I don't also understand this : When we say all the CO2 produced in the atmosphere stays there, aren't they used by plants? Planting a great number of trees won't reduce it?
Forest are disappearing globally + we need the soil to "Occidentally" feed everyone + the atmospheric CO2 exceed by far what forests could take since : sowed forests dont act like carbon dwells as naturals one, and the fact that actual atmospheric CO2 come from transformed underground sources very very very old forests or organism put there : coal and oil/gas => we broke the cycle. + everything is going too fast in comparison with "normal" natural cycles. Sorry for my english.
There is a natural cycle of CO2 which involves the plants using the CO2 produced by natural processes . The problem is that the CO2 produced from burning fossil fuels is unnatural and is additional to the CO2 from natural processes, so this accumulates in the atmosphere because the natural processes can't get rid of the additional amount of CO2 fast enough.
@@jackkranenburg2181 there is massive deforestation happening on Earth to increase both the land for pasture and the crops to feed animals. Livestock in particular are problematic because they produce methane, a potent greenhouse gas which is 86x as potent to CO₂ pound for pound over a twenty year time frame. th-cam.com/video/4RTvrBiMQ-g/w-d-xo.html
@@alastairleith8612 Fraud? He made those FAO officers who authored the fake study admit their biased comparison. These officers are supposed to be authorities in this field of science. The massive deforestation was for planting both human need for oil and secondarily for animal feeds. The deforestation in South East Asia was for palm oil only.
I understand the argument that cows do not release more Carbon than the plants used to feed them capture from the air. That makes sense. What does not make sense is stressig the short lifespan of Methane, then saying "after 10 years it's converted to CO2 again" and just ignore the resulting CO2 completely from your argument... Many people stressed the indirect problems with Cows and other massively kept livestock like clearing the land for them and their feed (burning forests), all the machinery and human power needed to take care of them instead of just harvesting plants to be eaten by humans. Meat and Milk products need to be refrigerated, another huge hit for the environment. Many commenters mention how Methane is more potent than CO2, making the argument I wrote in the first sentence stand on very wobbly legs (because it is technically true, but it does not disprove that the very existence of a cow adds to the global warming at the end of the equation) It's a big a complicated issue, like any involving science, global planet data spanning decades or centuries, predictions and models... There is though this one argument that sounds just too easy to imagine and logical to be false: If you grow plants and eat them, instead of growing plants to feed animals and eat those, it will be easier, faster process, less cumbersome for the environment.
The problem with this viewpoint is that methane is a lot more potent as a green house gas in comparison with CO2 (about 28 times more). So if this methane stays in our atmosphere for up to 100 years**, it does a lot more damage to our climate in comparison with CO2. And we all know how damaging CO2 already is... The second problem with all this methane in the air is that plants and algae DO NOT convert it during photosynthesis. Taking into account the big meat and diary industry, this is a lot of methane that gets released and is much more damaging to our atmosphere.
@@tpike32 For some reason my reply does not get posted if I add the link 😅. Anyways, this is a well known fact! You can see for yourself if you just google "EPA global warming potential" 😀
It's actually 86x as potent as CO₂ if we use 20 year time horizon which is justifiable given that we are already in a climate crisis and temperature and atmospheric concentrations of GHGs are already wrecking havoc on weather systems from cyclones and flooding to droughts and bushfires.
@@tpike32 its in every IPCC Assesment Report and each report from 1 to 5 the level for methane Global Warming potential has been increased. note also my other comment below about GWP₂₀ vs GWP₁₀₀. The twenty year timeframe is critical.
Here in Brazil the Amazon Rainforest is being destroyed to put cows and plantations in her place. So yes, the carbon released by the trees, mainly by fire, is a real problem to global warming. Not to mention about others huge environment concerns.
Here in South Africa the opposite is happening. Many former crop and cattle farmers has turned to game farming for hunting. This means that they are replanting trees and restoring natural habitat for the antelope, buffalo and other natural animals. Hunters then come and take the meat out of the field themselves which is the natural way. Because of this a lot of natural habitat has been restored and natural wildlife numbers has increased by millions.
Haven't you omitted the fact that methane by itself is a more potent greenhouse gas? So while it is not converted to CO2 it is doing more damage and as CO2 it will be there for a very long time. Therefore it will accumulate over time. And furthermore to feed cows takes up land where trees could grow to capture carbon while grasslands and feedstock plants for cattle are not efficient carbon sinks? Isn't this argument extremely misleading. Not that this is an unexpected thing for a milk man to say. I kind of feel for you, but I want my descendents and those of everyone else to survive and thrive in stead of keeping a limited number of farmers afloat.
