Let’s start this story off by apologizing for that headline. It was juvenile. Childish. Beneath the dignity of our readers.
Who the hell are we kidding? We know you chuckled. You don’t want to admit it, but you did.
The Telegraph UK has the flatulence news flash:
In the past environmentalists, from Lord Stern to Sir Paul McCartney, have urged people to stop eating meat because the methane produced by cattle causes global warming.
However a new study found that cattle grazed on the grasslands of China actually reduce another greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide.
…Klaus Butterbach-Bahl, of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, carried out the study in Inner Mongolia in China. He found that grassland produced more nitrous oxide during the spring thaw when sheep or cattle have not been grazing. This is because the greenhouse gas, also known as laughing gas, is released by microbes in the soil. When the grass is long snow settles keeping the microbes warm and providing water, however when the grass is cut short by animals the ground freezes and the microbes die.
Dr Butterbach-Bahl said the study overturned assumptions about grazing goats and cattle.
“It’s been generally assumed that if you increase livestock numbers you get a rise in emissions of nitrous oxide. This is not the case,” he said.
To sum up the study in one sentence, far more bullshit has been produced by the global warming cabal than all the cows in the world.
Source: Telegraph UK
This post was last modified on April 13, 2010
View Comments (3)
silly people. There is a HUUUUGE difference between cattle grazing as nature intended, and cattle jammed into a feedlot eating foods they cannot digest. It is the feedlot cattle, pesticides, antibiotics made necessary by sick cattle eating badly, fertilizer runoff and methane produced from cow manure that is the problem.
Methane lasts 23 times as long in the air as CO2. Livestock raising is responsible for more carbon in the air than all of the transportation in the world combined. Cars, trucks, jets, etc...
Simple minded people can always find a way to "dis" the facts with irrelevant stories.
If cattle were all grazed as nature intended, and the manure fell onto fields as fertilizer, we'd have much less of a problem. Its really pretty simple.
Sorry to prick yr fart bubble - but cattle are not only to be found in temperate zones - major cattle ranching in Brazil, being but one example... Most cattle even in temperate zones also do not freely graze, but are fed on eg: soya/corn etc...
the cow picture made my day