People who don’t understand that all methane emitted by cows must come from carbon gathered by plants and as a result contributes near net zero to the long-term global warming trend are the people who don’t understand science.
CO2 is a much less potent green house gas than methane. Ruminants converting converting CO2 to methane causes quite a great deal of warming because methane and CO2 are not created equal. As long as we have large amounts of cattle, we’ll keep creating higher methane concentrations
It’s about a 20x potential over the course of 100 years. The problem is, the sheer size of emissions from fossil fuels dwarfs any contribution cow methane gives to the atmosphere.
Like, methane in the atmosphere is really high right now, but it’s not because of cows, it’s because of fracking in Canada and the United States, which commits an order of magnitude or methane than cows ever could.
It would be like standing in a room with a raging inferno and pointing to a matchstick and say look, there’s our problem.
Cow-warming has a bunch of problems that mean it’s never going to contribute to being a significant factor in global warming.
It’s self-correcting. Eventually methane is going to reach a certain point of equilibrium where the amount that’s coming back into CO2 is equal to the amount being emitted and now you’re going to be at a steady state again.
It’s relatively small scale. Cows farting is not really that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things when we have factories producing millions of tons of carbon emissions.
It’s easily fixed. There’s lots of medications and other things you can do to cows to make them stop emitting methane, if it ever becomes one of our most significant problems it will be easily and quickly solved much like CFCs were.
Carbon emissions from fossil fuels have a bunch of traits that make it particularly nasty.
It’s additive. Everything we admitted in 1960 is going to be around and heating the planet for 100 years yet
It was growing exponentially. Humanity has been emitting an absolutely mind-boggling amount of carbon. We’ve gone from what? 300 parts per million to 400? And the amount of carbon we’re emitting every year now is higher than it’s ever been, and every single year worth of emissions just adds on to the problem pile that’s going to keep on getting worse for the next 100 years.
It’s not easily undone. That carbon is never going to turn back into oil unless humanity goes out of our way to do it, and it’s incredibly difficult to do. You would need the sum energy usage of humanity from the 1930s to today recreated and wasted on pulling the carbon back out of the atmosphere and sticking it in the ground.
Emissions from cows undo themselves in 20 years, entirely offset themselves through plant growth, and are easily massively reduced any change in our lifestyle in just a couple of years if we really wanted to as a society, with next to zero change in our lifestyle.
They aren’t comparable problems and all you’re doing by pointing at cows and acting like they’re causing global warming is distracting from the real problem.
It’s hardly small. It’s enough to make us miss Climate targets even if fossil fuels were eliminated today. We have to tackle both
To have any hope of meeting the central goal of the Paris Agreement, which is to limit global warming to 2°C or less, our carbon emissions must be reduced considerably, including those coming from agriculture. Clark et al. show that even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, emissions from the global food system alone would make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to realize the 2°C target. Thus, major changes in how food is produced are needed if we want to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba7357
Further for the bit about feed addatives, those don’t do as much as you’d think because the touted emissions reductions are only looking at feedlot emissions and not overall emissions
There, algae feed additives can be churned into the cows’ grain and soy feed. But on feedlots, cattle already belch less methane—only 11 percent of their lifetime output.
All told, if we accept the most promising claims of the algae boosters, we’re talking about an 80 percent reduction of methane among only 11 percent of all burps—roughly an 8.8 percent reduction total
The earth doesnt produce carbon at all, so why do you think things have getting warmer? It matters what form that carbon takes. Carbon in the form of a plant is a solid, and even works to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Carbon in the form of methane has a much stronger greenhouse gas effect than regular carbon dioxide. Which is where those bullshit statistics you hate come from, it’s carbon that was solid and is now a greenhouse gas. Same shit as fossil fuels, its not new carbon being made, its just solid carbon being turned into gas.
The earth doesnt produce carbon at all, so why do you think things have getting warmer? It matters what form that carbon takes. Carbon in the form of a plant is a solid, and even works to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Carbon in the form of methane has
Jesus Christ you’re ignorant.
The carbon in plants comes out of the atmosphere.
Cows eat those plants and processes in their stomach turn it into methane.
Methane in the atmosphere turns back to carbon within 20 years.
Plants then reabsorb that carbon when they grow to feed the cows.
It’s literally a constrained cycle. You can’t increase the amount of carbon in the atmosphere through cows and plants. You have to actually find carbon that is in a stable solid form and then put it into the atmosphere when it otherwise wouldn’t be.
In other words, you have to mine coal or pump oil.
Plants and cows have absolutely nothing to do with it.
The earth doesnt produce carbon at all What?
There are hundreds of fully natural processes that emit carbon that have nothing to do with Humans. Volcanos, Plant Respiration, other mammal respiration, forest fires, lime stone erosion, natural decomposition of organic matter, meteorites burning up in the atomosphere, lightning strikes, etc etc. Where do you think the carbon in the earth came from? God? Well before humans existed there were ice ages and periods of higher carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as well as higher oxygen. That statement by itself shows you don’t’ really have a good grasp of what climate change is, nor what is causing it.
@bioemerl @usernamesAreTricky @blazera lol. The problem is humans keep artificially up a cow population to satisfy their apetite for meat. One cow’s emissions is fine, 20 billion cows’ emissions is not, regardless of the plants capturing CO². Nature is artificially out of balance.
No, nature is out of balance because we are pulling carbon deep out of the Earth and emitting it into the atmosphere.
No number of cows is going to cause an imbalance in the carbon cycle, because it doesn’t matter how many cows you have, they must be fed by carbon pulled out of the atmosphere.
@bioemerl @usernamesAreTricky @blazera wrong. The more cows releasing gas, the more saturated becomes the atmosphere. One thing is the carbon they eat and a very different story is capturing it back, or do you think the carbon problem from the oil industry is happening just because we drill the oil out?
