[chrisco255]

Cow farts don't cause climate change. Meanwhile ruminants are essential to ecosystems, have existed in the hundreds of millions for tens of millions of years and provide tons of positive externalities that aren't subsidized. Nevermind that they contribute to food security and health. Ruminants are also better for the land than millions of acres of GMO monocrops drenched in Roundup.

The carbon cult has lost the plot.

[Volundr]

> Meanwhile ruminants are essential to ecosystems

Ruminants, yes, corn/grain fed livestock, no. Sadly the days where most of your meat production is coming from cows on a family ranch grazing on acres of grassland is long since gone and most of our beef is coming from cows fed on those "millions of acres of GMO monocrops drenched in Roundup".

I come from a long line of Montana ranchers, I'm in no hurry to see beef production disappear, and it certainly won't be disappearing from my plate anytime soon, but it's important to acknowledge that the ranches of today look nothing like what my parents grew up on.

I also suspect that were you to draw a Venn diagram of people who want less meat consumption, and people who want less monocrops drenched in roundup, you'd discover you've drawn a circle. These viewpoints are not mutually exclusive.

[scoofy]

The biomass of livestock is 14x larger than all other mammal, combined[1] (not counting humans). You have to be really intentional with the way you phrase things to point out that, yes, wild ruminants are essential to ecosystems.

Nobody is talking about wild ruminants though, we're talking about the 14x the biomass of all other mammal combined that are creating and obscene amount of emissions. And just FYI, it's the burps that are the main problem, not the farts.

Stop parroting propaganda.

1: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115

[chrisco255]

> The biomass of livestock is 14x larger than all other mammal, combined[1] (not counting humans). You have to be really intentional with the way you phrase things to point out that, yes, wild ruminants are essential to ecosystems.

Livestock have supplanted the biomass of wild ruminants and ungulates. As an example, North America had at least 60 million wild bison for millenia before it had 90 million cows. And that's not even accounting for the megafauna that existed prior to the mass extinctions of the Pleistocene (mammoths, giant bison, ground sloths, tapirs, steppe bison, saiga antelopes, giant muskox, wooly rhinos, etc etc) What do you think occupied the Great Plains before they mowed it down for corn fields?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IgvgvDbG-Q

[scoofy]

The world has a billion cows, some estimate as many as 1.5 billion, at we expect that to grow significantly as China and India become more developed. I honestly don't think anyone would be worried about cattle if the world cattle population were 90 million. It would be somewhere below 1% if emissions at that point. It's literally a factor of more than 10x.

Stop parroting disinformation.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/263979/global-cattle-pop...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/livestock-counts

[chrisco255]

It's 90 million in USA, that's not disinformation that's a fact, and what I'm underscoring by pointing to the 60 million wild bison population in the mid 1800s in USA is that there hasn't been a significant change in global non-human mammal biomass.

Eurasia alone had 200+ million wooly mammoths during the ice age (note that wooly mammoths have 10x more mass than cows), and there were hundred of millions more megafauna with similar digestive systems for tens of millions of years.

At no point in the last 50 million years did any number of those species trigger large scale climate change. It probably would have been welcome in the midst of the ice age, to be honest.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Estimated-Number-of-Wool...

[scoofy]

Nobody is saying that cattle are the sole cause of climate change. Suggesting that is a non sequitur.

They are simply another artificial source of GHGs that are contributing to climate change. That's why you're statements are disinformation. The intention is to somehow equate the natural GHGs from species which arise very slowly and allow a balance to be maintained, generally, yes, in a cycle.

The point isn't that cows are a problem. It's that we've created a whole bunch of cows, very rapidly, without any corresponding plant life to offset the excess emissions they produce. While extremely unlikely, this could absolutely happen in a natural system, and it could still cause climate change if it did.

The problem is total GHGs in the atmosphere right now, of which livestock is a significant contribution.

[chrisco255]

> Nobody is saying that cattle are the sole cause of climate change.