You're not wrong that it does accumulate, but at a stable rate as long as the livestock amount is stable, not a constantly increasing one. So the thing is that growing more or less livestock, cutting down forests or planting trees, using fossil fuels, transitioning to greener energy and so on, all of these are merely changes in coefficients of factors in a big equation where pollution adds up into global warming as long as it surpasses the carbon capture of the planet through trees, plants, hopefully technology in the future etc. Be it through reducing the livestock, be it through planting trees or transitioning to greener energy, everything helps! What this video ended up doing is hinting that we can (at least hypothetically) achieve stability even if we maintain this amount of livestock. The same is true about the current amount of fossile fuel burning, or lack of forests. But in all cases ALONE, with an EQUAL COUNTERBALANCE needed, NOT TOGETHER as we have them now. So yeah long story short, be vegan, advocate for livestock reduction, do your part but don't be too violent about it, we can reduce global warming by multiple sides.
Thank you. Cows produce no more carbon than letting the vegetation rot. And it's atmospheric CO2 which spends a lot of time in a solid form (carbon capture), a huge sink. It's entirely different from burning fossil fuels.
All go back to school ... and this time listen to a thing called the carbon cycle. Humans breathing also produce CO2? .. far more than cows in fact? Lets kill all them eh? Stop listening to ideology and start listening to actual scientists, cows don't eat coal.
@@black5f you are either wilfully ignorant or sadly ignorant, the big issue with cows is not the CO₂ they breath, that's a minuscule amount of their GHG footprint, it's the methane they produce (100x more potent over 10 years than CO₂) it's the land clearing of forests and woodland for their pastures, or crops being feed to them that could feed humans at a faction of the water/land/GHG/toxic waste streams that come from livestock production (killed 50% of the Great Barrier Reef already).
That’s assuming the cow population is constant. We already know the Amazon forest is being burned at an alarming rate for cattle farming. The Amazon forest holds vast amounts of carbon that is being burned for feed and livestock. Also he doesn’t mention how much more resources it takes to raise a large animal like a cow. How much water and feed does it take to raise a cow from birth to slaughter? ? There are families starving yet I bet the amount of food a cow needs in its lifetime could feed a few families several times over. We are experiencing record droughts year over year but the water will go to cows instead. Cars aren’t good either… but I think his argument that cows aren’t hurting the environment is missing a few points.
Indeed, I was going to say the same. I'm working on a university project about sustainable development and climate change (I'm a bio engineer) and the meat/dairy industry are not that innocent as they picture themselfs (no surprise there) :p
this is full of lies and misleading argument. see my main comment debunking it or click the link to a more thorough debunking. this guy is paid for in full.
For a complete analysis of the misinformation presented in this video I recommend this article by Paul Mahony : "When “revelations” about methane emissions are not revelations at all" planetaryvegan.net/2020/08/03/when-revelations-about-methane-emissions-are-not-revelations-at-all/
He of course omits how much more powerful the warming effect of methane is compared to CO2 in the time it is up. He omits that methane is currently responsible for over 15% of the current warming. And of course, he leaves out that the number of cattle in the world has been and is increasing.
"Methane is better than carbon dioxide because methane's lifespan is 10 years, while carbon dioxide's lifespan is 1000 years" Yea but you just said "After 10 years, methane become carbon dioxide"
Dr. Mitloehner, I think that the message you want to convey is misleading. As you said more than once, IF and ONLY IF the farmer mantains the same number of cows the quantity of GHG produced remains flat, but as population increases, the demand of meat will increase, and consequently the number of cows will necessarily increase. Moreover, apart from the mere GHG emissions, you should consider also soil erosion, deforestation, and the huge amount of water animals consume, directly and indirectly, since they are fed with soya flour, forage or whatever. The reduction of consumption of meat is necessary, no ifs, no buts, leaving aside the ethicality of making living beings suffer and die just for eat. The issue of cars is of course relevant, but I feel that here in this context is used to enforce your thesis that the problem of intensive farming is not a problem. There are lots of things to do to preserve the planet, if we drove only electric vehicles we wouldn't solve anything, it's useless and damaging to point the finger specifically to something, since every aspect of modern life should be reconsidered in order to be as sustainable as possible.
But of course, the problem is not that we eat meat, it's that there's simply too many of us, and that's not even going into the production of our, say, computers so we can write messages such as these.
Flat emissions are still a problem because we are already in a climate crisis and five of the major known climate tipping points are already in play. Namely, coral reefs, the Amazon, arctic sea ice, the western shelf of Antartica, thermal ocean conveyors.
it's worse than that. the stock of methane in that atmosphere is increasing more rapidly than CO2 even, and it's from human emissions, the fossil fuel industries and from livestock and dairy production. this video is very misleading.
