Methane emissions have become a focal point of the climate debate, triggering absurd agricultural regulations negatively affecting farming communities worldwide. Targets for abuse are ruminant animals, including cattle and sheep, that produce methane (CH4) through enteric fermentation – a natural digestive process that converts grass into protein-rich meat and milk for human consumption.Even farmers from my family in India are possible targets of anti-methane assaults on agriculture that have … [Read more...]
Go Ahead and Eat Your Beef
No doubt you've heard that raising cattle (for beef or any other purpose) contributes to global warming because the critters have the nasty habit of emitting methane by belching and---well, what they do from the other end.A new paper by our friends Will Happer and W.A. van Wyngaarden at the CO2 Coalition quantifies global methane emissions' warming effect and finds it negligible.Each methane atom has about 30 times the heat (infrared) absorption capacity of each molecule of CO2, causing many … [Read more...]
Global Temperature and CO2—Which Drives Which?
The climate alarmist crowd never tires of insisting that anthropogenic additions to atmospheric carbon dioxide---up by 45 percent, from 280 to about 407 parts per million, since before the Industrial Revolution---are driving historically unprecedented and likely-to-become catastrophic global warming, and that they're exacerbated by increases in atmospheric methane (CH4) driven by the rising temperature, making methane a positive feedback. The claim rests on the notion that carbon dioxide level … [Read more...]
