A recent CNN article, “How a ‘cow fart’ vaccine could help tackle climate change,” discusses a vaccine under development to be given to cows to reduce the amount of methane their digestive processes produce. The hope is that the vaccine will significantly reduce livestock emissions, thereby slowing down climate change. It won’t. Methane from livestock contributes little, if anything, to global warming. As a result, attempting to change these animals’ biological processes seems to carry risks far exceeding any possible benefits.
CNN explains that methane is produced as grass ferments in the rumen, and claims that it is more “potent” than carbon dioxide, but does admit that it is comparatively very short-lived in the atmosphere. The author, Jacapo Prisco, goes on to claim that “livestock accounts for about a third of human-related methane emissions, which are collectively responsible for about 30% of global warming.”
Here the CNN author either misunderstands claims made about methane, or is intentionally misleading readers. The author cites the International Energy Agency (IEA) as the source of his claim concerning livestock methane emissions. The IEA does say methane is estimated to be responsible for 30 percent of global warming, a point it admits is open to debate. What it does not say, however, is that livestock emissions of methane are responsible for 30 percent of warming, which is what Prisco’s claim implies. Livestock emissions are only a small part of methane emissions attributable to human causes, much less global methane emissions as a whole. It is also important to note that the IEA’s estimates of anthropogenic (human-caused) methane emissions are much higher than most official government assessments calculate. To be clear, the IEA is not a scientific organization but rather an institution created to assess global energy supplies, stocks, and future needs – in recent years, it has strayed from its mission to become an advocate for climate activism and legislation.
Data from the EPA show that beef production only accounts for 2 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., with only part of that coming from methane from cows’ digestive processes. This is notable, especially since the United States produces more beef and veal than any other country. Agricultural crop production, in contrast, produces 10 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. It is not unreasonable to assume the same is true for the rest of the world.
A recent paper written by physicists William Happer, Ph.D., of Princeton University and W. A. van Wijngaarden, Ph.D., of Toronto’s York University, explains that contrary to claims methane is some super-warmer in the atmosphere, “the contribution of methane to the annual increase in forcing is one tenth (30/300) that of carbon dioxide.” Based on that fact, the scientists conclude that “[p]roposals to place harsh restrictions on methane emissions because of warming fears are not justified by facts.”
As Climate Realism has discussed on other occasions, here, here, and here, for example, methane has a limited ability to meaningfully contribute to warming by the fact that much of the energy absorption bands affected by the gas are already covered by water vapor, which makes up a massive proportion of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
As a result, methane is virtually inconsequential with regards to global warming. Current concentrations are around 1.9 parts per million (ppm). For comparison, the atmosphere contains 18 ppm of Neon, and 426 ppm CO2.
The vaccine discussed in the story does not exist yet, it is being researched by the UK’s Pirbright Institute, and has been a decade-plus effort from various research organizations, with no “tangible results as of yet,” CNN reports.
Side effects for the animal have already been hypothesized, such as “a reduction in the amount of feed that the rumen can absorb, meaning cattle might require more food, increasing costs to farmers.” Making livestock less efficient at processing food into energy and mass is a poor idea in a world where hunger is still all too common.
It seems that livestock’s digestive processes, and methane production’s role in it, is still poorly understood. Considering the fact that methane production is possibly a fundamental step in the digestive processes of rumen animals, including livestock such as cattle, sheep, and goats, it is critical to understand methane’s importance in the digestive process before tampering with it in the vain effort to mitigate climate change. This is especially true considering that the effort to control livestock emissions is a solution in search of a problem, with no tangible benefit to the world, and unknown consequences for the animals involved.
CNN misleads readers by hyping the influence methane emissions have on global temperatures, as well as the amount that animal husbandry contributes. Data show that agriculture as whole, and livestock production more particularly, have little if any impact on global climate.
