Global Warming, Carbon Dioxide, and Methane
Perhaps it is Our Cattle Industry We Should Blame
Yes, water vapor; water vapor is better at causing the atmosphere to retain heat than carbon dioxide.
Another interesting fact to digest: .036% of the atmosphere is carbon dioxide. To paraphrase: Of 100,000 molecules in the atmosphere, only 36 of them are carbon dioxide. Can you really believe that these 36 carbon dioxide molecules among 99,964 are the source of most of our problems?
As much as the Industrial Revolution is to be blamed for global warming and elevated levels of carbon dioxide, consider the following: The current percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is .036%. Before the Industrial Revolution, it was .028%. That is an increase of only .08 percent in the past 150 years or so.
The Amazon Rainforest alone produces twenty times (20x) more carbon dioxide in a year than does all of mankind in the same amount of time!
The real problem is, in fact, methane.
Methane is twenty-two times (22x) more effective at retaining heat in the atmosphere than is carbon dioxide. And what's more, methane can be as high as 4% in some parts of the atmosphere--and it is this statistic that is growing at rates that we should be concerned about.
"Methane," you might think. "The same stuff from farts, right?"
Hit the nail right on its head.
Methane is released by digestion, animal excrement, rotting matter, and more.
One of the most worrisome sources of methane is cattle, and the cattle industry altogether. Cows produce methane when they pass gas as a result of their eating grass. Cows produce even more methane gas when they're eating unnatural foods, especially chemically altered ones. Seeing as how chemically altered cattle-feed is seen as an asset to the industry, it is highly wide-spread and widely-used. Lots of methane is released by cows and other cattle just by their diet.
And that doesn't even include excrement. Methane is released also by the patties that cattle leave behind, if you know what I mean.
Besides that, mankind has become extremely wasteful. Landfills are awesome points for release of methane.
We can conclude that methane is more of a worry for us than carbon dioxide. It is a fact that carbon dioxide release by industries is more limited by government protocol than is methane production. Methane is the real source of our global warming problems, if, indeed, it is something that we are doing that is resulting in global warming.
There is always also the possibility that what has occurred is irreparable and is beyond our control; whether or not it was ever in our hands to control and repair it is debatable.
Published by Sly Navreet
I call myself Sly Navreet, and I've been a writer here at Associated Content for several years, now. Please disregard anything stupid I may have said in content since before the past year or so; I'm trying t... View profile
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2 Comments
Post a CommentBah. Wrote too much.
...help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but that doesn't excuse us from trying to reduce CO2 as well!
While methane is indeed an important greenhouse gas, and ruminant animals are a big contributor, this article implies that carbon dioxide is not an important greenhouse gas.
"Can you really believe that these 36 carbon dioxide molecules among 99,964 are the source of most of our problems?" - Yes. Compared to the number of molecules in your body it wouldn't take a vast number of cyanide molecules to do some damage.
"The current percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is .036%. Before the Industrial Revolution, it was .028%. That is an increase of only .08 percent in the past 150 years or so." - True, but it's an increase of nearly 30% on the amount of CO2.
"And what's more, methane can be as high as 4% in some parts of the atmosphere" - which parts of the atmosphere? Those very close to cows, perhaps? Taking the global atomsphere, the methane concentration is significantly lower than CO2 (about 0.00017% in the atmosphere up to 25km).
So yes, drinking less milk will