Methane Cycle ignored

Dakota Dan

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058334857/methane-cycle-ignored

Agenda 20/30 it isn’t exactly top secret.

Dakota Dan

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121733345#Comment_121733345

Global warming is a hoax all you need is basic science to figure it out.

Water John

Well Dan, I'm waiting, enlighten me?

magicbastarder

he did his own research, i'll wager.

alps

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121783168#Comment_121783168

That's the best answer I've got (and I've gone to the top of organisations that should know and they don't) and would make sense.

So if we take that a cow eats 6 tonnes DM @ approx 45% Carbon, the growing of that 6 tonnes would remove somewhere around 9.5 tonnes of CO².

If the cow "consumed" 9.5 and breathed out 3.65 tonnes CO² it leaves about 5.8 tonnes (or 5,800kg) CO² to account for her 100kg of methane.

We can argue all we want about the multiplier, (I'd say 28...naturally as a farmer) but even up to mid 50's as you put it earlier, it's still an even balance....but for..

We don't count the 9.5tonnes removal

We only count the 0.1 tonne CH4 emission.

Water John

Alps, in many ways, I agree. If a plot of land has the same stocking rate every year, then it's stable for CH4, with the half life of CH4. As well, I can't see what benefit there is to finishing cattle younger in that. 40 animals every day of the year on a plot of ground. It doesn't matter to the environment, how often you rotate that number. The question for me is, what grows the 6 tonnes of grass? If it's inorganic N made by the Haber Bosch method then that is the main problem. That is fossil fuel use. That is the main environmental issue.

alps

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121786886#Comment_121786886

Agree fully, but unfortunately, agricultural emissions not counted that way.

WhichWay

Brilliant 12 minute video. Explains it better than I could try.

https://youtu.be/JyTfihyWZVQ?si=bsHlvpunWGXPPh19

magicbastarder

i'm afraid it's far from brilliant. it makes a basic mistake; in that he justifies it (explicitly) on the basis of a steady state in the number of cattle worldwide. he's basically saying 'you can't blame my cattle for methane emissions because the atmosphere is already flooded with methane from cattle'.

it'd be like saying to a homeowner who is shouting 'please fix the water main, my basement is flooded' that 'it's OK, the amount of water in your basement is at a steady state so there's no need to fix the water main'.

Lime Tree Farm

Humans contribute 60% methane. Stinking.

https://www.science.org/content/article/only-humans-can-create-climate-altering-methane-burns-new-studies-suggest

WoozieWu

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123179700#Comment_123179700

are you a paid big oil stooge or do you give up your time for free?

magicbastarder

are you able to address the point i make, or is ad hominem the only tool you have in the box?

WoozieWu

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123179868#Comment_123179868

i presume you are busy on the international bulk shipping forum admonishing their practices

Lime Tree Farm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123179868#Comment_123179868

I win, you lose, jog on.

WhichWay

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123179700#Comment_123179700

I think you missed the point.

You cannot blame cattle for global warming because the GHG they emit is part of a cycle. The grass and the cow absorb and expel the same amount.

Efforts to address climate change need to focus on the causes for example extraction of fossil fuels from the ground.

magicbastarder

no, i got that, and that's still wrong.

cattle create methane which wouldn't otherwise be there. the amount of atmospheric methane is higher than it would be in the absence of large scale cattle farming. even that video acknowledges that, but bringing the carbon cycle into it like he does is not actually answering the question.

grass absorbs CO2, and cattle emit methane, which is over 100 times more potent a greenhouse gas.

magicbastarder

here's an anaolgy. say i develop a process to use grass, as a feed into a system which produces large amounts of hydrogen cyanide. the amount of HCN in the atmosphere starts to climb measurably.

also, say it decomposes within 10 years. so ten or twenty years after i start producing it, the levels of HCN in the atmosphere level off to a steady state (assuming my production levels stay at a steady state)

if i turned around and said 'you can't blame me for the effects of all this cyanide in the atmosphere, it's not increasing, and it decomposes naturally', you'd think i was insane.

WoozieWu

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123180663#Comment_123180663

"all" being the key word right there

glad to get that cleared up finally

roosterman71

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123180663#Comment_123180663

You've developed something new. Similar to drilling oil out of the ground and burning it. Cattle aren't creating new gases but converting what has been captured as CO2. And if the number of ruminants is steady, the amount of methane is also steady.

Data up to 2021 - https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-syi/statisticalyearbookofireland2021part3/agri/cropsandlivestock/

This shows that cattle numbers are steady since the early 70s when Ireland joined the EU. Therefore, the amount of methane produced in Ireland by ruminants is the same today as it was 50 years ago. Removing some would reduce methane levels in 12 years time.

Now it's only the last couple of years that people have got a horn for methane and blaming ruminants, despite emissions across society growing yet the finger of blame is firmly pointed to an area remaining static(ish)

straight

It's broken down into really simple English here for lads that can't understand 😉

https://youtu.be/JyTfihyWZVQ?si=KDoZmzvFjsaKUsdt

emaherx

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123180663#Comment_123180663

It's not really the same given that rumination is a natural process.
Many of the reports on agriculture go to town trying to account for every possible source of methane and then compare to other unnatural sources such as fossil fuels but conveniently forget to scrutinise those sources to the same level.

