bioemerl

https://www.reuters.com/world/french-military-intelligence-says-israeli-strike-not-behind-gaza-hospital-blast-2023-10-20/

lets say a population of a billion cows and a billion trees. What happens if you double the amount of cows and half the amount of trees?

Relatively little. Trees aren't actually a huge carbon sink.

zero emissions from non-food sources after 2020 - would make us miss climate targets..

Did you actually read past the abstract?

Literally everything I said in my comment above still applies and you responded to literally none of it.

Cows don't run on fossil fuel that have been in the ground for millions of years. Cars do.

It’s enough to make us miss Climate targets even if fossil fuels were eliminated today. We have to tackle both

Yeah, if every single trend occurring today continues linearly into the future and we don't account for the fact that all of the methane emissions have to be offset by carbon sinks from plant growth, we'll have a problem.

Fortunately none of that will happen. Your study is literally assuming that we will stop using all carbon within 20 years, but yet continue to use it for nitrogen fixation.

If you go look at their graphs, you notice a trend. The lines comparing fossil fuels and food emissions don't diverge until the absurd linear assumptions they make go nuts 50 years into the future.

At the end of the day, if you remove the fossil fuel usage, the cycle must self-balance, else eventually you run out of some resource.

Further for the bit about feed addatives, those don’t do as much as you’d think

That is one option, you can reduce methane emissions through things like medication.

You can gather the cows into one big airtight building, collect the methane emissions, and burn it before it gets into the atmosphere instead of just venting it raw into the atmosphere.

And you can do the same thing for manure.

Right now we aren't doing anything because these really aren't the problems we need to solve right now. The vast vast majority of emissions today are coming from:

Transportation.

Manufacturing.

Electricity use.

Agriculture is ten percent. Land carbon sinks in the United States? They offset 12 percent.

It's about a 20x potential over the course of 100 years. The problem is, the sheer size of emissions from fossil fuels dwarfs any contribution cow methane gives to the atmosphere.

Like, methane in the atmosphere is really high right now, but it's not because of cows, it's because of fracking in Canada and the United States, which commits an order of magnitude or methane than cows ever could.

It would be like standing in a room with a raging inferno and pointing to a matchstick and say look, there's our problem.

Cow-warming has a bunch of problems that mean it's never going to contribute to being a significant factor in global warming.

It's self-correcting. Eventually methane is going to reach a certain point of equilibrium where the amount that's coming back into CO2 is equal to the amount being emitted and now you're going to be at a steady state again.

It's relatively small scale. Cows farting is not really that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things when we have factories producing millions of tons of carbon emissions.

It's easily fixed. There's lots of medications and other things you can do to cows to make them stop emitting methane, if it ever becomes one of our most significant problems it will be easily and quickly solved much like CFCs were.

Carbon emissions from fossil fuels have a bunch of traits that make it particularly nasty.

It's additive. Everything we admitted in 1960 is going to be around and heating the planet for 100 years yet

It was growing exponentially. Humanity has been emitting an absolutely mind-boggling amount of carbon. We've gone from what? 300 parts per million to 400? And the amount of carbon we're emitting every year now is higher than it's ever been, and every single year worth of emissions just adds on to the problem pile that's going to keep on getting worse for the next 100 years.

It's not easily undone. That carbon is never going to turn back into oil unless humanity goes out of our way to do it, and it's incredibly difficult to do. You would need the sum energy usage of humanity from the 1930s to today recreated and wasted on pulling the carbon back out of the atmosphere and sticking it in the ground.

Emissions from cows undo themselves in 20 years, entirely offset themselves through plant growth, and are easily massively reduced any change in our lifestyle in just a couple of years if we really wanted to as a society, with next to zero change in our lifestyle.

They aren't comparable problems and all you're doing by pointing at cows and acting like they're causing global warming is distracting from the real problem.

I'm having a hard time even understanding your sentences at this point.

All carbon from cows comes from plants, and all carbon in plants comes from the atmosphere.

The problem with fossil fuels is because we are drilling and pumping the carbon out of the deep Earth and then emitting it into the atmosphere as a byproduct undoing hundreds of thousands of years of sequestration in just a few short decades.

Mostly the oceans, over the course of millions of years.

The earth doesnt produce carbon at all, so why do you think things have getting warmer? It matters what form that carbon takes. Carbon in the form of a plant is a solid, and even works to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Carbon in the form of methane has

Jesus Christ you're ignorant.

The carbon in plants comes out of the atmosphere.

Cows eat those plants and processes in their stomach turn it into methane.

Methane in the atmosphere turns back to carbon within 20 years.

Plants then reabsorb that carbon when they grow to feed the cows.

It's literally a constrained cycle. You can't increase the amount of carbon in the atmosphere through cows and plants. You have to actually find carbon that is in a stable solid form and then put it into the atmosphere when it otherwise wouldn't be.

In other words, you have to mine coal or pump oil.

Plants and cows have absolutely nothing to do with it.

No, nature is out of balance because we are pulling carbon deep out of the Earth and emitting it into the atmosphere.

No number of cows is going to cause an imbalance in the carbon cycle, because it doesn't matter how many cows you have, they must be fed by carbon pulled out of the atmosphere.