"A common misconception is that the cows rear end emits methane,"

[pscot]

Cows are notorious for the amount of methane they produce. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas (GHG), but just how much do cows actually give off and how does this compare to other methane emission sources? This post tries to give an overview of all things methane and cows..

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https://muchadoaboutclimate.wordpress.com/2014/10/01/how-much-methane-does-a-cow-actually-produce/

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. It's the belching, not the farting. Who knew?

[Binkie The Clown]

2. The thing is, this is contemporary carbon still in the carbon cycle.

So it makes no difference whether cows or pigs emit it, or whether the vegetation dies and decays all by itself. Either way it does not add NEW carbon to the cycle, it only recycles contemporary carbon. That carbon was in the atmosphere last year, was extracted by plants in the spring and fed to pigs and put back into the atmosphere this year.

The reason fossil fuels are so damaging is that they introduce carbon that was stored millions of years ago that it NOT part of the contemporary carbon cycle. This is NEW carbon. (well, very old carbon, but new in the sense that it was not extracted from the atmosphere last spring and re-emitted this fall.)

So the bottom line is that pig carbon, cow carbon, chicken carbon, marsh gas carbon, compost heap carbon, sewage plant, are all net zero in the carbon cycle and add NOTHING to global warming because it came from last year's plants and will be taken up again by this year's plants.

[pscot]

3. That study says otherwise

Global emissions of methane were estimated to be between 76 – 92 Tg per year (1 Tg = 1 million metric tonnes). This is roughly equal to ~10-15 % of global methane emissions, which in turn is ~15 % of global GHG emissions. Methane is a more potent GHG than CO2, which means that gram for gram methane warms the atmosphere more than CO2. Methane also has a much shorter lifetime in the atmosphere compared to CO2 (~10 years compared to 100s of years) which will produce more rapid impacts on the global climate. This also means that any reductions in methane emissions will see a faster decrease in atmospheric concentrations than compared to CO2.

[Binkie The Clown]

4. I guess I'll need to dig deeper. I may have been misinformed.

It's a complex system for sure!

[MyOwnPeace]

5. But, but...........

Ronnie Raygun said THAT was the problem!!!!!!