Scientists Sniff Out Cure For Bovine Farting

anyone have numbers on the percentage humans account for?

It's all very well reducing methane emissions from cows.

But surely it would be better to be able to use this as an energy source ?! Burning methane is a great way of reducing its greenhouse 'footprint' ! Might be a way to keep the poor little moo-cows warm in our ever-more-freezing winters here in gulfstream-forgotten europe, too !

Honestly, this is rather pathetic. Maybe we can stop eating cows and drinking their milk instead? Leaving, for a moment, the ethical problems of tortuous slaughter and exploitation, the raising of cows is a hideously wasteful process -- even once we "solve" the problem of methane by introducing yet another chemical.

"..methane migrates into the atmosphere, dampening the oxygen content until a steady state is reached again. The constant interaction of feedback between living creatures and the geochemical content and cycles act as an organic unity, maintaining the Earth's climate and environment and preserving life.

..without the methane they produce, oxygen would rise inexorable in concentration to a level at which any fire would be a holocaust, and land life, apart from micro-flora in damp places, would be impossible." [The Hydrogen Economy - Jeremy Rifkin, p.252]

I think we should stop worrying about organic methane, and worry more about how WE produce it through our technology.

Dude, did you seriously just say the words "bean eater"? That means something bad in Southwest America.

_____________________________
Writer's Note: Apologies. The term was used innocently. Writing from Sydney I was not aware of it being localised slang that might cause offence.
_____________________________

Brenton: we don't produce methane with our technology; we use it. Methane is natural gas. Methane is not a byproduct of any industry, though it is used in the manufacturing of various organic (as in "carbon bearing", not "pesticide free") and methylation of various chemicals. (The "meth-" prefix to many drugs indicates methylation, often a step to enhancing potency.)

Bovine methane emissions are something to worry about. There's this naive notion that if it's natural, it can't possibly be that bad, and that all the "bad" chemicals are industrial byproducts. This is not so. Lest you forget, mercury and lead are perfectly natural, as is methane. None the less, it must be reduced even if it comes from cow farts. Consider this: methane is 1,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas; its infra red absorption profile makes it a very serious threat to our atmosphere. Imagine if that methane were converted to a thousand times that amount in carbon dioxide, and you'll have an idea of what kind of impact they're talking about.

Going veg is great, but between convincing a world of beef eaters and milk drinkers to stop and giving them feed that will vastly reduce their farting, I can guarantee you the latter option is by far the easier one.

There is a solution for those who consume beans.
Try throwing a strip of Kombu or two in your next dish.

I'm pretty sure that one of the reasons modern cows fart so much is that they are fed on grain, which their stomachs are not designed to digest. If they were fed on grass, their emissions would be much lower, and that grain could be used to feed people. Cow grain is also a big user of pesticides, and pasturing cattle is generally much less environmentally damaging than warehousing them in feedlots. The reason grain is used is that it makes fatter cows faster.

Berkana, I really don't know where all the methane comes from. I imagine there has to be some industrial emission which is why I made the statement. There also must me a large amount that comes from landfills.

My point is, there are other atmosphere killers that we produce that are far more dangerous. A perfect example would be CFCs, which destroy ozone with a ratio of 1:70000, are 10000x more efficient at exacerbating greenhouse effects, and don't biodegrade for 100 years. We are also still introduce ~60 million pounds into the atmosphere every year because it won't be banned in third world countries until 2010. [A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson p.152-159]

I'm hardly worried about a natural by product that's produced by nature, which also seems to have a place in sustaining life, and equilibrium. I also must agree with Qirex's "yet another chemical".

Brenton,

Methane is not produced as an emission product by any industry. If it were, our fuel problems could be solved by capturing those emissions. Methane "emissions" are dominantly natural if I remember correctly; peet bogs give off tons of methane as do any place with lots of rotting vegetation, which often naturally burn, giving off a mysterious glow ("will o' the wisp" in Britain, and the perpetual bog fires in other places). These emissions are too diffuse to capture for fuel economically. Methane seeps out of the ground and burns on the surface in some regions of Iraq and elsewhere. In fact, Methane is so plentiful it could potentially eliminate the use of crude oil if we could tap it correctly: the methane hydrates found at the bottom of the sea are a larger energy reserve than all the crude oil reserves combined.

Industrial "emissions" of methane could only come from incomplete combustion and leakage. No industry emits methane as a byproduct, unless you count those that do so by natural processes such as the cattle industry, bacterial sewage reduction, and municipal composting.

The notion that there are other chemicals that are more dangerous to the atmosphere that we ought to worry about is a distractor: we can easily do something about cattle flatulance by adding that naturally occuring food additive (fumaric acid), so why not? Arguing that there are other products more dangerous than methane is like arguing that I need not campaign for domestic water conservation because industry and agriculture waste far more water, or that I need not avoid the use of toxic solvents at home because industry produces far more, or that I need not campaign for local recycling because there are factors that waste far more. The battle needs to be fought on all fronts: saying that we have bigger problems elsewhere is an unnecessary damper, and an attitude I didn't expect to find on Treehugger.

Jillbert,

I see why people are suspicious (or even "pretty sure") of anything modern as the source of an environmental problem, but in this case, feeding cows grain is not the source of flatulance; it is a byproduct of how cows digest long chain carbohydrates, whether it is from grain or from grass (which has celulose, a long chained carbohydrate). This would have been just as big a problem if not greater when tens of millions of bison romed the planes eating grass, as they eat more and were more numerous than cattle today.

