How leaky is shale gas production?

The study only covers methane leakage and says nothing of the chemical slurries used nor the groundwater/aquifer leakage of said slurries. IMO, the Ars article is reverse FUD.

The ars piece opens with "How leaky is shale gas production? Good news—fracking's probably not as leaky as earlier studies suggested.", it continues without much analysis, and my weariness is that it doesn't really address that these studies and findings and reports are very hard to trust on face (or any) value as this topic or industry has a history of funding convenient research and, as with this ars piece, reproduction of the reports as news headlines. I would like to know whether fracking is bad. I'm old enough to remember being told in the 70s that oil would soon run out. Both the 70s and the deadline have passed and now there's so much fossil fuel it's a danger and we should not have the Keystone pipeline because we'll never survive the carbon release. The 70s also bought us the forecast of another ice-age, with hindsight we should take it all with a pinch of salt, but instead we brand each other science deniers or otherwise.

> where's the investigation into Al Gore becoming a billionaire from this issue?

Reports put him at between $200-300M. Pretty far cry from billionaire.

> Al Gore has been debunked on numerous occasions; weren't the ice caps supposed to have disappeared? Over 5 years ago he made that claim but they're still there. Al Gore has almost godlike status among the global warming crowd yet he flies in private jets with motorcades and has a massive mansion. If he was so worried, why has he done nothing to curb his own carbon use?

This whole paragraph is nonsense. Why does Al Gore (a non-scientist) matter in this discussion at all? An Inconvenient Truth was propaganda. It just happens to be propaganda for a side that's backed by the evidence and nearly every climate scientist in the world (the so-called "global warming crowd").

If you want to show research debunking the currently-accepted research, then go for it. Otherwise, this is completely worthless; you're just fighting a celebrity, not the science.

It's creepy how the global warming crowd uses the term "denier", and that some of them have called for the death penalty for "deniers".

Sometimes the mask slips though from what their real political agenda is. Here's some quotes.

Quote by Ottmar Edenhoffer, high level UN-IPCC official: "We redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy...Basically it's a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization...One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore."

Quote by David Brower, a founder of the Sierra Club: "The goal now is a socialist, redistributionist society, which is nature's proper steward and society's only hope."

Quote by Christine Stewart, former Canadian Environment Minister: “No matter if the science is all phoney, there are collateral environmental benefits.... climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.”

The ice caps are disappearing, just at a slower rate, the Northwest passage is now open for shipping: http://news.discovery.com/earth/oceans/cargo-ship-is-first-t...

Climate scientists admitted they didn't have a complete model and worked to improve that. Satellites are being launched to add data to the model: http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2014/0629/NAS...

Ocean currents have been found to be storing up heat: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6199/897

The earth is an organic system, one that adapts. Nobody can truly know what will happen, the body of evidence and the majority of scientists agree that changing the balance of CO2 is not a good thing.

One persons hypocrisy does not invalidate everything else. Plus how do you know he's not offsetting his carbon footprint by planting trees?