Cow flatulence, gas emissions much worse than thought - boffins

Ok, by the same logic, you'll be quite prepared to take 0.04% of your body mass in Sarin, because it couldn't have any effect?

Ozone, 0.000007%

There is no way that this "gas" (i dispute thee!) would be able to shield the Earth from UV.

More importantly, even though CO2 concentration has increased the temperatures have been stagnant for the last 17 years (according to the IPCC). So how big an effect does CO2 have on the earth's climate????

CO2 has the structure o, O-C-O which make it very good at rëemitting certain infrared (IR) frequencies. Methane (CH4) has a different structure that makes it very good at sending IR heat back to Earth at frequencies different then CO2. It is because no other atmospheric gasses, except some CFC's, transmit in those frequencies that make CH4 such a strong "greenhouse gas." Picture it this way, take a piece of glass 2 cm thick that is invisible to IR and then coat one side with a fume of shiny gold a few atoms thick —they do such for high-rise buildings—. and see how 98% of the IR is reflected. The gold on the glass would be only a few 10 millionths of the glass, but the glass does not react to that wavelength and gold does. Because of that CH4 is much, much stronger then CO2 and CO2 is much much stronger then the IR transparent nitrogen. Side note, the sky is blue because nitrogen is effected by high frequencies.; if it were mostly CO2 it would be brownish-red. I could show how the basic physics work in less then six hours, which is too long for here. Please read up on it, It really quite interesting. Uni of Chicago has some free online lecture on this.

Ah, so you're an expert, are you?

People with Ph.D.s in atmospheric chemistry disagree with you, overwhelmingly. Let me think a moment, whom should I believe....?

Re: Good work

...just capture the methane and sell it.

Re: Bottom up approach

I saw that too, but cows belch methane. Very little come out the back-end.

My idea is the genetically engineer the cow out of the process. We just have to splice the gene for converting grass to milk into the grass and fire the cows. Graminacae mammalari would undertake the whole process in one organism.

@snerdguy: Really, it's hard to believe that the methane emissions can be measured accurately? There's some ways that jump to my mind:

1) Determine mass of fodder converted to fumes (water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane), an easy enough process: monitor mass of fodder fed to an experimental group of cows; monitor the mass of the cows; monitor the mass of the solids and liquids coming out. The difference is lost as gas. Then rig a gas sampling system near the cow's mouth and ass and compare cow fumes to ambient air. Apply the resulting percentages to the mass of cow gas. You'll get your methane estimate from it. This technique is easiest when you have plentiful biology interns and shovels available.

2) Bigger budget biologists can take a more controlled environment approach: shove a cow and fodder into a sealed, climate-controlled room and rigorously track important masses and atmospheric composition. If you know the atmospheric mass and composition over time, it should be quite easy to figure out cow methane emissions. (Almost none when the experiment began; cow eats X pounds of fodder; room has Y pounds of methane Z hours later.) Quite likely you'd be able to peg methane productions to fodder consumption rates and then apply those ratios to cows "in the wild," as it were. Obviously, you'd want to rinse and repeat this experiment with a bunch of cows and different fodders, since there's not going to be a one-size fits all answer from a single combination of variables.

You have my vote, sir.

The real problem is that the ACC apologists have understood that, in order to get funding, they had to drum up interest, and they decided to use the good old partisan wars paradigm to do so.

So, while I have no doubt that real scientists are doing actual work together to find out what the situation really is, there is all this smoke and noise distracting us from the real issues.

And since anyone call call himself a scientist, and the Internet is the ideal disinformation breeding ground, we have hysterical zealots on both sides that would be ready and willing to in clude beheadings for anyone that disagreed with them.

I will come back to this page in 20 years, and check how much snow I have on my lawn in February, then again in July. Then I'll re-read these kind of comments with either quiet commiseration or sad approval.

But right now, we just don't KNOW.

Re: Serious question

You'll believe in it when kiddies on the internet stop calling you names? Very rational...

Re: Serious question

Ever heard of evolution, Mr Serious. We got here by exploiting our environments better than than competing individuals, tribes, and species. That's how we are "designed" by evolution to work. Exploiting the environment feels good and natural. That is not really in dispute. Along the way numerous organisms starved, succumbed to disease, were killed by competitors, and, were eaten by predators. Living this way is pretty natural, it doesn't require a big brain. Game theory says that in a variable environment you have more offspring than the environment will support, just in case. The remainder die. Evolution uses death lavishly. If you want to be part of this system, you can, but the odds are you wouldn't last a week. But no one actually wants to live like this. We choose security and creature comforts.

Somewhere along the way, the strategy of cooperation developed. This meant less stress since you weren't relentlessly competing with everyone, you had a few buddies to hang out with. It also meant that you could achieve new levels of exploitation by acting in groups. Humans are startlingly good at this cooperation thing compared to any other species, except perhaps some social insects (who don't have the smarts we do.)

The industrial revolution bumped up our ability to exploit the environment by several orders of magnitude again. in fact, to the extent where we can trash the planet, either now or soon, and we are actually are doing this just by being the type of organisms that evolution made us. Just because you are biologically designed to feel like successful exploitation feels good, doesn't mean it will continue to work. Things have changed from when you were genetically constructed. We are not programmed to restrain our exploitation, this function was provided by the environment, in the form of death and suffering when local limits were reached.

You don't need any funny moral stories about the Koch brothers to get this. This is pretty basic science.

Right now, we have the choice: go with what biology gave you and reap the result, or take a more enlightened approach, limit your children, be smart with resource usage, preserve the planets biological systems. It's not that hard, it just requires a little thought, and renouncing a bit of your biological programming. Personally, I'm not 100% sure that humans are up to it, but as far as I can see it's certainly possible.

Re: meanwhile...

Can you pretty please post the link of the satellite launch you're talking about? I want to read about this thing.

I'm pretty sure we want to keep a pretty close eye on anything that affects Earth's magnetic field right? Sol's always trying to kill us with sheet, isn't the field the thing that protects us from all those crazy solar and interstellar raaaaays?

Re: if only...

Personally, I blame the consumption of Hot Pockets™ in the US and bratwurst in Germany.

Re: Significant digits?

No, 5 ± 3 is less accurate. Best guess is 4.9 with an uncertainty of 2.6. Even though it's unlikely actually to be 4.9 this is still the most likely figure. Think of a "bell" probability curve: In this case, it is centered on 4.9 not on 5. The spread of the curve is given by the ± 2.6 bit. It's not a spread of 3, it is 2.6.

If you wanted a rough intuitive figure, 5 ± 3 would be ok. More accurate is 4.9 ± 2.6. This is more likely to be correct. It may be possible to go even further to describe the probability curve shape even further, not just mean and standard deviation (spread), but also skew (asymmetry), kurtosis ("peakedness"), and so on, if your data is good enough.