Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to Wired, a new bovine burp mask fitted with a catalytic converter catches methane expelled from cattle and converts it to CO2 and water. Methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2.
This burp-catching mask for cows could slow down climate change
Methane from cattle accounts for a significant amount of global warming – startup Zelp has a comfortable and stylish solution
By ANNA MARKS
Friday 1 January 2021There are 1.6 billion cattle on Earth, and their burps and farts are becoming a big problem. Cows expel methane, a colourless and odourless gas which is approximately 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide when it comes to warming the planet.
…
Zelp, a UK-based company, has developed a potential solution in the form of a burp-catching face mask for cows, designed to reduce methane emissions from cattle by 60 per cent. The firm was founded by brothers Francisco and Patricio Norris, whose family run a livestock farming business in Argentina. “We were aware that in every country, methane is one of the biggest contributions to global warming and we found that methane mitigation tools in agriculture are under-researched,” says Francisco. “There isn’t a lot of innovation occurring within the field.”
…
The mask fits comfortably on a cow’s head with a zip-tie-like mechanism allowing it to be adjusted to various cattle’s head sizes depending on the breed. It is applied to cattle after they are weaned, usually at 6-8 months of age, and sits next to the nostrils, allowing the tool to capture methane from their breathing, belches and burps. “Around 95 per cent of the cattle’s methane emissions come from their nostrils and mouths,” Norris explains. “The technology detects, captures and oxidises methane when it is exhaled by the animals.”
…
Read more: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/cows-climate-change-methane-stop
From what I’ve seen of cattle a lot of methane seems to come out the other end, so the mask at best would seem to be a half solution.
I’m also wondering how long the masks would last in real world conditions. Cows are pretty good at destroying stuff which bothers them. I suspect a lot of them would scratch against a tree or rock until the strap breaks, or get other members of the herd to chew on it.
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This made me laugh, “The mask fits comfortably on a cow’s head with a zip-tie-like mechanism…”
Comfortably? Have the Norris brothers tried it themselves to determine it’s comfortability? Or did they ask the cows?
Mooo,
Bob
Ooops, sorry about the runaway boldface.
I love the idiotic way they call this “stylish”.
You’re really going to walk past field of cows and say : wow, those bovine face masks are really stylish.
Any anomaly like that is a real turn off in animal mating instincts. Most species abhor defects. They do not go down as “stylish”.
Leave the poor creatures along.
No judgment. No labels.
There is no mention of how farts can be handled thought 😉
Platinum gauze butt-plug. Initial cost is high but the govt will pay so you don’t need to worry.
Michael Mann could use one of those.
It’s not the hot that is his problem. It’s all the excrement his is producing.
Please tell me this is an early April’s Fool joke.
Has to be.
Do cows burp through their noses?
“Methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2.”
zDOdq.png (851×600) (imgur.com)
Really?
Doubling CH4 has a larger percentage effect than doubling CO2 causing its effect to increase from almost nothing to a bigger almost nothing.
No it has not. See my comment below. Doubling Methane content is measured in hundredth of degrees, totally negligible.
Yes, from almost nothing to a bigger almost nothing. None the less the fractional increase is still larger than doubling CO2 and this is what they refer to as more powerful. They just fail to mention that even after the larger fractional increase, a bigger nothing is still nothing.
Can’t remember where I saw it, but apparently methane’s residence in the atmosphere is rather short, reacting with something else and breaking down into CO2 and something else. At any rate, it doesn’t stick around very long in methane form.
Since it is not really possible to double the atmospheric methane concentration, it’s a moo point.
“…which is approximately 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide”
Makes people think the range may be uncertainty range may be narrow? At least they didn’t state approximately 83.96834 times.
I’m with mwhite, absorption bands suggest 84 times is implausible, especially if there is water vapor in the air. I understand there is a paper published with the estimate of 84 times at 20 years and 34 times at 100 years that the IPCC uses. However, just because it’s published doesn’t make it true.
“At least they didn’t state approximately 83.96834 times.”
87.63% of all statistics are made up.
I read that on a napkin at Hooters, so it must be true.
Will act like a rag to a bull. As a founding member of the Bovine Liberation Front I protest in the strongest possible terms against this restriction of our fundamental right to ventilate.
Sounds like you just vented without any restriction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQMbXvn2RNI
Welcome, Brother!
If cars and airplanes can expel CO2 if they run on bio-fuel — hydrocarbon fuel made from vegetable matter — what is wrong with cows expelling CO2 and/or Methane made directly from vegetable matter?
Sssssh, stoppit. They’re trying to make money from dumb and gullible people. Don’t give the game away so soon.
Cows don’t have the same lobbyists.
This is one of those inventions designed by city people to get other vulnerable city people to pay them research grant money. Knowing cattle as I do I can think of ten reasons without even trying why this won’t work. And let’s not even get into the other end of the problem. I’d love to see the research about how 95% of emissions come from the nose. I suspect that is just more male bovine excrement. And just wait until PETA sees those things.
According to their website, the halter : “Goes above & beyond the freedoms of animal welfare”
The whole thing looks like an Onion spoof.
Weirdly though, looks like people have been interested in cow breath since the mid nineties.
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/eng/research/grouplist/sensorsanddevices/mbl/publications/papers/jwgardner/1997/j_agric_engng_res_1997_cow_breath_monitor.pdf
Yep. It is on the wrong end of the cow.
Yes obviously it’s farts that are cooking the planet not burps. Dinosaurs were very often bigger than cows their farts must of been enormous, but we don’t blame them for their own extinction unless farts attract asteroids. Oh my god I’ll never eat cabbage or sprouts again. Ah hah vegans and vegetarians it’s all their fault. Stupid yes, but not as stupid as burp catching masks for cows.
Do I really live in a world where burp catchers are a serious proposition, surely not this must be a joke.
It is a joke, but some people take it seriously.
Can’t tell the difference anymore.
When 80% of working age population is unproductive it’s easy for them to approve funds for unproductive jobs.
There’s also the cost. 1.6 billion cows at, say, $100 per attachment (it includes a catalytic converter!), is a lot of moo-lah.
Funny thing is in order to heat our old Edwardian (1906) non CCC compliant house, and to cook our food we also oxidise methane.
For now anyway until Carrie gets us.
Other funny thing, well not so funny, there is a complete lack of logs for open fireplaces. None anywhere at all. There’s plenty of kindling and coal though….
where does this claim of Methane as an ultra powerful Greenhouse gas come from
mwhite above posted this image
which seems to belie the claim, as do Happer and Wijngarden but anyone have a source about where the claim originates as it is so often quoted and so misleading
Where it comes from is rather technical. Climate scientists, the modelers, have some conceptual difficulties in calculating the effective atmospheric IR opacity, a quantity figuring in the ‘forcing’. They use a method based on the so-called ‘Planck-mean opacity’. Unfortunately such is wrong, it grossly overestimates the forcing by CO2 and ridiculously exagerates the forcing by Methane, Ozone, etc. The correct way of calculating the forcing is by using a flux-mean opacity, something the modelers never have heard of, or do not want to know. In reality the effect of Methane is negligible compared to that of CO2, which in its turn is small compared to that of water vapour.
I think the time is ripe to explode a bit of the junk-science trivial IR absorption theories. I am a physicist with a 50 year old degree so I am a bit rusty. Happer and Wijngarden semed on the ball but I was out of my depth. The time is ripe for an intelligent layman explanation of the quantum theory of IR absorption and emission by atmospheric trace gases . Not that anyone on the AGW side will pay a blind bit of attention.
Got any more details Ed?
I assumed that both the Methane and CO2 effects were computed that we had a completely non interacting base atmosphere whose sole absorption was by a given concentration of only one extraneous gas. Under these conditions tehn the fuigyures may be OK But with overlapping spectral obsorption wavelengths, and the dominant role played by water vapour the role of these gases is very much modified from the pristine model
Nearby a very happy cow herd dines indoors, with a very large waterbed and robot milker. Food is supplied with clockword timing. A back-scratcher for the guests is free of charge.
One could call this a Methane Green House (TM) … No masks in sight.
Beside stands bio-gas generator with who knows what for feed, likely maize.
No kidding, but the cows seem very healthy.
Sure someone will order all range herds rounded up into Methane Houses to save the Green House.
Sorry, chi’drens, the mask would have to be fitted to the other end of the system, then hooked up to a tank and separator system to handle the solid,liquid and gaseous methane emissions. Clearly these idiots know nothing about cows. Or climate. Or any other thing you may care to list.
From the Wired article:
Oh, so it converts dreaded methane into dreaded carbon dioxide? And that water might be difficult to “expel” in sub-freezing weather.
Cute idea, though. I’m sure there will be a lot of green financing ready to help out here.
Solution Stop eating meat that will make a difference. Cut meat consumption by 40%. Data tells the truth and numbers do not lie. Total methane emissions from all sources including wetlands and fossil fuels are about 614,000,000 tons/year. Residual atmospheric methane is 0.00017%. 1.4 billion cows emit 86 million tons of methane annually which is 14% of total emissions. Therefore 14% of – residual CH4 – 0.00017% is 0.0000238% that is 2.38 trillionths of atmospheric CH4. Atmospheric methane needs to be at least 100 times more prolific to have even the slightest influence on climate. Insofar as UK cows are concerned which are 0.69% of the global total at 0.0000000229908% of 0.00017%. Methane The Irrelevant GHG. (CH4) has narrow absorption bands at 3.3 microns and 7.5 microns (the red lines). CH4 is 20 times more effective an absorber than CO2 – in those bands. However, CH4 is only 0.00017% (1.7 parts per million) of the atmosphere. Moreover, both of its bands occur at wavelengths where H2O is already absorbing substantially. Hence, any radiation that CH4 might absorb has already been absorbed by H2O. The ratio of the percentages of water to methane is such that the effects of CH4 are completely masked by H2O. The amount of CH4 must increase 100-fold to make it comparable to H2O. Because of that, methane is irrelevant as a greenhouse gas. The high per-molecule absorption cross section of CH4 makes no difference at all in our real atmosphere. It cannot contribute to atmospheric warming or climate change
But I am omnivorous. I was born this way. And the eating of meat is highly pleasurable.
I’m waiting for a video of greenies trying to put these masks on Cape Buffalo in Africa. Serengeti, anyone?
Just like CO2, there’s good methane and bad methane. Infrared radiation can tell the difference, it’s clever that way.
Yes indeed Ron,
and while we’re at it how about one for Elephants they can munch up to 600 lbs. of plant fodder a day! and then perhaps we should do something about all those meat eaters: lions, hyenas, jackals and even the vultures they are all part of the climate crisis.
Are we serious??
Cheers
Mike
Oh, wow, deplorable(s).
Their site tells us the mask is 53% efficient, and 90% to 95% of the methane comes from nostrils/mouth. So the problem is solved if you reduce methane by less than half? Plus these masks detect disease, they have GPS trackers, and communicate various stats. They will be available on a subscription basis. I can only imagine each mask would be fairly pricey, especially with solar and thermo-electric energy harvesting devices. The cost of beef will go up by how much? Last time I spoke with the cows they said they didn’t want them.
Vegans. Cows are constructed to process the fibrous material, presumably to reduce their climate hoofprint.
http://extension.msstate.edu/publications/publications/understanding-the-ruminant-animal-digestive-system
Mask mania.
Covid masks for humans.
Methane masks for cows.
Some questions: how do they eat? and when they drink they stick their snout into filthy water, so what does that do to the device?
How long does the mask last, and how much does it cost?
Whatever it costs is too much.
It won’t last long. Cows are not accustomed to wearing halters or masks and are very likely to rub the offending item off quickly and trample it in the ever present mud.
We had a couple gathered cows so we could snap a lead rope on them and walk off with the rest of our heard following. Every couple days we would have to hunt up their halters and out them back on. That was two cows out of a max if 20, herd sized varied year to year from 6-20. Not ranchers just had some scrub land available that wasn’t worth trying to raise a crop on. Anyway it would be a full time job trying to keep masks on a sizable herd.
Also, is the mask an effective petri dish and concentrator. This is a wonderful opportunity to conduct a double-blind experiment with diverse (i.e. millions) of permissive subjects.
“Faster than a speeding snail! Not as powerful as El Loco! Unable to leap tall buildings at a single bound!”
“Look! It’s the masked ruminant.
It is designed to act as a booster to help get the cow over the moon.
The idiot-award challenge continues 😀
Cows don’t fart
People and horses fart – only when they are eating a low nutrient rubbish diet
Cows may burp but again, for same reason as above
Thus we see the need for A Little Correction to the opening remarks/premise…
Thus:
“”We were aware that in every country“””
Read = The UK
“”methane is one of the biggest contributions to global warming“”
Read = “Frankie, exaggeration destroys your credibility”
No matter: In the land of headless chickens (Name of Boris not least) and paranoia, it is The Modern Way and works-a-treat every time.
“”and we found that methane mitigation tools“”
Read = “Those UK muppets have more money than sense”
“” in agriculture are under-researched,” says Francisco.””
Read = Give me the money says Frankie
Because, and as Everybody Knows**, UK Farmers are rich beyond everyone’s wildest dreams
(**Frank, have you only just worked that out. Where have you been these last 4 decades?
“There isn’t a lot of innovation occurring within the field.”
The Field. haha.
Our boy Frank is a Laugh-a-Minute int he just?
IOW. He is taking the piss.
(You do remember what I say about “The Human Animal”?)
In the time of Monty Python everyone would have seen that.
Sadly, no more
Back when natural gas prices were sky high in the early 1980’s a company tried to contract with some of the largest feed yards in the Texas Panhandle to harvest manure from the cattle feeding pens and harvest the methane from the manure. Don’t remember them ever having any interest in the burbs the cattle emitted.
Just let someone try and mask these : (From Marty Robins Ghost Riders in the Sky) :
Does it work for covid as well? LOL.
The stupidity never ends. What about the other end of the cow? That should be interesting.
That said, no gas at any concentration in the atmosphere can warm Earth and the climate. They are falling for Junk-junk science and then thinking they are smart. The half-life of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere is about five years and is at less than 1% that of CO2. Neither warm anything.
I can’t believe no one has explicitly said this yet: What a load of BS!
Has to be January fools joke?
If not, galacticly stupid