14 . Cow farts do more damage than all coal fired power stations
combined
Geoff Russell from Animal Liberation, South Australia writes:



It's almost a year since Barry Brook, Professor of Climate Change at
Adelaide University, posted a piece on his blog about Australia's most
powerful global warming agent
<http://redirect.cmailer.com.au/LinkRedirector.aspx?clid=238ce296-cba7-4\
2de-8760-b280672bc0eb&rid=0c455ffe-e339-48e4-a9a2-f9cbfb4f04e4> . That
piece, co-authored with Peter Singer and I, showed that Australia's
livestock cause more warming than all our coal-fired power stations.

It wasn't a defence of coal, it was a plea for people to understand the
role of methane as a potent climate forcing and to understand that
cattle methane is no laughing matter.

At that time, news media regularly and wrongly claimed that methane as
a greenhouse gas has a warming impact "only" 21 (or 23, or 25) times
that of CO2. Even the well read Professor Ross Garnaut showed a
stunning ignorance of methane's true warming impact in his report.

Unfortunately, not much has changed. The world's media continues to
misrepresent the potency of methane and cattle methane continues to
prompt cartoons rather than action.

But in an opinion piece in last week's New Scientist
<http://redirect.cmailer.com.au/LinkRedirector.aspx?clid=a1f76640-2281-4\
949-b56f-eb6a7b7ca42f&rid=0c455ffe-e339-48e4-a9a2-f9cbfb4f04e4> , Kirk
Smith, Professor of Global Environmental Health at the University of
California in Berkeley, makes a forceful call for methane's real
warming impact to be accurately counted in international agreements. He
points out that a tonne of methane contributes 100 times more warming
during the first five years of its lifetime as a tonne of CO2, yet
under current Kyoto rules, its comparative potency is set at 21. This
is because the relative impacts of ALL greenhouse gases are averaged
over the same period 100 years
<http://redirect.cmailer.com.au/LinkRedirector.aspx?clid=fea066c0-23eb-4\
e01-81a8-1346c711b78c&rid=0c455ffe-e339-48e4-a9a2-f9cbfb4f04e4> ,
regardless of their atmospheric lifetimes.

This is like applying a blow torch to your leg for 10 seconds but
calculating its average temperature as just 48 degrees because that's
what it is when averaged over 20 minutes, with 20 minutes being used
because that happens to be some agreed international standard when
measuring heat sources applied to legs. The implication being, of
course, that a blow torch for 10 seconds and a 48 degree hot water
bottle for 20 minutes have the same effect. Some standards have little
rational basis, and this particular standard isn't just dumb but
globally and dangerously counter productive. If methane's warming were
properly accounted for, there would be more incentive for reductions.

Any budding Miss Marple investigating the issue would soon realise that
climate scientists don't use this Kyoto factor for methane in their
global climate models. They use its true forcing, integrated, if
required, over the time span under study. It's really just economists,
bankers, politicians and international climate horse traders, the kind
of people who gave us the global financial meltdown, who prefer a wrong
but simple number to the truth.

Read the full story on our website
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3a4-88fd-0587c74899f4&rid=0c455ffe-e339-48e4-a9a2-f9cbfb4f04e4>

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