This is an ancient article. Maybe someone can extract oil from it?
This is seems to be the latest: Siljan (lake) - Wikipedia
TL;DR - nothing here, move along.
Goodbye greenhouse effect with abundant natural gas? Sure, natural gas burns cleaner than most other common hydrocarbon fuels, but it still produces plenty of CO2. Half as much as coal or 75% as much as gasoline per BTU is an improvement, but it will not be our savior.
He said “That means good-bye energy crisis, sayonara OPEC, and toodaloo to nukes, air pollution (natural gas burns very cleanly), acid rain, the greenhouse effect, and just about every modern ill except herpes and ho-hum mouth”, not ‘Goodbye greenhouse effect’. Look at the date of the article and put it in the context of what people were worrying about in 1986. 
And really, if we actually COULD switch over completely to natural gas and not use any other fossil fuel it would go a long way to helping the green house gas issue, though it wouldn’t solve it as you noted. Not that it’s likely to happen, regardless.
Why did Uncle Cecil say the number or bronto’s per barrel of oil can’t be intelligently answered?
DV = Avg bronto volume
SV = Avg swamp volume
BPS = Avg barrel of oil per avg swamp
It may not be a correct answer but it would be intelligently derived.
Most oil comes from plant sources. Animal remains do contribute more for gas, though.
As such, you could use a mean, but it wouldn’t have much real meaning. Best analogy: how many rat hairs are in your candy bar? The mean may be some small number, but the median may well be zero, i.e. you can come up with some answer but it may not be meaningful.
Just as a technical note, brontos would be Jurassic and most of our oil/gas comes from somewhat younger source rock (the Cretaceous is a big source of a lot of our current production). We’re trying to get down into the Jurassic, but it’s not really known how much usable hydrocarbon we can extract from those rocks (the stuff needs to cook at the right temperature and there has to be amenable geology).
So, I’m putting the number of brontos in a barrel of oil at definitively zero. But the number of dinosaurs, in general, would naturally be a bit higher (but we can treat it as essentially zero or infinitesimal).
The wiki article on kerogen has a good summary. Basically, coal/gas comes from a mix of plants and animals, while oil predominantly comes from plant (marine, primarily) matter.
As you yourself note, this wouldn’t be a real answer but something pulled from thin air.
What I want to know is why the dinosaur/abiogenic fuel column link disappeared from the Recent Additions list. Did Cecil get an offer he couldn’t refuse???
:dubious:
It’s at the bottom of the list on my page.
Okay, so he didn’t exactly say “goodbye greenhouse effect,” but he did say “toodaloo to … the greenhouse effect, …,” and “toodaloo” means “goodbye.” If you parsed it some other way, please explain the meaning of the list of items following “toodaloo.”
I realize he might have been writing ironically, but your statement that switching completely to natural gas would help the greenhouse gas issue is also incorrect. It would eliminate a lot of other pollutants, but not CO2. In the context of the quoted sentence from the column, the natural gas would be abiogenic and practically unlimited, meaning a practically unlimited addition of CO2 to the atmosphere, creating a practically limitless greenhouse effect. If we were using fossil fuels, then there would at least be a much smaller supply to work with.
Well, blow me down! Of course, I think it was posted on Dec. 23, so by rights it should be near the top. So I can still sniff a conspiracy of obfuscation here…
Actually, what I meant to point out there was that the green house effect was well down on his list while you seemed to be underscoring it as if it was of major relevance to someone writing in the '80’s. Here is the exact quote:
Again, it was the '80’s, so it wasn’t really a major concern (at the time)…like the things further up his list. Additionally, if we DID switch entirely to natural gas in the '80’s (something not really possible, even today), because we found magic gas deep in the earth then our problems would be a hell of a lot less. Just the fact that we are switching over to natural gas from coal is actually helping the US balance of GhG in fact. Of course, he was totally talking tongue in cheek there, since it’s doubtful he thought we’d find such an abundant source of natural gas that we could basically get rid of every other form of power generation on the planet, and doubtful he thought it would solve all the worlds ills either.
So the followup is: What would cure herpes?