Not an actual climate scientist....... Frank received a Master of Science degree in animal science and agricultural engineering from the University of Leipzig, Germany, and a doctoral degree in animal science from Texas Tech University
Thank you so much for this video! This is information we all need to hear and see. So we can start to recognize the propaganda in the media and ask ourselves why we are being lied to
this video is very misleading. watch this seres of videos for answers and to debunk this stuff from the Dairy industry: th-cam.com/video/4RTvrBiMQ-g/w-d-xo.html
Isn’t the flaw in his ‘cyclical argument for cows’ his assumption that the methane is recaptured by plants at the same rate it is released by the cows? This isn’t addressed in his video. He concludes his video saying transport CO2 accumulates, whereas cow methane (which becomes CO2 after 10 years according to him) doesn’t accumulate (why?) but stays stable (as long as you don’t add more cows). But he doesn’t explain why it hypothetically would stay stable rather than accumulate. All he says is that what is released by the cows was equal to what the consumed plants ORIGINALLY absorbed (over what period of time, and at what rate we don’t know). That may be true, but it does not follow (without proof) that what the cows release upon digesting a plant will be re-absorbed by new plants as quickly as the cows release it. Of course, what this video also misses in the cow v car discussion is the massive deforestation for agriculture.
CO2 from methane from the Cows doesn't accumulate, because it was originally taken from the atmosphere. Crude oil is taken from the Earth's storage and released to atmosphere.
Most reforestation for agriculture is to grow plants. Once again the propaganda says its cattle. It’s not. In South America it’s for soya production. A bigger issue than South America is the Far East where illegal logging & deforestation for palm oil production is actually worse.
Whether or not the converted CO2 to grass (glucose) goes through the cattle's rumen or not. grass will either oxidize (covert back to CO2), decay (convert to CH4 than to CO2) or burn (convert to CO than to CO2). So the real issue is whether the CO2 levels exceed the photosynthetic cycle of CO2 (+ H2O) to C6H12O6 (+ 6O2). And that's the intrinsic difference between biogenic microbial forms of CH4 that break down to CO2 and CO2 from fossil fuels as well thermogenic (fossil fuel) forms of CH4 that also break down to CO2 The biogenic forms are part of the closed loop and have been cycling for a very long time without raising either atmospheric levels of CH4 or CO2, while relatively recently released ancient trapped forms of CH4 and CO2 (fossil fuels) have repeatedly spiked atmospheric levels of CH4 and CO2 from industrialization moving forward with increased natural gas use, fracking and syn N production.
Daniel Watterson the deforestation is mostly for 2 things. Palm oil (Far East). Soya, South America. Before you say that’s for livestock feed. Again that’s not actually true either. The soya beans are first heated to 200’ C. This releases the oil (for human consumption). The rest is a byproduct that is very high in protein, hence it’s got value as animal feedstuff.
The video is in line with the UN's report. The Sixth Assessment Report confirms that CO2 is the main driver of climate change. However, it also points out that reducing methane emissions is the best and fastest strategy for slowing global warming. As one of the report’s co-authors, Maisa Rojas Corradi, said, “Quickly reducing methane could counteract global warming, while also improving air quality.”
"As long as you don't add livestock - you are not adding to the burden of GHG". And the current amount that you are emitting as methane, still has the same amount of warming effect through the effect of methane. Frank is wildly misleading here - while trying to make the point that you won't add GHG emissions if you don't add livestock to your herd you won't add "additional" carbon to the atmosphere - he admits that there is a burden of GHG emissions from livestock - therefore by decreasing herd size you will decrease GHG emissions. Just think critically and you will see through this kind of misleading information.
You didn‘t get it. Cows, or to be more precise, the bacteria in their stomach produce gases from grass which is 1. renewable, 2. is consumed by bacteria or other orgamisms anyway. It does not matter if bacteria in stomachs of cows do it or bacteria in the earth. The output of CO2 is the same. The difference is only that there are more cows and less insects, worms and other organisms which would eat that grass instead. He is talking about the crucial difference between natural CO2 cycle and burning fossil fuel. Burning fossil fuel releases large amounts of CO2 which were stored in the ground for millions of years. Adding livestock means that people replace forests with meadows, and grass is less efficient at converting carbon dioxide than trees.
@@mutexin it's you that don't get it. when a molecule of CO₂ is drawdown into a pasture plant, say a grass, that C molecule might end up in a cellulose or some other molecule that the cow eats as fodder. Bacteria in the cow's stomachs break those sugars down into enzymes and sugar which the cow can use to grow and maintain health, one of the side-effects is the anaerobic bacteria produce methane. When that C molecule emerges from the cows mouth (or rear end but mostly methane is simply breathed out) it's as methane. 1 pound of that methane is 86x as potent as one pound of CO₂ molecules drawn down into the soil and plants. So your mistake is that CO₂ in and methane out is not a one to one equivalence and there are many factors in solved, but once we do the math we know that even with the best regenerative farming practices which encourage root growth and lower levels of grazing (to maximise soil health which promotes drawdown), using the somewhat misleading one-hundred year time horizon the methane emissions from cows are still double the drawdown of even the best regenerative ag pasture cropping. Using a twenty year time horizon we need to multiply that by a factor of 3, so six times more methane than CO₂ drawdown.
@@alastairleith8612 Have you even watched the video? He said methane is converted into carbondioxide in the atmosphere, since it is not that stable. So the atmosphere naturally recycles it.
