283
submitted 11 months ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] Pipoca@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

The half of emissions that are methane are the cow burps themselves, because their stomachs ferment grass and produce methane as a waste product.

Even if you want to quibble about the accounting of the other half, without cows grazing there would be way, way less methane produced.

[-] federatingIsTooHard@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

you're just restating your case. I asked for a citation.

[-] Pipoca@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

According to https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/2/2/127/htm conventional feedlot beef produces 501,593 kg of methane per 1 million kg of beef, mostly from both burps and composting manure. So that's about .5 kg of methane per kg of beef.

1 lb of methane is 84 kg CO2e; that is to say over 100 years 1 kg of methane warms the planet the same as releasing 84kg of CO2. So every kg of beef produces 42kg of CO2e, regardless of any quibbling about the CO2e of agricultural waste fed to cows.

By contrast, googling quickly the quoted CO2e emissions per kg of chicken is 18.2. Which is, of course, subject to the same quibbling.

[-] federatingIsTooHard@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

i will be digging into the methodology in a little while, but I found this part of the summary might indicate it's not as bad as it is sometimes made out to be.

All beef production systems are potentially sustainable

this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
283 points (96.1% liked)

Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

5237 readers
470 users here now

Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world.  About 1C of total warming.  Second chart:  about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability.  Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases.  About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS