Reposted from CENTRIST, Your Hub for NZ News
In brief
- Newsroom suggests a political agenda in methane emission targets undermines New Zealand’s Net Zero goals.
- Climate scientist Kevin Trenberth challenges the methane emissions narrative, arguing that New Zealand’s stable livestock numbers since 2010 have effectively achieved net-zero.
- Climate researcher David Frame suggests that drastic reductions in meat and dairy consumption would have a negligible effect on global warming.
Is Newsroom’s reaction over methane emission targets warranted?
The Newsroom website has unintentionally blown a massive hole in the credibility of efforts to blame farmers for NZ’s greenhouse gas emissions, with one of the world’s top climate scientists rebuking a Newsroom methane story as “hokey”.
According to Marc Daalder of Newsroom, the government’s decision to conduct an independent review of methane emission targets from agriculture, apart from the Climate Change Commission’s recommendations, suggests a political manoeuvre to undermine NZ’s Net Zero goals.
Daalder argues that the government’s approach risks prioritising short-term political goals over long-term climate action. By potentially watering down methane targets without substantial new scientific evidence, Daalder is concerned that New Zealand’s commitments to combating climate change may be compromised.
Enter Kevin Trenberth
However, climate scientist Kevin Trenberth questions the scientific basis for stringent methane reduction goals and has challenged the widely held belief that these emissions significantly contribute to global warming. He says, in a comment posted to the Newsroom story, that the moral panic surrounding New Zealand’s emissions, particularly related to methane, is scientifically unfounded.
In Trenberth’s response to Daalder’s analysis, he contends that New Zealand’s agricultural methane emissions have already reached a state of net-zero impact on climate change.
Trenberth’s argument centres on the notion that methane emissions from livestock are part of a natural cycle. He explains that the methane emitted by cattle and land use basically represents a re-release of carbon dioxide that was temporarily stored in short-term grasses.
This cyclical process, according to Trenberth, does not result in a net harm to New Zealand’s carbon dioxide targets.
“The issue is that methane is so short lived that, in fact, NZ is already at “net zero” (with regards to) methane. The numbers of livestock have been stable enough since 2010 so the amounts emitted are completely compensated by the amounts oxidised to carbon dioxide.
“Since the methane started out as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere before being taken up in grass, and then eaten by livestock, the process is circular. The main issues with methane are fossil methane from mining operations,” he says.
Trenberth describes the Newsroom analysis as “hokey” and that New Zealand’s stable livestock numbers since 2010 have led to a balance where the methane emitted is offset by the amount oxidised to carbon dioxide. Trenberth correctly points out that there are fewer livestock today than there was back then, further strengthening the argument that New Zealand methane emissions are already at net zero.
Will a drastic reduction in meat and dairy consumption have an effect on global warming?
Trenberth is not alone in thinking that methane’s effects have been overstated. According to climate researcher David Frame, the effect would be negligible if there was a drastic reduction in meat and dairy consumption of the sort envisioned by the government’s net zero policies.
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The methane, nitrous oxide and CFCs scare is bunk. It’s based on the GWP (Global Warming Potential) numbers which have nothing to do with absorption of radiation in the atmospheric window and everything to do with concentration in the atmosphere:
GWP is based on concentration not absorption spectrums:
CH4 1932 ppb GWP 86
N20 337 ppb GWP 273
CFC 4 ppb GWP ~8000
If anyone disagrees with that, please pipe up and tell me why I’m wrong.
Funny aside. The water vapor GHE warming so overwhelms these numbers that ‘they’ don’t calculate a wv GWP. I just tried to look it up. Nope.
‘Their’ Illogical logic is wv is natural, so doesn’t count. Overlooks the fact that CH4 is also natural—but evil because comes from beef (eat bugs instead) and mining (death to ff).
Such is twisted ‘climate science’.
” ‘they don’t calculate a wv GWP”
__________________________
Their formula is here:
IPCC AR4 Chapter 2 Page 210 pdf 82
I’m not going to try to get their formula to work, but maybe you would like to take a stab at it. I’m thinking that if you ran water vapor through their formula at a 2% concentration the GWP would come up negative.
I suspect bugs emit a significant amount of gases, not to be discussed by ‘climate scientists.’
e.g termites
The warming potential is its contribution to the atmospheric mass. About 0.2C for every percentage increase in mass. If the added gas is not contributing to the mass in a way that can be measured like surface pressure then it is not contributing to warming in a way that can be measured.
Solar absorption by the oceans is temperature controlled. The clouds that form over warm pools have a 2X ratio of SW reflection as LW reduction. Very powerful negative feedback that limits ocean surface temperature to 30C.
The chart show the negative relationship just north of the equator for the CERES era. The NH started warming 500 years ago.
?ssl=1
In May, around 15% of ocean surface will be regulating or close to regulating at the 30C limit. The regulating process reflects ALL the solar EMR above the level required to keep the surface at 30C, which is 420W/m^2 daily average.
The only thing I got from all that was that ocean surface temperature won’t get above 30°C (~303K) because at that temperature outgoing radiation from the ocean surface is about equal to incoming solar radiation.
Did you say anything about the GWP numbers and what appears to be an inverse relationship with greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere?
Another way to look at the GWP numbers is the fact that “they” never say how much temperature rise methane or nitrous oxide will contribute to global temperature by 2100 or in 100 years or if it doubles in concentration. If it were in any way significant, it’s a sure bet that “they” would tell us all bout it.
Well anyway, thanks for the reply.
You got the essential point. It means any solar EMR above the level needed to achieve that is not thermalised. It is reflected back to space. So radiative gasses a=other than water vapour have no influence at trace levels. Water vapour solidifying to reflective cloud limits the energy uptake to limit the surface temperature.
It follows from this that other radiative gases have zero potential to warm the surface. So the GWP equals zero.
Global Warming “Potential”…. that’s pretty laughable in itself.
Well the real issue for methane is that its absorption bands are completely overlapped by water vapor. The gwp bullshit is calculated in a mythical dry atmosphere with no connection to reality.
In reality, methane has no effect on climate at all.
From reading their extremely verbose justification of their paycheques, GWP is sort of based on radiative effects, but it all boils down to “Radiative Forcing”, and no one has ever actually measured this effect for any chemical. (This term does not exist in normal physics, only in “climate fizix”) So instead it is simply modeled in computers working with bad assumptions, and therefore all of it is fiction. Soup to nuts. That’s my analysis.
The infrared absorption spectra tell a very different story than what the IPCC wants us to believe.
The whole theory of “global warming” is based on re-radiation of infrared from the ground (based on the Planck distribution of intensity as a function of frequency at ambient temperatures) being absorbed in the atmosphere by various gases, including water vapor, CO2, and CH4.
At normal ambient temperatures, the IR radiation from the ground is at maximum intensity between about 400 to 1200 cm-1 wavenumbers, and drops off above 1200 cm-1 to practically zero above 2000 cm-1.
Water vapor IR absorption:
Strong <550 cm-1
Relatively weak 550 to 1300 cm-1
Strong 1300 to 1800 cm-1
Weak 1800 to 3400 cm-1
Strong 3400 to 4000 cm-1
CO2 IR absorption:
Strong 600 to 740 cm-1
Nearly zero 740 to 2250 cm-1
Strong 2250 to 2300 cm-1
Nearly zero 2300 to 3550 cm-1
Strong 3550 to 3750 cm-1
CH4 IR absorption:
Strong 1200 to 1400 cm-1
Strong 2850 to 3200 cm-1
Nearly zero elsewhere.
Since the IR radiation intensity from the ground is relatively high in the 400 to 1200 cm-1 range, the strong CO2 peak from 600 to 740 cm-1 captures a significant part of this radiation. This peak is in the “water window” of relatively weak absorption by water vapor (550 to 1300 cm-1), although the much higher concentration of water vapor does absorb some of it, so that the marginal effect of CO2 is reduced in humid climates.
The IR absorption peak for methane between 1200 and 1400 cm-1 is partially blocked by water vapor, and is partially in the relatively weak “water window”. However, methane concentration is only 1.8 ppm, while water vapor ranges from 2,000 to 15,000 ppm, so this concentration ratio could overwhelm a high absorption coefficient for methane.
The other IR absorption peaks for methane and CO2 above 2000 cm-1 are insignificant, since IR radiation intensity from the ground is extremely low (<1% of the intensity in the 400 to 1000 cm-1 range).
In order to truly evaluate the “global warming potential” of a gas, one must consider, as a function of frequency or wavelength of infrared:
These functions need to be integrated over frequency of IR radiation to obtain the net effect of concentration of an IR-absorbing gas on surface temperature.
I have made a detailed study of the IR absorption by water vapor and CO2 assuming the Planck blackbody function and measured absorption coefficients, concentrating on the CO2 peak from 600 to 740 cm-1. There is a strong screening effect from water vapor, and using an equilibrium model, the “equilibrium climate sensitivity” due to doubling the present CO2 concentration based only on IR absorption would range from about 0.35 C/doubling in the tropics to about 0.5 C (summer) to 1.0 C (winter) in middle latitudes.
This model would have predicted a warming of about 0.2 to 0.5 C between 1900 and today, based on the increase in CO2 concentration alone. Since the actual increase was about 1.1 C, this shows that CO2 concentration is not the only driver of climate, and it is relatively weak compared to other natural forces that we have not completely understood nor measured.
Whatever natural forces caused the global climate to warm since the Little Ice Age are now continuing to act, and humanity cannot stop them by reducing CO2 emissions.
I have said many time that all livestock are carbon neutral.
They cannot possibly produce more “carbon” output, than they take in.
Actually carbon negative (as if that matters). The carbon emitted by livestock is less than the carbon sequestered by the grass because a significant amount goes into building biological mass. Simple 2nd law math.
True…. But eventually all that biological mass, via many possible pathways, always comes back to exactly the same amount of “carbon” going in as comes out.
Cows etc cannot create or destroy “carbon”.
They do not add or subtract “carbon” from the active carbon cycle…
Hence, they are “carbon” neutral. 🙂
With bone being approximately 14 – 20% carbon, the total sequestered for a long time could be very large given the numbers. I have no idea what they do with the bones though in general. When I eat a New Zealand rack of lamb, I dump the bones in the regular trash, so presumably they (and the carbon) end up sequestered in landfill. So a sheep could be net negative at relevant timescales.
Any Kiwis on here know? Come on – waggle yer dags.
“I have no idea what they do with the bones though in general”
My dog eats them… completely !!! 🙂
And yes, once carbon is combined with calcium or similar elements, it will take a lot longer to cycle through the carbon cycle, if at all.
“Eventually”
How much carbon stays in the soil, if the farmer has good practices and the loam gets a little thicker every year.
How much carbon is tied up in leather goods, that take years or even decades to decay back to CO2, if ever.
Any “carbon” not actually sequestered or buried as coal or similar can be considered “active” because eventually it will decay.
Even the timber used in houses and furniture, and leather etc is really only there for a couple or a few hundred years unless it gets to somewhere where decay isn’t possible.
It’s not new carbon- whereas, the theory goes that carbon removed from the ground (so called ff fuels) is new carbon. True, but the threat is exaggerated. A slight increase in temperature, if due to the new carbon, is a good thing, for most people in most places.
It’s also true, likewise, that forestry can’t contribute to the supposed “problem” because it’s not new carbon in the trees. Yet, there is a movement to end all forestry “to save the planet”. I’d like to save the planet by shipping such whiners to Mars. 🙂
Carbon removed from the ground is not new carbon.
It came from CO2 via dead algae and plankton that fell to the seabed and was subducted. Processing time is estimated in terms of millions of years.
Methane/natural gas is similar except it is CO2 and carbonic acid in water again subducted and cooked.
The time scale is what is the big difference.
Climate catastrophists are only concerned with the date on a calendar.
The so call energy imbalance charts that have been pushed for decades to not differentiate between the speed of IR versus speed of conduction and convection. Not to mention those charts use a flat earth model with numerous geometric errors.
I and many others have been saying that too for many years. It is so blindingly obvious that it is impossible to believe that the charlatans pushing the anti-meat campaign were not fully aware of it from the start. Clearly they didn’t care about the truth, only what they thought they could get away with. The devastation they have wrought on others should be worth a lot of very long jail terms. OK, that means honest people end up paying twice – once for the damage, once for the cost of keeping people in jail. I had no choice in the first, but I’ll volunteer my taxes towards the second.
OK … OK … Don’t have a cow mann
Watch for Trenberth being declared a “Denier” very shortly.
Trenberth is for once right about NZ agriculture—but for the wrong reasons. So he is just wrong about mined (coal, oil, natgas) methane contributions.
The two narrow and weak methane IR absorption bands are completely overlaid by two much wider and stronger water vapor absorption bands. Methane is a GHG in the lab in a dry atmosphere, but NOT in the real world averaging about 2% specific humidity. Methane is literally swamped by water vapor. GHE contribution is close to zero. Easy to google this physics. There is a readily findable peer reviewed paper with a very telling graphic showing GHE contributions (y) for all GHG by wavelength (x) given atmospheric concentration. Methane is mousenuts.
Paper is Wei et al, in Helion 2019 available free at ncbi.nim.nih.gov as PMC6351392. Key chart is figure 1.
Originally published online as 10.1016/J.Helion.2019.e01145.
Have now bookmarked the paper to iPad. Took some doing, as since I first easily found it couple of weeks ago google supressed it way down in my search function as about item 150, after lots of scientifically false earlier links from many famous institutions erroneously claiming methane is a big deal in the real world.
Enjoy the real science.
Thanks Rud, nice paper, although somewhat difficult to follow. Not so with Fig. 1 though.
Then, of course, there’s also Wijngaarden and Happer, which was easy to find (surprisingly)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.03098
How are the ad hominemsters doing with that one these days?
It is nice to see some logic in his thinking.
Farming animals must by any simple logic be carbon dioxide neutral: If pelletizing trees in the USA and shipping them to the UK Drax power station to burn is justifiable, animal farming is way ahead of that.
And yes, the absorption spectra means it could never have any influence on the climate in any scenario.
Here is a direct link to the Heliyon publication:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6351392/
Heliyon. 2019 Jan; 5(1): e01145.
Published online 2019 Jan 23. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2019.e01145
PMCID: PMC6351392 PMID: 30723826
Absorption coefficient of water vapor across atmospheric troposphere layer
Peng-Sheng Wei,∗ Hsuan-Han Chiu, Yin-Chih Hsieh, Da-Lun Yen, Chieh Lee, Yi-Cheng Tsai, and Te-Chuan Ting
And don’t forget that methane quickly oxidizes to CO2 and water, the GW potential is B.S.
Professor Dave Frame, an IPCC contributor, has calculated that New Zealand’s ruminants are warming the planet at the rate of a four/millionth of a degree C per year. It is going to be a while before we have to remove a sweater.
The Planet’s humans emit over 3 times the CO2 that all ruminants produce (CO2-e) but are excluded from restrictions because they are eating plants and animals that eat plants so they are in a balanced, natural cycle. Sounds a lot like ruminants. Consistency???
Frame’s comment is nonsense, Owen. He is not agreeing with Trenberth because the latter is saying that the herds must be decimated (in the true sense which means the removal of 1 in 10). Trenberth is saying that is not required.
Nice to find someone familiar with “Commentarii de Bello Gallico.”
I want to see a picture of NZ ‘ruminants’ wearing sweaters.
They’ll be coming for the humans soon enough, that was always the plan.
Some environmental activists have let it slip that they’d like to get the world’s population greatly below a billion and some have even further speculated that ebola would be a good way to do it.
Climate alarmists are generally fascists, and fascists always have some “Final Solution” in the works.
And before a lots replies pop up:
Communists=Fascists
Both come from the same poisoned atheist socialist root.
Net Zero is a meaningless term therefore it can mean anything. This is proof.
Bob, tend to disagree. Politicians have made Net Zero meaningful by their actions trying to achieve it. Stuff like EU no ICE after 2035. Only heat pumps in UK. Problem is, they cannot achieve it in the real world. So their Net Zero failure might well hasten the demise of the whole global warming charade. That would be useful. SNP/ Green coalition collapse over honest admission SNP cannot meet 2030 net zero goals is a hopeful early harbinger.
Rud, I am not convinced that their goal is Net Zero rather they use Net Zero to advance their cause.
Sadly that seems to be the truth. The elite’s desire to control everything is what requires a pan world fear be introduced that enables endless laws be enacted to reduce the fear.
“No cars, no cows, no cruise, ain’t got no cash to use”
I feel a song coming on…..
Having read hundreds of comments from Un< IPCC, and other’s pushing great social and economic change, the intent is to create a One World Order with a few rich elites in charge and the rest delegated to slavery to support their lifestyles.
Just like the endless wars in the book “1984”, the “fight to save the climate” will become a perpetual war. The failed predictions will quickly be replaced by new predictions, which will justify tightening the screws on people even more.
If you can’t live on that, then eat cake.
Personally, I would suspect vegan influence on methane targets. As CH4 has an absorption spectrum that overlaps water vapor, the influence is minimal anyway.
TH, very true. For the precise physics, gander the 2019 paper I posted two coordinates to above. The real world alarmist methane disconnect is shocking. Real world methane GHE isn’t just minimal, it is nearly non-existent.
Isn’t just vegans. People who oppose coal, oil, and natgas also know that these inevitably produce some methane (mostly coal, since O&G guys like to sell it).
“Real world methane GHE isn’t just minimal, it is nearly non-existent.”
Which just goes to show how desperate the climate alarmists are to try to use methane to sell their Net Zero insanity.
They will use every concoction they can to poison society.
Cattle sheep goats chickens… are far superior vegans to human ones. Human ones are even at least as flatulent as Aggie animala. Imagine being downwind of m 7 billion head of vegans! Whewwww
It is a little startling to watch a ‘vegan’ chicken pick up a mouse, toss its head back, and swallow it whole.
Hey, just as much fun as watching a cute bambi do exactly the same – and not by accident either!
Chickens are omnivores. They will eat anything they can catch or scratch for.
Wow. I never thought I would agree with Kevin Trenberth on his climate science views but he gets this one part right:
Trenberth’s argument centres on the notion that methane emissions from livestock are part of a natural cycle. He explains that the methane emitted by cattle and land use basically represents a re-release of carbon dioxide that was temporarily stored in short-term grasses.
That doesn’t vindicate his litany of exaggerations and hyperbole about CO2, methane, and their effect on the climate and sea level, but, well, I’m astonished. I wonder if the “eat bugs” wing of his mob knows he said this. The mindless mob might eat him alive like they did James Hansen, fellow radical, for rationally promoting nuclear fission as the realistic “green” solution for reliable grid-scale electricity generation.
No different to the widely held BELIEF that CO2 warms Earth. Why not confess to the scam that he has been instrumental in perpetuating for decades now.
CO2 has not shifted the 30C limit on open ocean surface temperature – cannot and never will at trace amounts.
Yes, I made that point a year ago:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/03/06/the-misguided-crusade-to-reduce-anthropogenic-methane-emissions/
I think it is worth remembering that very little is really known about atmospheric methane.
The fact that the IPCC says on page 142 of the 4th IPCC WG1 assessment report
“Keppler et al. (2006) reported
the discovery of emissions of CH4 from living vegetation and
estimated that this contributed 10 to 30% of the global CH4
source. This work extrapolates limited measurements to a global
source and has not yet been confirmed by other laboratories,
but lends some support to space-borne observations of CH4
plumes above tropical rainforests reported by Frankenberg et
al. (2005). That such a potentially large source of CH4 could
have been missed highlights the large uncertainties involved
in current ‘bottom-up’ estimates of components of the global
source (see Section 7.4).”
The fact we have government policies punishing farmers even though the IPCC say there are large uncertainties in our understanding of methane is ridiculous.
So we go vegetarian and the CH4 levels increase due to plant growth. Clever.
Once that is discovered they will ban food plants due to CH4 and we will end up eating termites.
But wait, termites respirate and world wide contribute more CO2 than 8 billion people.
What then? Let them eat cake?
I think it is more likely that methane is released from dead, decaying vegetation, as in ‘swamp gas.’ Formerly, before methane reduction became the poster child for saving the world, wetlands and termites were considered the major source. However, NASA and others have revised that to make it seem more likely that the world can be saved by cracking down on fugitive emissions from fossil fuels.
Hi Clyde.
The point I was trying to make was that there is a great deal of uncertainty about methane.
There is still a lot we don’t know about methane.
“But it seems that wetland trees are much more than conduits. They also create the conditions, and provide the raw materials, for methane generation by micro-organisms. “In wetland systems, trees send a lot of carbon into their roots,” says Pangala. This delivery, known as rhizodeposition, provides the essential raw materials for methane-generating micro-organisms that congregate among the trees’ roots. “Trees are bioreactors”, says Gauci. “Without them, methanogenesis, even in wetlands, might be much less.”
Many trees, especially outside wetlands, also actively generate methane. Some methane comes from photochemical reactions in their foliage. More may be from microbes living in the trunks that themselves generate methane, says Gauci.”
https://e360.yale.edu/features/scientists-probe-the-surprising-role-of-trees-in-methane-emissions
Methane eating bacteria were among the first life on earth and are still here. Converting methane to CO2. They converted the atmosphere from methane to co2 making plants and eventually animals possible.
I think Trenberth agrees that banning New Zealand lamb from our plates would be a travesty.
i see what you did there! 🙂
Natural gas leaks out of the earth almost everywhere. Heat limestone and steam under pressure with iron as a reducing agent. You get hydrocarbons and this has been replicated in the lab.
It’s great to see Kevin Trenberth’s comments getting some traction, he is 100% correct about ruminant methane along with Dave Frame pointing out methane’s warming of the global atmosphere cannot be measured. Those of us who have some understanding of the carbon cycle have known this many years – elementary science. Daalder and Newsroom have repeatedly demonstrated that they have no scientific knowledge of the climate or the carbon cycle – they are just promoting the politics of climate change – pretending to be saving mankind.
There is a new GHG calculator at climatebell.org that can potentially settle all discussions about ECS and the effect of all GHG’s individually and collectively. Users of microsoft excel can download the workbook here:
https://www.climatebell.org/uploads/1/5/6/0/15609982/climate_bell_ghg_lab_v2.40f.xlsb
Read the setup instructions here:
https://www.climatebell.org/calculator.html
I don’t have excel myself and am not about to pay for it just to test the calculator, but I’m sure many visitors to this site already have it. There is an interview with it’s creator, Rodney McInnis, on Tom Nelson’s youtube channel.
Download the free and open source libreoffice. All the excel you should need. Well, unless the model contains some macro add-ins that libreoffice doesn’t support.
https://www.libreoffice.org/
.. the process is circular”
“ Trenberth correctly points out that there are fewer livestock today than there was back then, further strengthening the argument that New Zealand methane emissions are already at net zero. “
Eh? If the process is circular, then how many livestock there are makes no difference.
“Eh? If the process is circular, then how many livestock there are makes no difference.”
That is correct. I wonder why Trenberth would make such a distinction? He seems to be saying a certain number of livestock is ok, but more than that is a problem.
People have been debunking methane as being a climate change problem for years here at WUWT.
It’s more of even if this net zero analysis is wrong, consider methane is not increasing since we have fewer livestock now than then.
I agree the point adds noise to the discussion.
He was saying that the herd is not growing. Number of animals is stable.
A growing herd would change the coefficients of the equations.
I do hope the Guest Blogger is sounder on the methane science of farming than they are on general farming knowledge, because those aren’t fellas destroying the Earth, they’re dairy cows, which means they are girls, not boys. Pretty basic mistake really.
But do they identify as girls, or boys?
Most of the boys at least partially transition quite young.
Is a sheep a trans-bovine?
An ovine is a bovine with its ‘b’ lopped off 🙂
Referring to the photo of the girls — that’s the look when you use the wrong pronoun.
NZ does 73 million tons of CO2-e, out of a global total of 14 billion tons.
How on earth do they think reducing their emissions is going to combat climate change?
How do any of these Net Zero nations think reducing their emissions will combat climate change, when China and India and dozens of other nations are increasing their emissions as fast as they can and will negate any emission reductions by the Net Zero nations?
The Net Zero nations are spinning their wheels, and all they will accomplish is the bankrupting of their economies with their emissions reduction efforts.
There is a serious lack of leadership in Western nations. Things are not going to turn out well if delusional climate alarmists continue to rule.
Probably by the same thought processes they had when they were kiddies running around with plastic and cardboard swords and shields thinking they were big tough soldiers.
Apologies for the mild misogyny.
Of the 130-plus countries in the world, only about 20 are claiming to be doing something.
A lot of countries not doing anything are demanding climate reparations.
Ain’t virtue signaling politics fun!?!?
NZ agitators identify as The Mouse That Roared.
Same way that some who comment here think that Australia with a population of 27.2m, the 56th most populous country in the world, can make a large contribution by cutting its emissions.
“Climate researcher David Frame suggests that drastic reductions in meat and dairy consumption would have a negligible effect on global warming.”
But a major negative effect on human health.
Which is the real, hidden motivation/agenda.
When people are coerced into eating plants instead of flesh [beef, lamb, fish, etc.] the methane released by humans will be the same as reduced by prohibiting meat from the menu.
[QUOTE FROM ARTICLE]”“Since the methane started out as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere before being taken up in grass, and then eaten by livestock, the process is circular. The main issues with methane are fossil methane from mining operations,” [Trenberth] says.”
If this is true, then back in the 1800’s when millions of bison roamed the Great Plains, they were all belching and farting methane, just as cattle do today. Same process, just a different animal.
As for “fossil” methane or natural gas, could it have come from anaerobic decay of herbivores buried in prehistoric times, such as whatever event killed the dinosaurs?