@@mutexin I don't need to have watched the video to be correct on this point. But yes I have watched the video. It's a smokescreen for the dairy and cattle industry, completely shameful in it's misrepresentation of the dangers of methane for someone with a twitter handle called @GHGGugu Read my full comment up above for a full explanation of the deceit going on here. (th-cam.com/video/RW8BclS27aI/w-d-xo.html&lc=UgxCOIG5JpbxW5KclDp4AaABAg)
Methane does not disappear in 10 years. It decays to CO2 (and H2O). So saying that one stays for 10000 years and the other one disappears is plain scamming. Yes, in the case of livestock you may attempt to call it a closed cycle (except for deforestation for pasture, which is quite relevant worldwide) but while it is methane it contributes more to global warming than CO2 itself, so it would have been better to emit that CO2 directly. Anyway, to be a closed cycle plants need it to be CO2, not methane, right? So overall reducing methane emissions, even at the cost of converting to CO2 in the process, would reduce its global contribution to greenhouse effect. And if we have to choose between having higher CO2 or higher methane for the amount of the allegedly closed cycle of livestock, it is better to have CO2 not only because of less warming, but because of the increase in plant development it would mean. The only argument could be acidification of the oceans, but it is difficult to quantify. Anyway, reducing methane emmissions through food supplementation for livestock (like algae) does not mean that later its crap still produces methane because of the bacterian action and degradation of organic matter in it. I think they just measure direct emitions from the digestive process, but waste management and its emissions could also be relevant.
That is exactly what I thought! So...he is basically saying methane is around for 10 years + the 1000 when it's converted to CO2 so it's actually worse than just CO2??? And also, he says that since the cows are eating a plant that ate up the CO2 and when they fart, it's not releasing any more CO2 than it was originally as the plant they ate that it came from....then why does it matter if we are adding more cows or not?? Because the amount of plants they eat is still a 1 to 1 ratio from the output of CO2...right? So, we still are not getting anymore gas than was originally used by the plant in the first place??
yes but it's lifetime as methane is when it does the vast majority of it's warming impact, or radiative forcing. It's also a precursor to tropospheric ozone, another potent, short lived GHG.
thankfully we have capitalism that adjusts itself to increase as the profits allow. if it came between your car and burgers which do you choose? remember, one compounds but you can't really get to the other w/o it. choices, choices. . . i know! neither! yay, problems solved!
So he said CO2 is what we breathe out , what we exhale. So ever animal and ever human exhale is lasting a thousand years . And there worried bout a cow fart .
Ok, so with modern technology this is possible. turn desert into forest. problem is solved then. can plant bunch of tree. can product many food. Animals will be happy. People who live in desert will be very happy and much more wealthy. :)) No more desert problem too :)) and plant trees on abandoned fields. demolish abandoned building and plant tree or make food.
This uneducated guy should work on the cattle farm and throw cow waste in to the pit every single day :/ (and back his doctor tittle) As an *enviroment protection engeneer* i have MORE knowledge that him! And what i can tell: *the greenhouse gas effect* doesn't even exist, i learned that on the *meteorology* subject! Both methane and CO2 are inert to the atmosphere energy budget (like Titan and the Venus) That was an astonishing result!
Nope not acurate for the 10 years the methane is in the atmosphere it already made the damage. Sooooooo. That's not relevant that it them becomes co2 in 10 years . Sooooo in closing methane is still much worse not the same.
I don't also understand this : When we say all the CO2 produced in the atmosphere stays there, aren't they used by plants? Planting a great number of trees won't reduce it?
Yes trees feed on CO2
Forest are disappearing globally + we need the soil to "Occidentally" feed everyone + the atmospheric CO2 exceed by far what forests could take since : sowed forests dont act like carbon dwells as naturals one, and the fact that actual atmospheric CO2 come from transformed underground sources very very very old forests or organism put there : coal and oil/gas => we broke the cycle. + everything is going too fast in comparison with "normal" natural cycles. Sorry for my english.
watch this seres of videos for answers and to debunk this stuff from the Dairy industry: th-cam.com/video/4RTvrBiMQ-g/w-d-xo.html
There is a natural cycle of CO2 which involves the plants using the CO2 produced by natural processes . The problem is that the CO2 produced from burning fossil fuels is unnatural and is additional to the CO2 from natural processes, so this accumulates in the atmosphere because the natural processes can't get rid of the additional amount of CO2 fast enough.
I have this question: How can the livestock be kept constant if there is increasing demand for animal protein for example in the global level?
let farmers keep their land areal. stop building houses on farm land so the land will keep catching co2
@@jackkranenburg2181 there is massive deforestation happening on Earth to increase both the land for pasture and the crops to feed animals. Livestock in particular are problematic because they produce methane, a potent greenhouse gas which is 86x as potent to CO₂ pound for pound over a twenty year time frame.
th-cam.com/video/4RTvrBiMQ-g/w-d-xo.html
@@alastairleith8612 it seem you didnt understand the cientific information
@@nicolastisato9542 I not only understand what I'm talking about, I'm calling fraud on Dr GHG who isn't in fact a climate scientist at all.