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In the early 1800’s there were upwards of 60 million Bison here belching and farting methane. Huge animals compared to cattle
Also during the 19th and early 20th century huge areas of wetlands were filled in squelching methane emissions
DeLaune, R. D., I. Deval and C. W. Lindau. 2002. Flux of reduced sulfur gases along a salinity gradient in Louisiana coastal marshes. Estuarine Coastal Shelf Science. 54(6):1003-1011. https://doi.org/10.1006/ecss.2001.0871
Sulfur gas production is mostly hydrogen sulfide in brackish marsh, dimethyl sulfide in saltmarsh, much less sulfur and more methane gas in freshwater marsh.
If you spend enough time in those marshes you will see bubbles which do get oxidized. Most with good sense don’t walk in those muddy marshes, plunge too hard as a bailed out pilot and my two sons once did you have to pull them out. Need to put in lots of windmills to kill the insects which might cut them out by the millions but still have them by the billions. And then there is this “Production of methanethiol (smell of rotten cabbage) from dimethylsulfoniopropionate in marine surface waters.” Marine chemistry is a most difficult science and even carbon dioxide can get reduced to methane. Wonder how many regulators have even studied the necessary chemistry. Need to check out the whales and porpoises, last I heard the oceans were bigger.
And methanogens are still here. In soil, in fields and swamps and insects and animal guts.
I’d rather the cattle be left alone and instead the vaccines be used on Bill Gates.
For long-term supply of methane for beneficial use as fuel and as a carbon source for further synthesis, we should learn all we can about methanogens and put them to work. And you’re right – leave the cows alone!
Cows don’t need no vaccination
Cows don’t need no gas control
No Bovaer in the feed trough
Preacher, leave them cows alone
Hey! preacher! Leave them cows alone!
I hope readership appreciates this reference / riff on the original 😁
It was David’s fault.
Gilmore ?
I played your lyrics in my head to that Pink Floyd tune.
The cattle eat the grass and belch methane. So kill the cattle and let the grass grow and die each winter. The grass decomposes and emits the same amounts of methane. No change. So what is the real agenda? Destroy meat and other animal protein and reduce the human population. Evil.
Decomposition produces mostly CO2, and some CH4. I doubt that the ratio of CO2 to CH4 is as high when grasses decompose as when they’re digested and belched out by cows, but I’m just guessing, I have no data to prove that.
OTOH, even if you don’t burn it, CH4 in the atmosphere oxidizes into CO2 and H2O quite quickly. Its atmospheric lifetime is only about a decade.
https://sealevel.info/methane.html#oxidation
Quicker if there is lightning.
On the other hand, given livestock numbers are reasonable stable, bovine methane is in equilibrium.
How many large plant eaters are there in Africa? How would you like to be tasked with giving each of them vaccine using a needle? I’ve given large horses intramuscular shots but will pass on doing the same for rhinoceros and hippopotamus. Wildebeest would also make my ‘no’ list.
Aren’t emissions from living things neutral? If not, why not?
The point wasn’t the methane, the point was that CNN is sponsored by makers of vaccines: embedded advertising.
Yes without a doubt, and the wokist that wrote this rubbish actually has the audacity to call himself a journalist. CNN is dead.
Jacopo Prisco (jacoprisco.bsky.social)
@ur momisuglyjacoprisco
Journalist @ur momisuglyCNN
. Born at 330 ppm CO2. He/Him.
jacopo . prisco @ur momisugly gmail . com
Quitting Twitter for BSky
Said before. Will repeat. Methane is a GHG in the laboratory under dry air conditions. It ISN’T in the real world containing about 2% specific humidity on average. The reason is basic physics. The amount of atmospheric methane is very small compared to water vapor. And it’s therefore very small two IR absorption bands are completely swallowed by two of the several much larger and wider water vapor absorption bands. The whole methane GHE thing is bad physics.
The relevant paper is publicly available at Heliyon 5(1):e01145 (2019). Also available at pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.
Rud,
“Methane is a GHG in the laboratory under dry air conditions.”
Sorry to burst your bubble, but no, it’s not.
Adding methane to air at the same temperature does not make the air hotter. Maybe you misunderstood the “experiment”. “Greenhouse gases” are popularly described as “trapping heat” (whatever that is supposed to mean)!
Everything in the universe “traps heat”, if absorbing energy from a hotter object is what is meant. Conversely, everything in the universe emits heat, and cools if allowed to do so.
Cows emit heat. If you can’t take the heat, stay out of the paddock. Only joking.
More bubble bursting….
Adding methane to air most definitely WILL result in an air sample that will become warmer when a broad spectrum of light including IR shines on that same air sample, for example sunlight…because methane absorbs IR while nitrogen and oxygen are transparent to LW IR. Then a photon will be emitted by the excited CO2 molecule if it hasn’t lost its excess energy by collision with the 2500 molecules of N2 and O2 surrounding it… half of the photons go upwards and half downwards on average, the downward ones causing the surface to be warmed by absorption of the photon’s energy, this being the so-named greenhouse effect.
You added “when a broad spectrum of light” that MF did not state. Without the added light, there is nothing changing other than the ppm mix of the gasses.
You are incorrect. When molecules absorb electro magnetic energy such as light, it affects the valence energies, which are potential, not kinetic, energies and the molecules do not warm. Temperature is kinetic energy.
IR is not thermal energy, first discovered by E. Foote in the 1850s.
Half the photons go up and half down is not quite true. Photons have no rest mass and no size. Photons are a quantum of energy. EM energy emitted from a point source creates a spherical wave. The spherical emissions means that the waves go out in all directions, including HORIZONTAL.
Given all that is put aside, air density increases towards the surface, which means more molecular interaction with the photon emissions from above. What this resolves to is downward is less that 50% due to the increasing interactions as the energy approaches the surface.
You misunderstand the GHE lab experiment. Take a gas sample in a standard dry air tube, shine in IR, see what happens. GHE. These lab experiments were first performed by Tyndall in 1859 and reported to the Royal Society in 1861. No physics bubble is burst.
Tyndall used a thermo-electric pile as his detector. It is likely he was measuring the specific heat Cv in a fixed volume rather than and kind of IR function.
His source was H2O steam at roughly a foot from the salt lenses he capped his glass tube with. Given the cap was roughly 4 inches in diameter, it is probably if not likely that very little IR entered his apparatus.
If one does a deep dive into the Tyndall experiments, one finds that air saturated with water vapor (est. 1% to 5%) had the same results as 100% CO2.
“Methane from livestock contributes little, if anything, to global warming.” (My emphasis.)
Good to say, “if anything.”
Better yet to say, for all the radiatively active non-condensing gases of concern – CO2, CH4, N2O, etc.- that NO ONE KNOWS that ANY of the reported warming can be reliably attributed to the computed incremental static radiative effect of rising concentrations. And better to acknowledge that there is no good scientific reason remaining, after properly considering the dynamics of the general circulation, to expect to detect ANY sensible heat gain on land and in the oceans as a result.
Lorenz described how kinetic energy is produced and maintained in the atmosphere. The ERA5 reanalysis model computes an hourly parameter by gridpoint called the “vertical integral of energy conversion” with units W/m^2.. The concept is [internal energy + potential energy] <–> [kinetic energy].
So what? It will never be possible to isolate the tiny so-called “forcing” from the massively overwhelming two-way energy conversion for reliable determination of cause-and-effect. In the time-lapse video posted below, the vertical scale is +/- 10,000 W/m^2. And because these gases add no energy of their own to the atmosphere + land + oceans, it is unsound to ASSUME a climate “forcing” is involved at all.
More here. This is fundamental to the physics of compressible fluids, as the modelers know very well. Thank you for your understanding as I keep posting about this.
https://youtu.be/hDurP-4gVrY
Another great post from David.. people need to read and comprehend. !!
Any tiny, theoretical, 1D radiative effects from CO2 or CH4 are totally swamped by other energy movements in the atmosphere.
They are claiming a study based on temperatures (aka KE) and circulation is the whole of it. And they expect a 25 km grid to be satisfactory.
Except it is all about energy: input energy, energy storage, energy transfer, and latency.
The earth energy systems (water, land, and air) function as a heatsink – thermal engine combination.
Excess energy is stored in the ocean and land (heat sink) to be later released when the solar energy is reduce or zeros. The thermal engine is primarily due to the spherical geometry with the equatorial regions getting significantly more energy than the poles. Heat is the transfer of thermal energy across the thermal gradient from hot to cold.
