Saturday Morning Confusion About Cow Farts!

Dear Friends: "Let's get things back into perspective here!"

With all the talk about global warming and the environment there is one area of concern that seems to be getting worse kids:

A new NASA-sponsored study shows that global methane emissions produced by livestock are 11 percent higher than estimates made last decade. Because methane is a particularly nasty greenhouse gas, the new finding means it’s going to be even tougher to combat climate change than we realized.

It’s hard to believe that belches, farts, and poop from livestock could have any kind of global atmospheric effect, but it’s an issue of scale, and the nature of methane itself.
There are approximately 1.5 billion cows on the planet, each and every one of them expelling upwards of 30 to 50 gallons of methane each day. We typically think of farts as being the culprit, but belches are actually the primary source of cattle-produced methane, accounting for 95 percent of the problematic greenhouse gas.

And problematic it is. Methane is about 30 times more efficient at trapping the Sun’s radiative heat than carbon dioxide over a timescale of about a century. There may be more CO2 in the atmosphere than methane, but by unit, it’s the more destructive greenhouse gas. Both NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System research initiative and the Joint Global Change Research Institute (JGCRI) contributed to the study.

 The new research shows that methane emissions slowed in the US, Canada, and Europe, but they’re rising elsewhere. Very likely, the rest of the world is catching up to first-world standards in terms of meat and dairy consumption.

https://gizmodo.com/we-ve-grossly-underestimated-how-much-cow-farts-are-con-1818993089

P. S. Have a look at this: In America, beef accounts for 37 percent of all human-induced methane released into the air. Methane is 23 times as warming to the climate as carbon dioxide. In a recent article, Atlantic senior editor James Hamblin highlighted research that found one dietary change—replacing beef with beans—could get the U.S. as much as 74 percent of the way to meeting 2020 greenhouse-gas emission goals. As Hamblin notes, it’s worth being reminded that individual choices matter.