Beef Contributes Hardly Anything To Warming, Says Beef Association, Non-Climate Scientist They Hired

[hatrack]

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The industry doesn’t dispute that livestock generate huge quantities of methane, a potent greenhouse gas with more than 80 times the short-term warming impact of carbon dioxide. Even so, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, a trade group representing more than 175,000 cattle producers, argues that American cattle “may not be contributing much at all to global warming.” “Beef is being painted as a villain,” wrote Jerry Bohn, head of the NCBA, in a 2021 op-ed for an industry trade magazine. Assertions against beef are an “outrageous lie,” he added, pushed by those seeking to sell fake-meat alternatives.

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To challenge this forbidding math, Sawyer and other pro-beef academics are making hotly contested assumptions, backed by a new method for counting methane emissions that concerns many climate scientists. This accounting metric, known as GWP*, was developed by Oxford researchers in 2018 to more accurately predict how changes in methane emissions affect global temperatures. Cattle groups are now applying this metric to their herds to claim a vastly reduced climate impact. GWP* focuses on changes in methane emissions, penalizing new or growing sources and putting less blame on large, steady emitters, like cattle herds in well-to-do countries. “It’s the industry choosing metrics which make their impact look small,” says Drew Shindell, professor of Earth science at Duke University. “It’s not a credible way to approach the problem.”

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When cattle ranchers are asked about climate change, conversations often become tense. And not infrequently they end up invoking the work of a prominent scientist at the University of California at Davis. “You’ll want to talk to Frank Mitloehner about what you just said,” says Lyle Perman, who raises more than 500 cows at Rock Hills Ranch in South Dakota, when asked about cattle’s effects on climate. “We’re not saying we don’t contribute to climate change, but we take issue with some of these characterizations.”

Mitloehner, a professor in the department of animal science, has emerged as an industry darling after a decade-plus of outspoken challenges to those who say eating less meat will help protect the climate. “Farmers are criticized and demonized by much of society,” he says. Mitloehner speaks with a patient cadence and seems to relish technical terms—“hydroxyl oxidation”—which he pauses to repeat for his audiences. Although he’s not a climate scientist, Mitloehner sports the handle @GHGGuru on Twitter and describes livestock farming in the U.S. as just a drop in the bucket of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions.

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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-10-19/beef-industry-falsely-claims-low-cow-carbon-footprint

[Alexander Of Assyria]

1. Farmers are criticized and demonized by much of society? Who knew?

What part of society is that, cause most of society adores the farmers who feed us all??

This non-climate scientist is yet another hired fun gun with strawman arguments.

Appears the cattlemen have learned well from Fox.

[bahboo]

2. and getting a strong whiff of bovine excrement from this....