@@alastairleith8612 Fraud? He made those FAO officers who authored the fake study admit their biased comparison. These officers are supposed to be authorities in this field of science.
The massive deforestation was for planting both human need for oil and secondarily for animal feeds. The deforestation in South East Asia was for palm oil only.
I understand the argument that cows do not release more Carbon than the plants used to feed them capture from the air. That makes sense.
What does not make sense is stressig the short lifespan of Methane, then saying "after 10 years it's converted to CO2 again" and just ignore the resulting CO2 completely from your argument...
Many people stressed the indirect problems with Cows and other massively kept livestock like clearing the land for them and their feed (burning forests), all the machinery and human power needed to take care of them instead of just harvesting plants to be eaten by humans. Meat and Milk products need to be refrigerated, another huge hit for the environment.
Many commenters mention how Methane is more potent than CO2, making the argument I wrote in the first sentence stand on very wobbly legs (because it is technically true, but it does not disprove that the very existence of a cow adds to the global warming at the end of the equation)
It's a big a complicated issue, like any involving science, global planet data spanning decades or centuries, predictions and models...
There is though this one argument that sounds just too easy to imagine and logical to be false:
If you grow plants and eat them, instead of growing plants to feed animals and eat those, it will be easier, faster process, less cumbersome for the environment.
The problem with this viewpoint is that methane is a lot more potent as a green house gas in comparison with CO2 (about 28 times more). So if this methane stays in our atmosphere for up to 100 years**, it does a lot more damage to our climate in comparison with CO2. And we all know how damaging CO2 already is... The second problem with all this methane in the air is that plants and algae DO NOT convert it during photosynthesis. Taking into account the big meat and diary industry, this is a lot of methane that gets released and is much more damaging to our atmosphere.
Do you have the scientific data to prove this?
@@tpike32 For some reason my reply does not get posted if I add the link 😅. Anyways, this is a well known fact! You can see for yourself if you just google "EPA global warming potential" 😀
It's actually 86x as potent as CO₂ if we use 20 year time horizon which is justifiable given that we are already in a climate crisis and temperature and atmospheric concentrations of GHGs are already wrecking havoc on weather systems from cyclones and flooding to droughts and bushfires.
@@tpike32 its in every IPCC Assesment Report and each report from 1 to 5 the level for methane Global Warming potential has been increased. note also my other comment below about GWP₂₀ vs GWP₁₀₀. The twenty year timeframe is critical.
Here in Brazil the Amazon Rainforest is being destroyed to put cows and plantations in her place. So yes, the carbon released by the trees, mainly by fire, is a real problem to global warming.
Not to mention about others huge environment concerns.
Here in South Africa the opposite is happening. Many former crop and cattle farmers has turned to game farming for hunting. This means that they are replanting trees and restoring natural habitat for the antelope, buffalo and other natural animals. Hunters then come and take the meat out of the field themselves which is the natural way. Because of this a lot of natural habitat has been restored and natural wildlife numbers has increased by millions.
Grass is more effective at storing carbon that trees BTW.
Haven't you omitted the fact that methane by itself is a more potent greenhouse gas? So while it is not converted to CO2 it is doing more damage and as CO2 it will be there for a very long time. Therefore it will accumulate over time. And furthermore to feed cows takes up land where trees could grow to capture carbon while grasslands and feedstock plants for cattle are not efficient carbon sinks? Isn't this argument extremely misleading. Not that this is an unexpected thing for a milk man to say. I kind of feel for you, but I want my descendents and those of everyone else to survive and thrive in stead of keeping a limited number of farmers afloat.
You're not wrong that it does accumulate, but at a stable rate as long as the livestock amount is stable, not a constantly increasing one. So the thing is that growing more or less livestock, cutting down forests or planting trees, using fossil fuels, transitioning to greener energy and so on, all of these are merely changes in coefficients of factors in a big equation where pollution adds up into global warming as long as it surpasses the carbon capture of the planet through trees, plants, hopefully technology in the future etc. Be it through reducing the livestock, be it through planting trees or transitioning to greener energy, everything helps! What this video ended up doing is hinting that we can (at least hypothetically) achieve stability even if we maintain this amount of livestock. The same is true about the current amount of fossile fuel burning, or lack of forests. But in all cases ALONE, with an EQUAL COUNTERBALANCE needed, NOT TOGETHER as we have them now. So yeah long story short, be vegan, advocate for livestock reduction, do your part but don't be too violent about it, we can reduce global warming by multiple sides.
Thank you. Cows produce no more carbon than letting the vegetation rot. And it's atmospheric CO2 which spends a lot of time in a solid form (carbon capture), a huge sink. It's entirely different from burning fossil fuels.
wouldn't there be billions of tons of less vegetation and therefor rot if we weren't growing it to feed it to cows?
a scientifically illiterate comment right there.
You are wrong and its a disaster people like you can vote. This video is a con art.