I'm asserting they have zero effect on climate change, they have merely supplanted wild biomass that existed on a much broader scale for tens of millions of years and there is no evidence that an abundance of mammalian digestion has ever caused climate change in the 50+ million years that mammals have dominated life on earth.

> The point isn't that cows are a problem. It's that we've created a whole bunch of cows, very rapidly, without any corresponding plant life to offset the excess emissions they produce.

The only thing we've done is supplant wild mammals with domesticated mammals. In the absence of agriculture or even humans, mammals already dominated the planet.

As I referenced, wooly mammoths on one continent alone had a higher biomass than all the cows alive on the planet today. That is a completely extinct species, and there's hundreds of more extinct species where that came from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Pleistocene_extinctions

You'll have to explain to me how it was that the Pleistocene featured such a high biomass of ungulates without a corresponding increase in temperatures.

[adrianN]

Cow farts do in fact make climate change worse.

[chrisco255]

Please show in the geological record anywhere in the last 50 million years where ruminants caused climate change.

[ygjb]

Who said they cause climate change? Is the impact of domesticated cattle a measurable impact on global methane production? Yes. This has been measured, observed, and accepted science since at least 1995[1]. Does methane have an observable, measurable effect on climate? Yes[2], and agriculture is a major driver for anthropogenic climate change[3]. If you want to argue it doesn't or isn't, bring data, because there are too many articles, research papers, and studies arguing that it does that have for your unbacked opinion to be accepted.

Does this mean that cow farts (or burps) are the cause or driver of climate change? No. Is it something that we can meaningfully reduce the impact of? Well, probably, based on some of the resources linked to in other comments.

Does it mean that solving this for cattle is going to solve climate change? No, but incremental progress helps (insert 1.01% effort per day over a year = 37.8 meme).

You know what doesn't help? Clearly ignorant reductive comments that conflate a contributing factor with the entire problem while ignoring the preponderance of evidence contrary to your claims.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/jas/article-abstract/73/8/2483/4632... [2] http://repository.geologyscience.ru/bitstream/handle/1234567... [3] https://www.iea.org/reports/global-methane-tracker-2022/meth... [4] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/methane-emission... [5] https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/methane/?intent=121

[chrisco255]

The problem with the assertion that cattle methane has had a meaningful impact is that it's not measured against any historical control. We have a roughly 50-60 million year period to compare against where mammals have been the dominant kingdom of animals on planet earth [1]. Their digestive systems have not meaningfully changed. Livestock have merely supplanted biomass that would otherwise be wild biomass, producing methane just the same (though perhaps distributed over a more diverse spectrum of species).

Domesticated cattle occupy land that was occupied by wild ruminants long before it was fenced in. In the absence of monocrop agriculture and human dwellings, hundreds of millions of more acres would be occupied by ruminant mammals. The Great Plains, where we today grow massive amounts of corn, wheat and soybeans, were occupied by massive quantities of bison, elk, and deer. And before the mass extinctions of the Late Pleistocene, the earth was massively occupied by wooly mammoths, giant ground sloths, giant bison, muskox, shrub ox, stag moose, stout legged llamas, etc etc [2]. The Eurasian biomass of wooly mammoths alone was more than the global biomass of all domesticated cattle alive today [3] (assuming 200 million mammoths 50K YA in Eurasia and 1 billion global cattle population today, with mammoths averaging 10x more mass than cows).

It might be the case that human activity actually reduced the amount of methane produced globally by four-legged ungulates (although surely we've more than made up for the difference from mining and drilling).

[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adn6842?utm_campa... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Pleistocene_extinctions [3] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Estimated-Number-of-Wool...

EDIT: On further review, I found a study that makes the attempt to estimate what pre-European U.S. settlement methane production attributed to ruminants was and estimates it to be 86% of what modern day livestock and wild ruminant methane production, underscoring my point (livestock ruminants merely supplanted wild ruminants):

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22178852/

[adrianN]

Never before have ruminants existed in the numbers we have today.