Recent reports show fossil fuels under reported by as much as 40 - 70%, while Irish agriculture is being vastly over reported

https://www.farmersjournal.ie/news/news/warming-impact-of-methane-emissions-from-irish-livestock-vastly-overestimated-576649

https://www.farmersjournal.ie/more/climate-and-environment/methane-from-fossil-fuels-vastly-underestimated-and-much-higher-than-cattle-526333

https://www.iea.org/news/methane-emissions-from-the-energy-sector-are-70-higher-than-official-figures

https://www.carbonbrief.org/methane-emissions-from-fossil-fuels-severely-underestimated/


Landfill emissions in the US underestimated by up-to 70% also.

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/152825/satellite-data-suggest-us-methane-emissions-underestimated

Yes farming produces green house gases, every form of it including plant based but we do need to eat.
Unfair reporting shows emissions produced by livestock, but allows no credit for carbon sequestering of well managed grass lands. On the flip side all forms of plant production seem to be given a carbon neutral status or even carbon negative status with no considerations to carbon lost to the atmosphere trough ploughing and other practices or any consideration what the methane emissions of crop residuals would be if there were no livestock to feed them to. Not to mention the soil degradation which is accelerating in much of the world due to a shift from mixed animal/plant agriculture.

magicbastarder

It's not really the same given that rumination is a natural process.

what difference does that make? what's important is the amount of methane in the atmosphere which wouldn't be there if we didn't farm cattle in the numbers we do. i deliberately didn't specify what the process was in my hypothetical example very specifically because it doesn't matter, but if it was say a way of turning grass into something like cheese using a bacteria which gave off HCN, i could argue that it was also 'natural' but that in no way means i can say HCN amounts in the atmosphere was 'natural'.

anyway, the number of cattle we are talking about is not natural. mankind has vastly increased the number of ruminants worldwide.

magicbastarder

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123181050#Comment_123181050

Cattle aren't creating new gases but converting what has been captured as CO2. And if the number of ruminants is steady, the amount of methane is also steady.

cattle aren't creating new gases? they create the methane. that's the whole point of this debate. they're taking in carbon in their feed, and water - both in non-gaseous form - and creating a gas with them.

the argument 'if the number of ruminants is steady the amount of methane is also steady' doesn't do much lifting there. going by one set of data i've found, the number of cattle in the world went from 940m to 1,550m between 1960 and 2022; increasing at the rate of 10m per year on average.

Say my name

There's satellites now that measure methane emissions in real time.

They haven't picked up from cattle farms yet. Where it shows plumes are from landfill, compost sites, gas facilities, fuel systems.

That's how you tackle methane. Look at the satellite real time visual information. Go to site and solve it.

Some vegan science abolishment activist stuck a cow in a closed container and measured the methane and said aha this is how we attack livestock rearing. There were buffalo and elephants and dinosaurs in times past and not a word about it.

Seth Brundle

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123181387#Comment_123181387

There were buffalo and elephants and dinosaurs in times past and not a word about it.

Were there buffalo, elephant and dinosaur farms?

Say my name

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123181398#Comment_123181398

In Cork. Yes.

roosterman71

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123181306#Comment_123181306

And what do they "create" the methane from only carbon that the food they eat has captured. They aren't creating new methane. It's called the Biogenic Cycle.

emaherx

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123181275#Comment_123181275

It matters, when cattle are not adding new carbon.
It matters when those who point the finger at livestock production try to make out it is worse than releasing all of the carbon that has been stored in the earth for millions of years.

It matters that when other sources are being underestimated.

It certainly matters if the livestock emissions have actually been over estimated.


Mankind also vastly reduced the number of wild ruminants and wiped out the very large ones, I wonder what were the emissions from an Irish Elk?

magicbastarder

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123181456#Comment_123181456

i'm struggling in how to explain this to you. they are creating methane from something that is not methane. this is basic chemistry.

you can take a few different types of atoms and make compounds which can vary greatly from each other. so the carbon which is in the grass cattle eat is in a form that can be very different from the methane we're talking about. you seem to be stuck in some magical thinking that you can't make something 'bad' from something 'good'.

magicbastarder

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123181506#Comment_123181506

there are two things in discussion here; what the source of the carbon atom is, and what you combine the carbon atom with. yes, they're both important but they're not drectly equivalent.

'importing' carbon into the system from below ground is obviously not A Good Thing.

combining carbon which is in the system, with other atoms in such a way that they create much more potent greenhouse gases is not A Good Thing.

i'm bemused by that video - and by some people here - falling back on the 'a steady state of cattle number means there's a steady state of methane in the atmosphere' argument.

that's a pretty explicit confirmation that cattle are (partly) responsible for elevated levels of methane in the atmosphere. if we reduced the global head of cattle, we'd reduce the amount of methane in the atmophere which comes from cattle. there's no other way of stating that.