If saving the world involved killing all the elephants, would we do it? Or, what if a cure for leukemia was developed but it somehow required killing every dog and cat on the planet? While you ponder that, consider this:
How much methane does a head of cattle produce? That is important because it’s going to drive legislation in various countries around the world and will equally be raised in various international forums in response to concerns about the climate.
The particulars of the issue, in case you missed it, are that cattle generate methane as a by-product of their digestion of grasses.
Methane, like other gases, to use a phrase from NASA, “traps heat.” The full line from the NASA web page reads: “methane traps a significant amount of heat, helping the planet remain warm and habitable.”
The overwhelming amount of heat on earth comes from the sun. Some 1360 watts per square meter arrives every second for the half of the earth facing the sun. About 30% of that is reflected back into space, the remaining 70% serving to keep earth habitable. (952 watt/sec/meter). This is a tremendous amount of energy: 121 quadrillion watts per second. This is more than 15,000 times the amount of electric energy in all the world’s power stations.
And as NASA notes, gases in the atmosphere (like methane) determine how much heat is retained and how much leaks away. The question is: what’s the amount of additional gas needed to effect significant change?
Which leads back to the methane produced by cattle.
How much methane is in the atmosphere right now? The total atmosphere weighs a bit more than 5 quadrillion tons; methane, which makes up 0.000187% of the atmosphere by volume, weighs substantially less per unit volume than nitrogen or oxygen, which comprise some 99% of the atmosphere. The result is that there is “only” about 5 billion tons of methane in the atmosphere.
With 1.5 billion cattle producing 100 liters of methane per day per head (36500 liters per year, at .72 grams per liter), the world cattle population is adding some 39.5 million tons of methane to the atmosphere per year. (It might be as much as twice that, depending on whose estimates you use for cattle methane generation.)
Let’s assume it’s the higher number; in fact, let’s go to 100 million tons per year. That works out to a 2% change in methane per year. Methane will break down (oxidize actually) over time (if no additional methane were added all methane would be gone in 8 years). So, a total increase from cattle and all the other grass eating animals (like elephants) over time might push methane content in the atmosphere up an additional 20%. How much would that affect energy retention? As it turns out, the current level of methane in the atmosphere accounts for 1/2 watt/sec/meter of energy retention. A 20% increase would therefore account for perhaps 1/10th of a watt/sec/meter of energy – out of 952 watt/sec/meter (70% of 1360). That would equate to roughly 1/30th of a degree Fahrenheit.
What’s the point of all these numbers?
Imagine that the numbers above produced a different set of values, imagine that it could be shown that next year, if we continued to eat beef, that the earth’s temperature would rise by 25 degrees and billions of people would die. There would be a great crisis and we would probably see the slaughter of most of the cattle in the world.
Fortunately, that isn’t this case; the numbers tell a different story, where there are incremental changes and the impacts, if any, are, despite the headlines, obscure.
Certainly, we should do what is reasonable and proper to be good stewards of the land. But there’s a greater issue: what is survival worth? Would it be worth it to save the planet to kill every grass-eating animal? Would a cure for leukemia be worth killing all the dogs and cats?
The argument that is being presented by many in the press, in academia, and in the global government movements is that we’ve reached such an existential crisis point, that we must fundamentally change the way we live if we are to survive.
At one level there’s the simple fact the numbers don’t support their argument.
But more than that, what they’re really arguing about is massively changing how we live and how we are governed. And at that level there’s this simple truth: at a certain point survival isn’t necessarily worth the cost. As a great Virginian once asked: Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?
Copyright 2019 Arrias
www.vicsocotra.com