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Do cow farts contribute to global warming?
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Question Date: 2011-05-02 | | Answer 1:
Cows do contribute to global warming, although
in fact they mostly do so by burping rather than
farting. Cows are ruminants--they specialize in
eating plants like grasses that are difficult to
digest, so they have evolved a four-chambered
stomach--they chew their food, begin digesting it
in their first two stomach chambers, then
regurgitate this "cud" and chew it again,before
passing it back to their stomach and then
intestine to complete digestion. Like a lot of
other animals (including humans!), ruminant shave
a complex association of microbes living in their
digestive system to help them break down their
food. One of the microbes that lives in their
stomachs makes methane (CH4)--the same
gas that we burn as "natural gas." Methane is a
strong greenhouse gas--it's about twenty times
stronger than carbon dioxide, although over a few
years methane in the atmosphere will react with
oxygen and become transformed into carbon dioxide.
In the US, about 20% of human-related methane is
due to cows and other ruminants, so livestock do
contribute to global warming. People are now
trying to develop different cattle feeds that
result in less methane production. | | Answer 2:
It's actually the cow "burps" that mostly
contribute to global warming more, although the
"farts" cause problems as well.Because of how cows
digest their food, they release a lot of methane
through belching (and a smaller amount through
farting), and nitrous oxide and ammonia in their
manure. Like carbon dioxide, methane is a
greenhouse gas, but methane traps heat in the
atmosphere even more effectively than carbon
dioxide does. It's become a problem because we
have so many cows and other livestock to feed us.
(All the ammonia and nitrous oxide cows make can
cause big ecological problems too.) A lot of
people think everyone needs to cut back on the
amount of meat we consume to help reduce the
greenhouse gases made by livestock animals. Also,
if the same amount of space were used to grow
crops instead of growing livestock, it's thought
that we would be able to feed more people, since
growing crops utilizes space and resources better
than growing livestock. For more
information on livestock and their effect on
greenhouse gases, see these websites: globalwarming
meat-methane
cow-farts-gw | | Answer 3:
Technically, no - the methane is actually
burped, not farted. Methane is a greenhouse gas,
in fact a quite powerful one, but still a very
minor one compared to the two more common major
greenhouse gasses, carbon dioxide and (most
important of all) water vapor. From what I
understand, we still aren't entirely certain just
what the role of carbon dioxide is in global
warming, so I think it's safe to say that we can't
really say what the significance of methane is
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