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Burping Sheep produce Deadly Gas!
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by Hugh Askew | December 3, 2009 at 05:28 am
336 views | 17 Recommendations | 2 comments
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Deadly if Greenhouse gases are causing contentious Global Warming.
The cute and cuddly critters down under are accused of producing a staggering 12% of that nation's greenhouse gases.
Australia, a major sheep producer, has taken to studying sheep burps. The study is aimed at finding sheep that produce a less lethal variety of belches. They then hope to breed a strain of sheep that are easier on the environment.
While Global Warming itself may be controversial and ultimately off base, sheep breeding is nearly as old as civilization itself.
Around 12 per cent of Australia's greenhouse gases originate with agriculture, and some 70 per cent of that amount is blamed on ruminant livestock, with most of it coming from burps.
John Goopy, the study leader, measured the sheep's emissions by herding them into a specially designed booth shortly after they eat and then calculating the amount of gas belched.
His team hopes to find whether there is a genetic link between the sheep that produce the least methane, which could then be exploited to breed low-emissions sheep.
Of the 200 sheep so far tested, about half produced much more than average while the other half belched considerably less methane.
"The biggest single determinant of methane production in cattle and sheep is the amount of feed they eat. But even once that is taken into account, I have found significant differences between individual animals," he said.
The scientist said methane has about 17 times the environmental warming capacity of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas blamed for global warming.
"And if we can find a hereditary link and specifically breed for that outcome it will be an ongoing reduction, it won't be a one-off."
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Hugh Askew
Omaha, Nebraska, United States
Gordon Clark
Vancouver, Canada
Recommendations (17)
PIM of SPAIN
San Pedro de A, Malaga, Spain
Yuliya Talmazan
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aurealeus
BeanTown, to Florida, United StatesAnonymous user
Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (2)
at 09:42 on December 3rd, 2009
Ha, ha..... that's a riot! What's next? Burping ants? LOL
at 09:00 on December 6th, 2009
What has climate to do with finance and economics, you may ask? Actually, quite a lot.
All this bogus about global warming and CO2 emission bear enormous costs with it. Estimates vary on how much a proposed "cap-and-trade" plan might cost. Depending on where you get your figures - which seems to be a recurring caveat surrounding this whole discussion - annual cost to the US alone could be between $200-$350 billion, or roughly $1,750 - $3,000 per household.
Even President Obama himself said that energy costs were likely to "skyrocket" under his plan. One memorandum, estimates that, "Economic costs will likely be on the order of 1 percent of GDP, making them equal in scale to all existing environmental regulation."
Critics, predictably, rebuke those figures, claiming that they are typically inflated and that their government would never spend that much money on a bogus scheme. Besides, "how can you put a price on human life... they say!?"
Depending on what side of the debate you reside - skeptic or believer - action or inaction will cost you, respectively, thousands of dollars per year in additional taxes and the surrender of your liberty to a world government, or, your life and that of all future generations.
Think about.