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Feeding Seaweed To Cows Eliminates Methane Emissions (www.cbc.ca)
Dave Knott writes:
A Canadian farmer has "helped lead to a researcher's discovery of an unlikely weapon in the battle against global warming: a seaweed that nearly eliminates the destructive methane content of cow burps and farts," reports the CBC. "Joe Dorgan began feeding his cattle seaweed from nearby beaches more than a decade ago as a way to cut costs... Then researcher Rob Kinley of Dalhousie University caught wind of it." He tested Dorgan's seaweed mix, discovering that it reduced the methane in the cows' burps and farts by about 20 per cent. "Kinley knew he was on to something, so he did further testing with 30 to 40 other seaweeds. That led him to a red seaweed Asparagopsis taxiformis he says reduces methane in cows burps and farts to almost nothing."
"Ruminant animals are responsible for roughly 20% of greenhouse gas emissions globally, so it's not a small number," said Kinley, an agricultural research scientist now working at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Queensland, Australia. "We're talking numbers equivalent to hundreds of millions of cars."
The researcher predicts a seaweed-based cow feed could be on the market within three to five years, according to the article. "He says the biggest challenge will be growing enough seaweed."
"Ruminant animals are responsible for roughly 20% of greenhouse gas emissions globally, so it's not a small number," said Kinley, an agricultural research scientist now working at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Queensland, Australia. "We're talking numbers equivalent to hundreds of millions of cars."
The researcher predicts a seaweed-based cow feed could be on the market within three to five years, according to the article. "He says the biggest challenge will be growing enough seaweed."
Eating less meat would help GHG reductions.
We like meat. People like you are such killjoys. Please, just go away, you whiny little bitch!
What incentive does big ag have to do anything to reduce their environmental footprint? They have a get-out-of-jail-free card for emissions, fresh water usage and water system pollution, food poisoning, antibiotics abuse, employee and animal abuse, and land degradation. They're richly subsidized to be the world's greatest pollution offenders.
"Please pay no attention to all the extra emissions from growing, harvesting, processing, and transporting!"
The only way to solve man-made climate change is to tax average people an exorbitant amount.
And give it to the already exorbitantly rich, because that's the whole scheme behind this AGW-hype.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
What's the vitamin K2 or precursors of the seaweed in question? What's the typical route for materials in cow food to K2 in cows?
The problem is indeed growing cows for food, no matter how it's done. If people stop eating meat and instead ate the vegetables fed to the animals, the efficiency of the food supply increases 10 to 40 fold (depending on who's number you use). A pound of beef takes 10 to 40 pounds of feed, an absurd amount of fresh water, a huge expanse of land, countless antibiotics, and the transportation of elements within the system (feed to cows, cows to processing plants, etc). Why not just skip the middlemen and give humans the vastly-more-efficient feed?
And guess what? Models keep improving, and they are becoming quite accurate:
That is exactly totally beside the point.
Models are calibrated in a subset of their variable space, i.e. a subset of weather, oops, my bad, climate conditions from the past.
Stating that they are 'improving' inside that subspace is in no way any indication of their accuracy in a totally different part of the variable space, namely some apparently dramatically different subspace where the state of the system is supposed to reside in the future, including the dynamics with which the state of the system arrives in that region of the variables space.
So, for me, there is no scientific basis to believe the predictions of the IPCC et. al.
However, I do agree that it is better if we, humanity, clean up the mess that we create, i.e. the waste and other by-products from our oxidative processes.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Good scientific questions that should have been answered and have the answers compared before stating that seaweed is a solution for cow feeds.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.