by David Mason-Jones
There is an old fake-science idea doing the rounds again at the moment. This is that cows are culprits in the global warming narrative. The problem, however, is that the scary image of cows destroying the planet with their carbon emissions doesn’t fit with how the planet actually works.
No cow alive today, nor any cow that has ever existed, nor any cow that will ever exist, can add single atom of carbon to the atmosphere that wasn’t already there in the first place.
At one point of the carbon cycle, it is true that cows emit carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) to the atmosphere, each of which contains one atom of carbon. This is a basic fact of biology – but what about some other basic facts to go with it?
It would seem the fact that ruminants emit carbon gases is regarded as the clincher argument by people like Rosemary Stanton and Kris Barnden, who recently published an article on the ABC News website damning cattle. The problem is they fail to put this isolated fact together with others to give it context and, in this way, create a misleading impression. They fail to describe how a cow exists within the carbon cycle. They fail to ask a fundamental question; ‘Is the carbon a cow emits new carbon to the atmosphere?’
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