"An Inconvenient Toot"

[FVZA_Colonel]

I was flipping through the channels just a moment ago, and came across Glenn Beck as he was flipping through his new book. One of the pictures was of (and I'm not kidding) a cow farting out a hurricane, which I'm guessing was to support the theory that cows contribute more to global warming that humans ever could. Now, I know it's Glenn Beck, and if anything else I can trust him to get his science wrong, but how do you actually respond to a claim like this.

[MrModerate]

1. Take the claim in context . . .

Bovine-produced methane is a more intensely damaging greenhouse gas than car exhaust, mole for mole. As advanced societies eat much more beef than other societies, our carbon footprint is larger. But cow farts exceeding human activitities that lead to global warming? Nonsense. Cattle breeding *is* a human industrial process (just like coal-burning power plants) and has to be counted in the mix.

What Beck was trying to say, who knows and who cares. He's a cow fart on his best day.

[Didereaux]

2. Cows BELCH methane, not fart it.

They have four stomachs, the first is little more than a fermentation vat, with bacteria doing the digesting of the majority of the food. THe 'cud' a cow chews is is simply mother natures way of getting the hay ground up finer and finer so it can be better utilized by the bacteria. Each of the following three stomachs gradually digest the remainder along with the bacteria to extract the nutrients. Bot again the vast majority of any ruminant produced methane is from that first stomach and it is belched out. By the way sheep, goats and many,many other grazing animals all do the same thing.

Now THAT had to be way more info about animal produced methane than you wanted, right? heheh

[XemaSab]

4. Thanks for the range management flashback.

Next you're going to be quizzing us on stocking rates, putting out mounted grasses for us to learn, and throwing about terms like AUM. :(

[Didereaux]

7. nah, all the BLM permits are gone ;)

[MADem]

6. Well, goes to show that idiot Beck ALWAYS gets things bass-ackwards!!!

I heard there was some sort of additive they could provide to the animals to reduce that total belching...

[kestrel91316]

9. That's why if a sheep or cow is out grazing a turnip field and

swallows the wrong-sized turnip without chewing, lucky people like me get called out to "uncork" the poor thing before bloat kills it. The technique involves shoving a large-bore plastic tube down the throat and pushing the turnip into the rumen (accompanied by a massive release of that lovely gas into the vet's face) where it can be worked on by our friends, the bacteria.

[Nihil]

10. Good job vets don't smoke while on duty!

:hi: :smoke: :freak: :nuke:

[Bitwit1234]

3. Ask him if bush pulled the teat.

[tinrobot]

5. But the humans raise the cows...

...so we can have meat.

If we stopped eating meat, it would actually do a lot for the environment. But I doubt that was Glenn Beck's message.

[jpak]

8. Beck's an ignorant dumbass

60% of global methane emissions are from anthropogenic sources.

US landfills and natural gas systems emit nearly 3 times as much methane each year as enteric fermentation (AKA "cow farts")

http://www.epa.gov/methane/sources.html

Radiative forcing from CO2 emissions comprise ~70% of the total anthropogenic greenhouse effect - methane only 22%.

http://www.epa.gov/nonco2/econ-inv/international.html