Methane Oxidizes–sho nuff?

So one of our genius crew, Dave, put up a comment that has me all disturbed and that ain’t good at my advanced age.

In response to my post on Methane and a few of my comments about how little methane there is and there are plenty of natural sources of methane,
Dave says this
daveburton | February 17, 2014 at 2:05 pm | Reply | Edit
Even if you don’t burn it, methane (CH4) in the atmosphere oxidizes fairly rapidly, changing into (negligible amounts of) harmless CO2 and water:
CH4 + 2·O2 -> CO2 + 2·H2O
Various sources give the half-life of methane in the atmosphere as 6 to 8 years, which would make the average lifetime 1.4427 times that (because oxidation is an exponential process, rather than linear), yielding an average lifetime for a molecule of CH4 in the atmosphere of 8.7 to 11.5 years. Page 11 of this source gives the directly-calculated atmospheric lifetime of CH4 as ~8 years, but identifies a feedback mechanism that (they say) effectively increases the atmospheric lifetime of additional CH4 to ~12 years.
Call it 8-12 years. That’s pretty short. It means the only reason methane levels are as high as they are (about 1.8 ppm) is that methane emissions are already high. There would have to be a very large, sustained increase in methane emissions to cause much increase in long-term average atmospheric methane levels.
john1282 | February 17, 2014 at 4:27 pm | Reply | Edit
Dave, help me- how could a subtance that oxidizes easily have a half life of 8-12 years unless the people who claim that, like EPA junk scientists, are messin’ with our minds?
Did you know we have some hot damn chemists. Mr. Bob is a chemist tadchem is a chemist, I presume.
Who knows how many chemists we have? I am putting this up for comment as a post to get your comment some attention.
I will find out, won’t I? Your comment goes up as a post.