no doomsday from Gulf methane

Somehow, a hysterical fringe-science blog post by Terrence Aym -- a grade-A teabagger nutball who has previously argued that states should seceed from the U.S. and claimed that North Korea was behind the Deepwater Horizon explosion -- has managed to capture the imaginations of many scientifically illiterate journalists and bloggers.

Aym takes the fact there are elevated levels of methane in the vicinity of the Deepwater Horizon leak, combines it with a gross misunderstanding of a speculative theory by Gregory Ryskin about methane and the Permo-Triassic Extinction, and concludes that "OMG we're all gonna die!".

It is, of course, a load of hooey. Sorry, but we won't get out of this so easily as the world ending; we're going to have to do the hard work of cleaning up the mess. io9.com does a fine job of debunking the nonsense, with several good links.