All go back to school ... and this time listen to a thing called the carbon cycle. Humans breathing also produce CO2? .. far more than cows in fact? Lets kill all them eh? Stop listening to ideology and start listening to actual scientists, cows don't eat coal.
@@black5f you are either wilfully ignorant or sadly ignorant, the big issue with cows is not the CO₂ they breath, that's a minuscule amount of their GHG footprint, it's the methane they produce (100x more potent over 10 years than CO₂) it's the land clearing of forests and woodland for their pastures, or crops being feed to them that could feed humans at a faction of the water/land/GHG/toxic waste streams that come from livestock production (killed 50% of the Great Barrier Reef already).
It's not too much cows people, it's too much cars. That simple.
That’s assuming the cow population is constant. We already know the Amazon forest is being burned at an alarming rate for cattle farming. The Amazon forest holds vast amounts of carbon that is being burned for feed and livestock. Also he doesn’t mention how much more resources it takes to raise a large animal like a cow. How much water and feed does it take to raise a cow from birth to slaughter? ? There are families starving yet I bet the amount of food a cow needs in its lifetime could feed a few families several times over. We are experiencing record droughts year over year but the water will go to cows instead. Cars aren’t good either… but I think his argument that cows aren’t hurting the environment is missing a few points.
Nice research from the Big dairy
Indeed, I was going to say the same. I'm working on a university project about sustainable development and climate change (I'm a bio engineer) and the meat/dairy industry are not that innocent as they picture themselfs (no surprise there) :p
@@ken_barbe watch this seres of videos for answers and to debunk this stuff from the Dairy industry: th-cam.com/video/4RTvrBiMQ-g/w-d-xo.html
We need to get these presentations out to every middle school class.
too much stupid teacher that don't understand these logic.
this is full of lies and misleading argument. see my main comment debunking it or click the link to a more thorough debunking. this guy is paid for in full.
For a complete analysis of the misinformation presented in this video I recommend this article by Paul Mahony : "When “revelations” about methane emissions are not revelations at all" planetaryvegan.net/2020/08/03/when-revelations-about-methane-emissions-are-not-revelations-at-all/
I'll eat my grassfed beef 1-3 times a week. Nobody will ever change that about me. :)
how self-satisfyingly selfish, yay!!
It is not excessive consumption
Maybe you fly much more than he does for all you know and cause the sane problem in a different way
He of course omits how much more powerful the warming effect of methane is compared to CO2 in the time it is up. He omits that methane is currently responsible for over 15% of the current warming. And of course, he leaves out that the number of cattle in the world has been and is increasing.
Eat more beef !!
@@sking2173 not until the methane is captured or neutralized via seaweed.. and people stop deforestation for it.
"Methane is better than carbon dioxide because methane's lifespan is 10 years, while carbon dioxide's lifespan is 1000 years"
Yea but you just said "After 10 years, methane become carbon dioxide"
You say we should reduce the number of cars instead of cows. is it correct?
Dr. Mitloehner, I think that the message you want to convey is misleading.
As you said more than once, IF and ONLY IF the farmer mantains the same number of cows the quantity of GHG produced remains flat, but as population increases, the demand of meat will increase, and consequently the number of cows will necessarily increase.
Moreover, apart from the mere GHG emissions, you should consider also soil erosion, deforestation, and the huge amount of water animals consume, directly and indirectly, since they are fed with soya flour, forage or whatever.
The reduction of consumption of meat is necessary, no ifs, no buts, leaving aside the ethicality of making living beings suffer and die just for eat.
The issue of cars is of course relevant, but I feel that here in this context is used to enforce your thesis that the problem of intensive farming is not a problem. There are lots of things to do to preserve the planet, if we drove only electric vehicles we wouldn't solve anything, it's useless and damaging to point the finger specifically to something, since every aspect of modern life should be reconsidered in order to be as sustainable as possible.
But of course, the problem is not that we eat meat, it's that there's simply too many of us, and that's not even going into the production of our, say, computers so we can write messages such as these.
Flat emissions are still a problem because we are already in a climate crisis and five of the major known climate tipping points are already in play. Namely, coral reefs, the Amazon, arctic sea ice, the western shelf of Antartica, thermal ocean conveyors.
it's worse than that. the stock of methane in that atmosphere is increasing more rapidly than CO2 even, and it's from human emissions, the fossil fuel industries and from livestock and dairy production. this video is very misleading.
Not an actual climate scientist.......
Frank received a Master of Science degree in animal science and agricultural engineering from the University of Leipzig, Germany, and a doctoral degree in animal science from Texas Tech University
This video was brought to you by the meat industry. Thanks for watching!
Thank you so much for this video! This is information we all need to hear and see. So we can start to recognize the propaganda in the media and ask ourselves why we are being lied to
why we are getting lied to? To get every human to not eat meat and go to a fake Lab meat society
this video is very misleading. watch this seres of videos for answers and to debunk this stuff from the Dairy industry: th-cam.com/video/4RTvrBiMQ-g/w-d-xo.html
Isn’t the flaw in his ‘cyclical argument for cows’ his assumption that the methane is recaptured by plants at the same rate it is released by the cows? This isn’t addressed in his video.