Water vapor in the atmosphere, especially clouds, functions as the governor of the system.
UHI is due both to the change in materials (concrete versus dirt) and the substantial increase in surface area created by the building. The buildings can store in their structures much more thermal energy than just the footprint of the building on the ground. This raises night time temperature as the larger surface area emits more thermal energy.
They have the wrong model. They ignore electro magnetic fields a waves and how light actually warms solid and liquids. The models lack subsurface specific heat and how the temperature gradient flows energy into the earth and the water’s depths.
The keep creating new pseudo scientific jargon and hijack/repurpose/redefine words because they really can not explain how it works.
100% methane at 20 C is exactly the same temperature as 100% oxygen, nitrogen, CO2 or argon at 20 C.
Mix them in any proportions you wish, the temperature will remain at 20 C.
Some people have a very tenuous attachment to reality.
Now try shining a strong LW IR light through them, with a wavelength of 7.7 μm.
Which of your five flasks of 100% gas will absorb the 7.7 μm light and thereby be warmed?
Dave, don’t be silly. You might just as well say leave one of the flasks in sunlight, and the others in a freezer!
Any gas can be warmed. All gases above absolute zero emit infrared.
You haven’t contradicted a single statement I made. Shine a strong IR light? Now turn the light off. Which flask cools faster? Hmmmmm?
Some people have a tenuous attachment to reality, and can’t address facts – flying off at any number of pointless tangents, trying to hide their ignorance.
Are you one of them?
Michael Flynn wrote, “You might just as well say leave one of the flasks in sunlight, and the others in a freezer!”
When I said “try shining a strong LW IR light through them” I meant shine it through ALL FIVE of them.
The question is, which flask of air is thereby warmed?
The answer is that the flask of CH4 will be warmed, and the others will not be warmed, because methane absorbs 7.7 μm infrared light, and the other gases you mentioned do not.
⋅
Michael asked, “Now turn the light off. Which flask cools faster? Hmmmmm?”
Assuming the air outside the flasks (and the flasks, themselves) are still at 20C, only the CH4 flask will cool, because only its temperature was elevated. Only the CH4 flask will be warmer than the surrounding air. Once you turn off the 7.7 μm light, its temperature will begin dropping back to the temperature of the ambient air and the other flasks.
⋅
Michael observed, “Some people have a tenuous attachment to reality, and can’t address facts”
I agree.
So-called “greenhouse gases” have a warming effect because they absorb radiation which, in their absence, would have escaped to space. Absorbing radiation warms whatever absorbs it, because energy is conserved. Those are facts which some people, whose attachment to reality is tenuous, are reluctant to accept.
(Caveat: That’s a simplification; complicating factors include emission heights, pressure broadening, overlapping effects from multiple GHGs, clouds, convective and latent heat transport in the atmosphere, etc.)
If you are shining the light through the glass, they will warm according to their respective specific heat capacities.
If you are shining the light directly into the gas, you will get no temperature rise but you will increase the potential energy associate with valence bands.
Sparta Nova 4 wrote, “If you are shining the light through the glass, they will warm according to their respective specific heat capacities.”
That’s incorrect. Assuming that the flasks are transparent to 7.7 μm, only the flask containing CH4 will be warmed by the 7.7 μm radiation.
The radiation will pass through the other flasks without being absorbed, but it will be absorbed by the CH4 in that flask, because CH4 has a bending mode absorption line at 7.7 μm, and the other four gases are transparent at that wavelength.
The specific heat capacity of CH4 would only affect the rate of its temperature change while it is warming (or cooling). The heat capacities of the other gases wouldn’t have any effect at all, because their temperatures wouldn’t be changing.
Cattle are carbon neutral. Every carbon atom in a cow has come directly or indirectly from the atmosphere (most is in the food they eat). So a cow is actually sequestering carbon for a while. This attack on cows and their farmers is absurd. But then, just about everything from the same source is absurd
Partly, it is the vegan/animal rights lobby blaming cows for methane. Termites and rice farming do not interest them at all.
I think veganism is mostly a desire for asceticism, of being ritually pure from anything that reminds them they are animals. John Harvey Kellogg was their spiritual ancestor, aside from being a millenarian quack doctor.
