Sitter Drilling

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has released a report (“Livestock’s Long Shadow”) claiming that farm animals emit (bhhhrrrzzzt) nearly 20% of all greenhouse gases. They warn that by 2050 meat production will double, with a similar increase in dairy production, leading to increased flatulence accompanied by flatulence-induced global warming. Their figures show livestock responsible for 9% of carbon dioxide production, 40% of methane production, and 65% (gasp) of nitrous oxide emissions.

These figures are unreliable at best, attempts to incite fear and hasty international global controls (with the UN at the helm, of course) at worst. As sources of greenhouse gases and other factors affecting climate keep on being discovered,1–3 even if these were actually snapshot figures from some time ago (we have not seen their references and cannot comment), they are not snapshots of the current picture, which keeps changing dramatically.

Of course, ignoring inconvenient facts about published data on purported global warming is a cottage industry (a government-subsidized political agenda masquerading as science), dispensing to favored scientists billions of dollars a year in taxpayers’ money. Although a recent paper4 reported that there was a substantial cooling in the tropical Andes that coincided with glacial advances in Europe during the Little Ice Age (1250 to 1810), we keep reading news reports on climate research in Science and Nature that continue to refer to the Little Ice Age as a European (therefore, not global) phenomenon.

A final note on the supposed danger of livestock farts: When the American plains were covered by tens of millions of buffalo, there would have been the same gaseous emissions. Do you suppose those environmentalists now in an uproar at the UN about livestock would be as livid about wild animal parks or rewilded American plains filled with gas-emitting herbivores?