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this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Breathing does not create Carbon, it is only transformed.
There are basically 2 pools of carbon. The carbon already in circulation in the athmosphere, plants, animals and so on, roaming at the surface. That Carbon can be CO2, or other mollecules, but there is always a fixed amount. You breathing is simply borrowing the carbon for a bit and putting it out again in the air when exhaling.
The second pool is carbon locked away in the ground, as coal, oil and whatnot. That carbon is OLD and is not supposed to be in the first pool. When you burn oil, the carbon from the 2nd pool ends up in the 1st one. You cannot really offset it because even planting trees just transforms it as wood for a bit, but if the tree burns or rots, the carbon goes back in the air. The only option long term is to send the carbon back in a locked state in the second pool.
But for you, just reduce the amount of carbon you move from pool 2 to pool 1 to help the earth. Cut on oil, gas, coal as much as you can. The rest is basically irrelevant.
You can compare it to the water cycle. You are at a lake with a pump, and pump the water from the lake back into the lake. You can keep going forever and will not cause the lakes to rise since the water is pumped from there anyway. BUT, if a mega corporation starts pumping from underground sources and dumping it in that lake, it would overflow for sure. And they would blame you for all the water you are pumping.
Yet somehow when cows do it this is not the case.
Your premise is that the only carbon that's new is from fossil fuels, which I can agree with (to a point; it came from biomass originally so is not truly new, just reintegrated after a billion years) but the problem is your view, the view we had for a few decades until very recently, is not the most common view. People talk about carbon in biomass going through the carbon cycle as if it's a bad thing now, and you get called a fucking denier of all things if you point out that that is ridiculous.
No one is complaining about the carbon a cow is breathing in and out. It's the methane they produce, which is a very potent greenhouse gas, about 80 times the warming power.
Methane has a half life of 8 years, and is produced from carbon dioxide and water, specifically it is produced into carbohydrates by plants which are then broken down into methane by certain bacteria in animal digestive systems. It degrades back into carbon dioxide and water through oxidization very quickly in the atmosphere. It's effect on global warming is miniscule compared to carbon dioxide, by measure of the volume of each produced and their persistence in the atmosphere. Methane is a non issue, and is easily made up for by the fact that cows, and the humans that eat them, are carbon sinks also. Imagine if you stopped cattle production and destroyed all those cattle to stop them from creating methane, how much carbon dioxide do you think they'd create as they biodegrade? This would have a significant impact on warming, way way more than the methane does. The existence of cattle (and any and all biomass in general since they're all carbon sinks) is a net positive for warming, by far.
Just no. Not sure where you are being fed your information, but methane is worse than CO2.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane
Just no huh.
The article you link shows carbon dioxide having a stronger impact on warming than methane in aggregate, which is what I'm talking about and what matters.
You were crying about people bemoaning the impact of cows breathing. You were wrong.
potential. Do you even understand what you're citing? There are graphs in the article if words are hard. Do you know what radiative forcing is? You should read about it.
The fact that you are isolating the word "potential" suggests that you don't realise what "global warming potential" actually is. It's a measurement for comparing the effect of greenhouse gases to carbon dioxide, not the top of an error bar
I understand this, but it's a comparison between the two compounds, not a comparison of the effect each are having at the volumes they get released.
Cows uptake a lot of carbon dioxide just by existing as biomass. This more than offsets any methane they fart out.
Is that second sentence something you have numbers for or a guess?
For fun, a rough estimate is 20% of an animal's mass in carbon. A cow is around 600kg (1000 pounds). That means 120kg of carbon. Carbon being 12g per mols, that is 10'000 mols of carbon. Turn that all in CO2, that makes 10'000 mols of CO2 which is 44g per mols, so 440 kg of CO2.
As methane (CH4), it is instead (16g per mols) : 160kg.
A cow produces 100kg of methane a year so a cow's biomass is not sufficient to compensate for it's methane production over its life.
Plus, when you eat the cow, you are the one farting that carbon back in the athmosphere anyway.
Still, cattle is 10% of the global greenhouse gas emissions.