Good point. Vegans foolishly hitched a false ‘climate science’ alarm ride on cows.
Don’t know much about all that science stuff, but we do have an awful lot of cattle here in my part of Texas, including a few on my place, and it is still going to be below freezing for several days this coming week
Got over 300 head on my Wisconsin dairy farm, and windchill is forecast to be -60F tomorrow night. We will have to jam the entire herd into the biggest feed shed plus adjacent storage barn, then drop all the side curtains and close all the doors to prevent udder disaster. Ice cream au natural is not a good thing veterinary wise.
Rud,
Surely all that concentrated cow fart methane GHG heating will keep them all warm and toasty? All that “trapped heat”, you know?
Complete nonsenses, isn’t it.
Yup. But if you want a working dairy farm, you better also protect them from -60F windchill no matter where their methane blows.
I visited my Grandfather in Manitowoc for Christmas 1983. Drove up from Ft Riley. When I got there, he had 3 ft of snow on the ground, and a Windchill of -80. My Dodge Power Wagon wouldn’t fit into his garage, so I got the front end in and inserted a dipstick engine heater to keep the block from freezing. He passed away the following year, so it was worth the journey to see him again.
Vaccine are to prevent diseases from outside bugs etc
Whatever they want to call a chemical that deliberately disrupts a cows totally natural gut processes, it is not a vaccine.
We already learned that from mRNA COVID ‘vaccines’.
I think we’re still learning about the long term effects of those.
That was my first thought too.
From wiki
I believe using the word “vaccine” is a deliberate attempt at mis/disinformation to pull the wool (leather?) over people’s eyes.
But all vaccines are safe and effective!
We’ve been told that so who are we to disbelieve?
/arc
As a layman I am really really really not concerned about global warming and I think most of the world feels the same!
Captain, we have detected signs of intelligence on this planet!
Is CNN still doing business?
I went to the linked-to article and had 81 “cookies” placed on computer. It is my hypothesis that the more cookies a site sends, the less likely it is to be useful. After many years of visiting WUWT, there are 25 cookies. CNN must be getting paid for this service, the network has no other reason for existing.
JH, that’s not a hypothesis. It is a fact. I stopped doing most internet stuff on my main machines (I had to buy a small second a couple of years back due to software upgrade limitations) years ago because of that. iPad makes it easier to control cookies, and easier to periodically ‘clean’ the much smaller memory.
I hope DOGE gets to the US DOE soon. They fund the IEA and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), heavy duty globalist warmunista skunks. Extremely French. Talk about your noxious emissions. Claw back their funding, Elon!
Cow burp CH4
They do not fart CH4
Bill Gates, Bill Gates
Leave Them Cows Alone
Female Cows eat grass
“Male” Steers eat corn
If cows did not eat the grass, it would die and rot every winter and give off CH4 anyway.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas but in very tiny quantities and not effective when water vapor is present. It’s effect on global warming in a year, and maybe in a decade too, is too small to measure.
Humans emit methane with farts after eating beans. That’s why the sale and consumption of beans should be banned to save the planet. We can live without bakes beans and refried beans to save the planet.
Bill Gates has lost the plot. He is on a mission to save the World irrespective of who he destroys on the way. He has inflicted experimental vaccines on poor African communities in Tanzania without governance. He is pushing the cow methane vaccine in Europe with minimal controls. Thankfully the market is rejecting the experimental milk”.Bill leave nature alone and stop using your private jets to save the planet!
Yes, that is their entire modus operandi.
Linnea is right, as usual.
However, if cows were to fart less it seems that it would mean that they must be more completely digesting their feed. So, does this medication reduce feed costs? If so, it might be worthwhile, for that reason.
Based on nine months of data, the average methane level in the atmosphere for 2024, measured at Mauna Loa, is going to end up at about 1.932 ppmv = 1932 ppbv of dry atmosphere, an increase of 10 ppbv over 2023. Over the last decade, the level has been rising by an average of about 11 ppbv per year.