Consider this: natural methane (even as a digestive side effect) is such a potent greenhouse gas that some climatologists and paleontologists have proposed (based on scientific tests of fossilized dinosaur dung) that dinosaur flatulance may have led to the warming of the earth back in those days. (Do a Google search for "dinosaur flatulance". I'm serious. This site won't let me post links for fear of spam.) That's an awful lot of farting! And the dinosaurs did not eat grain.

(In fact, burning methane (CH4) to produce carbon dioxide and water vapor (CO2 + 2*H2O) is the best way to reduce the global warming contribution of methane, as the resulting gasses don't have nearly the same infra red absorbtion capacity.)

As for how methane dampens oxygen levels, that's nothing to worry about in our day. Really. Methane dampens oxygen levels by oxidizing into carbon dioxide and water vapor. Human activity is already doing too much of that (through the use of other carbon-based fuels), which is why there's too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Methane played this role before industry took it too far; at this point, it's former role is no reason to ignore it's current negative impact.

You should not have the attitude that you're hardly worried about a natural byproduct that's produced by nature. Consider this: Radioactive radon gas is a "natural byproduct produced by nature" from the radioactive decay of minerals found in dirt, yet it causes lung cancer. All manners of toxins and poisons are found in nature. Nature is not all benign; if what you're concerned with is global warming, every factor counts, natural or not. If our agriculture contribues a factor, even if it is by a natural process such as cow flatulence, by all means, reduce it. And this fear of "yet another chemical" is also unfounded: the chemical is "a naturally occurring chemical food additive". "Chemical" is not synonymous with "evil"; water is a chemical. Every substance you interact with is chemical, whether natural or not.

Berkana,

You seem to be wrapped in the conception that humans know the world better then the world knows itself.

Life has been existing on this planet for 3.5 billion years. Nature, and evolution have created an wonderful complex system that maintains itself without OUR help.

Global Warning is an inevitable cycle (believed to be brought on by a meteor or volcanic event). It occurs every 600,000 years, which tends to push us into an ice age. The issue I have with it is the fact that humans have been releasing more crap into the air, unrelated to anything nature intended, and have sped up the process for it to occur hundreds of thousands of years early; possibly in our lifetime of our children's.

My TreeHugger attitude is to let nature be nature. Stop fighting it, and learn to live with it, in it, and not effect it. If a cow farts, it farts. If radon leaks from the ground, live somewhere else or get lung cancer and die. If a spider crawls up my wall, let is crawl. There are things to control, and things to just let be. We should be concentrating on how our technologies and demands on the planet and ecosystem effect the overall balance, and learn to back off; not, put more control on.

e.g. Drive less, eat less meat, stop sprawl, buy organic, buy local, recycle, get educated, stem human over breeding, don't use products with anti-bacterial agents, etc.

"My TreeHugger attitude is to let nature be nature. Stop fighting it, and learn to live with it, in it, and not effect it. If a cow farts, it farts."

That's a very zen attitude, but unfortunately, the number of cows on the planet and their diet is all but natural; it is a human-made problem and we should mitigate it as best as we can, IMO.

Of course if I could pick the best solution to quite a large amount of our problems, 95% of Earth's population would be vegetarian or vegan, but I don't get to decide that..

MGR,

You made my point. Which is why I said "eat less meat". If you eat less meat, then there isn't a need for that many cows, and it would solve the methane production just as well, without introducing anything else to the equation. Simple supply and demand.

As for wishing the world is vegetarian, I've been working on myself. I just finished my 10th consecutive day without eating meat.

I am not wrapped in any conception that humans have it all figured out. However, I must point out the flaw in the opposite concept that seems to dominate:

The world doesn't know itself. The world doesn't know anything; it doesn't care if there's a mass extinction (as all mass extinctions prior to human activity was natural, and nature didn't give a hoot), it doesn't care if there's biodiversity. It simply doesn't know nor care. I'm not saying that we humans know the world perfectly, but when we establish a cause-and-effect relationship, and there something we can do about mitigating a negative effect that's not too difficult (such as adding a fart-reducing supplement to cow feed vs. making the world eat less beef and drink less milk) there's no reason to oppose it with attitudes such as the fear of "introducing something new to the equation" or the notion that the impact doesn't matter because it is natural. Cow farts may be natural, but cow ranching is not. Bacterial methane production is natural, but massive urban sewage management is not. If we recognize the mechanism of global warming and know that its acceleration by human activity is a problem, it shouldn't matter that cow farts are natural; what matters is that we have such massive ranches (about which there's nothing natural), and that this is ultimately another human impact. Why then scoff at someone's proposition of a solution to this with remarks about its insignificance compared to an undefined and mysterious "industry" (which folks seem to automatically presume to be the root of all evil), fears of using "another chemical" and romantic notions of balance and nature knowing itself?

With the matter of cattle ranches, it's already too late to "let nature be nature"; the cattle are domesticated, bred, fed, and used in a manner that's not natural at all. I agree that we ought to just let some things be, but as you said, there are some things in our control, and the matter of cattle emissions is one of them.

Hey, standard tracebacks from moveable type aren't working, but I've a few coments on my site.

Cows have busy bowels

brenton is right in saying "3.5 billion years. . . wonderful complex system that maintains itself without OUR help" Human society is not capable of destroying life on earth. We can send many of the larger species extinct, including homo sapiens, but life on earth will persist, regardless of how many cows we farm.

Methane is one of the most potent greenhouse gases. Methane also comes from landfill sites. We now have affordable technology to trap the methane in *some* landfill sites as a (local) source of fuel. However you can't easily put methane extractors on ruminants in paddocks!

Humans are forcing global warming at an extreme rate, much faster than the natural rate of climate change. The emerging rate of climate change exceeds the adaptive ability of vegetation and animals to keep pace with shifting patterns of temperature and precipitation. This will lead to waves of extinctions.