the same formation processes occur there & here.
It also means that it could mean that’s how they formed on earth. Could it not?
I wonder what Fossils provided the Methane on Saturn & Jupiter?
“The pseudoscience is the abiotic theory of hydrocarbon formation.”
The theory of hydrocarbons being formed from biomass was created before we had any knowledge of the other planets, before we had extracted oil from the deep mantle and other areas that have never been surface, before we had found fossilised trees cutting horizontally across tens of millions of years of strata and multiple coal seams.
The fossilised dinosaur recently dug out of the Alberta oil sands was not crushed flat and had clearly not been subject to the extreme pressure required to form the strata it was embedded within.
You can’t handwave away the anomalies, that is how you create myth, not science.
“Coal was made from trees”
.. that would rule out any coal being formed in other ways
..and there are theories that coal can be formed without it being organic matter first.
I don’t think they’ve been disproved.
Some great comments here to get this important debate started. Keep it coming please.
Highly doubtful, as the conditions during the oil forming periods,in the Mesozoic age (252 to 66 million years ago) -70% , 20% were formed in the Cenozoic age (65 million years ago), and only 10% were formed in the Paleozoic age (541 to 252 million years ago). All in warm, tropical seas, not at c -180C.
here’s a good article on abiotic oil. http://viewzone.com/abioticoilx.html
and BTW, they’ve produced abiotic oil precursors in the labs and solid theory on how they would lead to hydrocarbons
Adam Gallon: the conditions
Haven’t changed much in the upper mantle in the last billion years.
Blast from the past…
U.N. PREDICTS DISASTER IF GLOBAL WARMING NOT CHECKED
June 1989
UNITED NATIONS (AP) A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.
https://www.thegwpf.com/u-n-predicts-disaster-if-global-warming-not-checked/
Climate models say…settled science…UN experts…emissions… 😂
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Our prediction…
Ah yes, UN IPCC… emissions…
Metane is something different than crude oil, which is mainly octane, a quite more complex molecule, and some even longer chains… (I’m not sure now, if oil has also aromatic cycle compounds?)
The coal is obviously from plants, there are fossils (imprints) found sometimes in it…
The oil being made from dead organism deposits is vindicated by that they are mostly found in deltas of huge rivers… Just from this statistics, it is somehow connected to something being washed down by the rivers…
Btw – Libya, there was a huge river flowing down from what is today Sahara. When Europe was below glacier, the Hadley Cell was much different (the wet air from Atlantic that now flows mainly over Europe and Scandinavia eastward, was then flowing over Sahara and Mediterranean instead) and Sahara was green and had a river going down near Libya, there are still said to be river-beds there…
I see almost no pseudo-science or lies in the two BBC posts above… Well, methane may be different, it’s a simple molecule and occurs in space too… I’m not sure, but Russia possibly extracts methane on Siberia plaines, not in river-deltas?
Shale gas and oil is also extracted from the levels, that once were marshes, i.e. full of alive organisms…
P.A. Semi says:
The oil being made from dead organism deposits is vindicated by that they are mostly found in deltas of huge rivers
Not many huge rivers in Saudi Arabia…
List of countries without rivers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_without_rivers
oldbrew says:
> Not many huge rivers in Saudi Arabia…
First, it’s Tigris and Eufrates in Persian Gulf.
Second, if they drill some oil in Red Sea (which I do not know now), it is a question, where was Nile river ending in Mesozoic era…? No, there are almost no oil-fields in Red Sea, only in it’s very neck besides Egypt Suez canal, which could be Nile delta once long ago…
The states like UAE and Oman were once sea-bed below Tigris+Eufrates delta… (I don’t remember now, where Saudi peninsula moves tectonically and where it can be raising? (i.e. if there is height in Oman, it need not be there in ancient times?) Like India moves northward and raises Himalaya mountains… Like Italy moves northward and raises Alps mountains…)
It also shows, that Syria and Iraq were once much greener and life-full regions, not deserts as today…
Ghawar is the world’s biggest oil field, shown in green inside the red oblong here.
This precisely was Eufrat and Tigris delta once ago… The delta shifts, already last 2000 years is documented a very long shift (I just don’t remember which direction)…
Also, as Saudi Arabia sub-continent moves, it can raise on one side more than other (over geological time-scales)…