He concludes his video saying transport CO2 accumulates, whereas cow methane (which becomes CO2 after 10 years according to him) doesn’t accumulate (why?) but stays stable (as long as you don’t add more cows). But he doesn’t explain why it hypothetically would stay stable rather than accumulate. All he says is that what is released by the cows was equal to what the consumed plants ORIGINALLY absorbed (over what period of time, and at what rate we don’t know). That may be true, but it does not follow (without proof) that what the cows release upon digesting a plant will be re-absorbed by new plants as quickly as the cows release it.
Of course, what this video also misses in the cow v car discussion is the massive deforestation for agriculture.
CO2 from methane from the Cows doesn't accumulate, because it was originally taken from the atmosphere. Crude oil is taken from the Earth's storage and released to atmosphere.
Most reforestation for agriculture is to grow plants. Once again the propaganda says its cattle. It’s not. In South America it’s for soya production. A bigger issue than South America is the Far East where illegal logging & deforestation for palm oil production is actually worse.
Whether or not the converted CO2 to grass (glucose) goes through the cattle's rumen or not. grass will either oxidize (covert back to CO2), decay (convert to CH4 than to CO2) or burn (convert to CO than to CO2). So the real issue is whether the CO2 levels exceed the photosynthetic cycle of CO2 (+ H2O) to C6H12O6 (+ 6O2). And that's the intrinsic difference between biogenic microbial forms of CH4 that break down to CO2 and CO2 from fossil fuels as well thermogenic (fossil fuel) forms of CH4 that also break down to CO2 The biogenic forms are part of the closed loop and have been cycling for a very long time without raising either atmospheric levels of CH4 or CO2, while relatively recently released ancient trapped forms of CH4 and CO2 (fossil fuels) have repeatedly spiked atmospheric levels of CH4 and CO2 from industrialization moving forward with increased natural gas use, fracking and syn N production.
He explains it that the CO2 from cows is being used by Plants they eat. Its a cycle
Daniel Watterson the deforestation is mostly for 2 things. Palm oil (Far East). Soya, South America. Before you say that’s for livestock feed. Again that’s not actually true either. The soya beans are first heated to 200’ C. This releases the oil (for human consumption). The rest is a byproduct that is very high in protein, hence it’s got value as animal feedstuff.
How are the facts and views presented here affected by the recent report on climate change presented by the U.N.?
The video is in line with the UN's report. The Sixth Assessment Report confirms that CO2 is the main driver of climate change. However, it also points out that reducing methane emissions is the best and fastest strategy for slowing global warming. As one of the report’s co-authors, Maisa Rojas Corradi, said, “Quickly reducing methane could counteract global warming, while also improving air quality.”
"As long as you don't add livestock - you are not adding to the burden of GHG". And the current amount that you are emitting as methane, still has the same amount of warming effect through the effect of methane. Frank is wildly misleading here - while trying to make the point that you won't add GHG emissions if you don't add livestock to your herd you won't add "additional" carbon to the atmosphere - he admits that there is a burden of GHG emissions from livestock - therefore by decreasing herd size you will decrease GHG emissions. Just think critically and you will see through this kind of misleading information.
You didn‘t get it. Cows, or to be more precise, the bacteria in their stomach produce gases from grass which is 1. renewable, 2. is consumed by bacteria or other orgamisms anyway. It does not matter if bacteria in stomachs of cows do it or bacteria in the earth. The output of CO2 is the same. The difference is only that there are more cows and less insects, worms and other organisms which would eat that grass instead.
He is talking about the crucial difference between natural CO2 cycle and burning fossil fuel. Burning fossil fuel releases large amounts of CO2 which were stored in the ground for millions of years.
Adding livestock means that people replace forests with meadows, and grass is less efficient at converting carbon dioxide than trees.
@@mutexin it's you that don't get it. when a molecule of CO₂ is drawdown into a pasture plant, say a grass, that C molecule might end up in a cellulose or some other molecule that the cow eats as fodder. Bacteria in the cow's stomachs break those sugars down into enzymes and sugar which the cow can use to grow and maintain health, one of the side-effects is the anaerobic bacteria produce methane. When that C molecule emerges from the cows mouth (or rear end but mostly methane is simply breathed out) it's as methane. 1 pound of that methane is 86x as potent as one pound of CO₂ molecules drawn down into the soil and plants.
So your mistake is that CO₂ in and methane out is not a one to one equivalence and there are many factors in solved, but once we do the math we know that even with the best regenerative farming practices which encourage root growth and lower levels of grazing (to maximise soil health which promotes drawdown), using the somewhat misleading one-hundred year time horizon the methane emissions from cows are still double the drawdown of even the best regenerative ag pasture cropping. Using a twenty year time horizon we need to multiply that by a factor of 3, so six times more methane than CO₂ drawdown.