Using the van Wijngaarden and Happer (2022) figures of 0.7 W/m² for a doubling of CH4 and 3.0 W/m² for a doubling of CO2, for a small incremental increase, say 0.01 ppmv (which is a typical one year increase for CH4), the forcing ratio is about 51×:
(log2((1.93+0.01)/1.93)*0.7) / (log2((425+0.01)/425)*3.0) = 51.25
In other words, adding 10 ppbv of CH4 has 51× the warming effect of adding 10 ppbv of CO2.
Over the last ten years, the annual CO2 level increase has been about 2.58 ppmv. 2580 ppbv / (11 ppbv × 51.25) = 4.58, so CO2 is contributing nearly five times as much to the current modest, benign warming trend as CH4 does.
Coincidentally, the 50 year “adjustment time” (effective atmospheric lifetime) of added CO2 is also nearly five times the 9-12 year effective atmospheric lifetime of CH4.
It’s more likely that suppressing the methanogens would lead to less complete digestion of the cellulose, hence a lower feed conversion efficiency.
Reduced feed conversion efficiency is in the fine print of the seaweed extract trials to reduce methane production.
It could also lead to “mad cow” disease, not the same one you are familiar with.
I asked four AI LLMs this simple question:
“Does vaccinating cattle to reduce their methane emissions increase or reduce feed conversion efficiency?”
Three of them (MS CoPilot, Perplexity and Consensus) all said that vaccinating cattle to reduce their methane emissions “does not” or “does not appear to” negatively affect feed conversion efficiency. But they said nothing about whether it increases feed conversion efficiency.
The fourth one was ChatGPT, and it gave a different answer. It said:
–(begin quote)–
Vaccinating cattle to reduce their methane emissions has the potential to increase feed conversion efficiency (FCE). This is because methane production in cattle represents an energy loss—typically 2–12% of the gross energy intake. If a vaccine effectively reduces methane production by inhibiting methanogenic archaea in the rumen, more of the feed energy could be redirected toward growth or milk production instead of being lost as methane gas.
However, the actual impact on FCE depends on several factors:
Effectiveness of the vaccine: If the vaccine significantly reduces methane production without disrupting overall digestion, cattle could utilize feed more efficiently.Changes in rumen microbiome: If the vaccine alters microbial populations in a way that reduces fiber digestion, it could negatively affect feed efficiency.Nutrient utilization: If the vaccine leads to increased production of propionate (a more efficient energy source compared to acetate and butyrate), this could further enhance FCE.Early research on methane-reducing vaccines shows promise, but large-scale, long-term studies are still needed to confirm the extent of the benefits or any potential trade-offs in feed efficiency.
–(end quote)–
However, when I asked ChatGPT for references, it was unable to provide them. So it might have been “hallucinating.” It’s important to remember that most LLM AI answers are guesses. Sometimes they’re correct, and sometimes they are not.
How on earth is a vaccine going to work in a part of the body which not internal (the rumen is a bit of the outside surrounded to a great extent by surface epithelium). There are no normal defense mechanisms (which is why anaerobes are there in the first place). To show my point I asked AI how vaccines work. It gave the following:
Vaccines contain weakened or inactive parts of a pathogen, called an antigen.
The antigen triggers your immune system to produce antibodies.
Antibodies are trained to recognize the specific antigen.
When you’re exposed to the pathogen, your antibodies can quickly defend your body
Yep, things haven’t changed since I was a student. The immune system is inoperative in the rumen.
How many millions are going to be spent on projects that haven’t a hope in hell of succeeding,and as has been pointed out by many contributors to this conversation, won’t make an iota of difference to any global warming!
Dear Orchestia,
They probably mean a drench, using a drench gun, not a syringe.
Also methane production increases as forage quality declines. Mitigated by microbes, the process (making methane) reducers the ratio of carbon to nitrogen, allowing ruminants to digest the mix of (carbohydrates + microbe bodies) in their small intestine.
While I’m not a nutrition expert, the limit for digestion (as I recall) is about 1%N, which equates to around 6.25% protein.
Feedstocks on the low side of 1%, cause animals to loose weight and condition (and vice versa). A perfectly good feedstock is sorghum stubble or low quality grass with an additive consisting of urea & molasses (for a sugar-hit and make it palatable) + minerals to bring the N-level above 1%. They might hammer-mill in some grains (what ever’s cheap) to increase starch levels for fattening.
