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
It’s enough to make us miss Climate targets even if fossil fuels were eliminated today. We have to tackle both
Yeah, if every single trend occurring today continues linearly into the future and we don’t account for the fact that all of the methane emissions have to be offset by carbon sinks from plant growth, we’ll have a problem.
Fortunately none of that will happen. Your study is literally assuming that we will stop using all carbon within 20 years, but yet continue to use it for nitrogen fixation.
If you go look at their graphs, you notice a trend. The lines comparing fossil fuels and food emissions don’t diverge until the absurd linear assumptions they make go nuts 50 years into the future.
At the end of the day, if you remove the fossil fuel usage, the cycle must self-balance, else eventually you run out of some resource.
Further for the bit about feed addatives, those don’t do as much as you’d think
That is one option, you can reduce methane emissions through things like medication.
You can gather the cows into one big airtight building, collect the methane emissions, and burn it before it gets into the atmosphere instead of just venting it raw into the atmosphere.
And you can do the same thing for manure.
Right now we aren’t doing anything because these really aren’t the problems we need to solve right now. The vast vast majority of emissions today are coming from:
Transportation.
Manufacturing.
Electricity use.
Agriculture is ten percent. Land carbon sinks in the United States? They offset 12 percent.
That is completely misunderstanding the study. The study still finds that food emissions alone - with zero emissions from non-food sources after 2020 - would make us miss climate targets.. They do other analysis later than only makes the picture worse if other emissions aren’t immediately stopped
As such, even if all non–food system GHG emissions were immediately stopped and were net zero from 2020 to 2100, emissions from the food system alone would likely exceed the 1.5°C emissions limit between 2051 and 2063
For biogas, it still has plenty of methane emissions and doesn’t solve a number of other environmental issues like waterway pollution
What “medication” are you referring to with cattle? That’s pretty vague but most likely you are referring to some kind of feed addatives which have the problems I mentioned earlier