@@alastairleith8612 Have you even watched the video? He said methane is converted into carbondioxide in the atmosphere, since it is not that stable. So the atmosphere naturally recycles it.
@@mutexin I don't need to have watched the video to be correct on this point. But yes I have watched the video. It's a smokescreen for the dairy and cattle industry, completely shameful in it's misrepresentation of the dangers of methane for someone with a twitter handle called @GHGGugu Read my full comment up above for a full explanation of the deceit going on here. (th-cam.com/video/RW8BclS27aI/w-d-xo.html&lc=UgxCOIG5JpbxW5KclDp4AaABAg)
@@alastairleith8612 your link does not work. Do you have any argument to counter what I mentioned in the previous comment?
Good watch, nicely shot, OTT post-production.
cows over cranbewrries
OMG ELEANOR
@@thumpty243 omg ho ru from school lo
@@eleanormlodecki2383 Yes im Adam
@@thumpty243 i though lol
Yes
Methane does not disappear in 10 years. It decays to CO2 (and H2O). So saying that one stays for 10000 years and the other one disappears is plain scamming. Yes, in the case of livestock you may attempt to call it a closed cycle (except for deforestation for pasture, which is quite relevant worldwide) but while it is methane it contributes more to global warming than CO2 itself, so it would have been better to emit that CO2 directly. Anyway, to be a closed cycle plants need it to be CO2, not methane, right? So overall reducing methane emissions, even at the cost of converting to CO2 in the process, would reduce its global contribution to greenhouse effect. And if we have to choose between having higher CO2 or higher methane for the amount of the allegedly closed cycle of livestock, it is better to have CO2 not only because of less warming, but because of the increase in plant development it would mean. The only argument could be acidification of the oceans, but it is difficult to quantify. Anyway, reducing methane emmissions through food supplementation for livestock (like algae) does not mean that later its crap still produces methane because of the bacterian action and degradation of organic matter in it. I think they just measure direct emitions from the digestive process, but waste management and its emissions could also be relevant.
I heard it was 7 yrs
so methane turns into co2, which then lasts 1000 years?
He did explain photosynthesis again..
But the co2 which you are referring to was in the atmosphere already? Maybe you should watch the video again.
That is exactly what I thought! So...he is basically saying methane is around for 10 years + the 1000 when it's converted to CO2 so it's actually worse than just CO2??? And also, he says that since the cows are eating a plant that ate up the CO2 and when they fart, it's not releasing any more CO2 than it was originally as the plant they ate that it came from....then why does it matter if we are adding more cows or not?? Because the amount of plants they eat is still a 1 to 1 ratio from the output of CO2...right? So, we still are not getting anymore gas than was originally used by the plant in the first place??
@@mistyo5860 More cows = more CO2 in the atmosphere instead of in plants?
yes but it's lifetime as methane is when it does the vast majority of it's warming impact, or radiative forcing. It's also a precursor to tropospheric ozone, another potent, short lived GHG.
O livestock, so O output of methane. If I add 1 cow, more methane more global warming... :(
So methane is 1010 years and cars are 1000 the fossil fuels came from the environment too
No. Cows eat grass not fossil fuels.
saiva vellalar 😇
Dairy industry fights back
Moooo 🐮
methane degradation is not 10 years as he claims but 20 years. A lot of lies in this video.
thankfully we have capitalism that adjusts itself to increase as the profits allow.
if it came between your car and burgers which do you choose? remember, one compounds but you can't really get to the other w/o it. choices, choices. . . i know! neither! yay, problems solved!
So he said CO2 is what we breathe out , what we exhale.
So ever animal and ever human exhale is lasting a thousand years .
And there worried bout a cow fart .
what globaal bull
Ok, so with modern technology this is possible. turn desert into forest. problem is solved then. can plant bunch of tree. can product many food. Animals will be happy. People who live in desert will be very happy and much more wealthy. :)) No more desert problem too :)) and plant trees on abandoned fields. demolish abandoned building and plant tree or make food.
This uneducated guy should work on the cattle farm and throw cow waste in to the pit every single day :/
(and back his doctor tittle)
As an *enviroment protection engeneer* i have MORE knowledge that him! And what i can tell: *the greenhouse gas effect* doesn't even exist, i learned that on the *meteorology* subject!
Both methane and CO2 are inert to the atmosphere energy budget (like Titan and the Venus)
That was an astonishing result!
Funny i got this video sent by a person ehondoes work with cows and has been saying this already ten years ago. Speaking of who has more knowledge 😉
@@17MrLeon
I graduated *Engeenering College* as engeneer. Comparable?
thanks for clarifying
@@7marbam
Do you want details?
@@WadcaWymiaru please!
Nope not acurate for the 10 years the methane is in the atmosphere it already made the damage. Sooooooo. That's not relevant that it them becomes co2 in 10 years . Sooooo in closing methane is still much worse not the same.
yes. as demonstrated here th-cam.com/video/4RTvrBiMQ-g/w-d-xo.html