Australia exports sorghum stubble in large compressed container-sized bales from places like Narrabri and Moree to places like Japan and Europe where it is used to form the basis of the diet for dairy cattle held in feedlots. I’m sure they do similar things in the US – take low-cost roughage and use the bugs + ruminants to turn it into valuable product.
Cheers,
Bill
The construction of such a vaccine would have to inhibit some biota that produced methane thus altering the whole biota of the rumen reticulum.
This would inevitably cause a dysbiosis.
Now ruminants and other fore or hind gut fermenters have evolved over millions of years as have their biota to be able to cope with such things as inevitable climate change.
To tinker with this symbiotic relationship means putting those farmers and nations who adopt it into a place of reduced live weight gain, inferior productive output of microbial protein,the benchmark of ruminant production, together with lower fertility and successful breeding programs.
The cow produces protein from non protein nitrogen and free fatty acids only derived from grass and forage in the free range state.
But for that we could never resolve the need for mankind to have all the essential amino acids needed to thrive and grow.
In Australia the introduction of cattle meant that vast areas of semi desert, dominated by potent methane producers, the humble white ant, had an introduction that competed for the same cellulose as the white ant and as a result produce less methane, since the product of cattle is mainly protein.
So the methane signature of cattle is less than the original from the white ant.
Similarly cropped land destroys white ants reducing the methane signature.
Some information on the Australian white ant.
https://meteor.geol.iastate.edu/gcp/studentpapers/1996/atmoschem/brockberg.html
Since methane is a non player in an increasingly humid world it would behove the Trump administration to stop the likely US funding of the UK vaccine initiative.
Do something positive about dairy cattle rather than stuffing up their biota.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8276037/
There is real work to be done here.
There has to be better oversight of these vaccine labs.
Directing vaccine production for cattle in a one health manner, where it helps cattle to feed people
is the way forward.
The Trump administration could look at One Health, USA to make sure the funding for this is on target.
Schmidt et al., in Attribution of the present‐day total greenhouse effect, 2010, states “we find that water vapor is the dominant contributor (∼50% of the effect), followed by clouds (∼25%) and then CO2 with ∼20%. All other absorbers play only minor roles.” Thus, if the effect of methane is 1/10 of CO2, methane contributes ~2% of the greenhouse effect.
Water vapour is 98% of greenhouse gases.
CO2 is 2% of greenhouse gases.
Methane doesn’t rate measuring.
NB, these are not equal in effect, water vapour is a way more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2.
Martin,
Schmidt et al. are obviously hallucinating.
Adding water vapour, CO2, methane or anything else changes the temperature of the atmosphere not at all.
There is no “greenhouse effect”. None at all.
There is no “greenhouse effect.” Check.
Adding any molecules of the same temperature of the air does not change the temperature of the air. Check.
Adding molecules with a different specific heat capacity to the air will alter the thermal response to an energy input. CO2 requires lower energy in joules to raise a defined quantity by 1C than air. H20 requires higher energy in joules to raise a defined quantity by 1C than air. Mixing is simple arithmetic and is proportional to concentration.
CO2 has a half life of about 120 years, methane abut ten years. The great mid-west Bison methene rush has long since decayed and with it the the worst of the Industrial Revolution’s excesses. Fortunately our forests have stockpiled the latter and the great herds of Gnu and zebra are saved by the non problem of the former.
Come on – methane is measured in billionths. Forget it.
Come on, CO2 is measured in millionths, and is only 2% of greenhouse gases. Forget CO2 as well!
CNN is as big a joke as the BBC. I just ignore them. Let them shrivel and die of natural causes.
Very nice Linnea.
The chance of them coming up with a vaccine are low to none. There is a large number of different gut ‘fauna’ that would need to be targeted. So it will be as viable as an influenza vaccine, which many have stated would be improbable because of the different virus involved.
How many? I knew it was a lot, but I asked Grok.
542 genera belonging to 23 phyla distributed throughout the GIT of dairy cattle