How do cows make global warming?

Question

please explain it in a formal way as its for my geography test...

Answer 1

to make it blunt...by farting

Answer 2

It's not from farting, it's mostly from their mouths. 95% of methane emmited from cattle is from the front end, not the back!

Cows chew their food, or their 'cud'. They keep swallowing their food, regurgitating it, and carry on chewing it. The bacteria that cows (and other ruminants) carry around in their digestive systems break down their food, and also release methane. So through their mouths.

Methane is a green house gas, which is actually worse than carbon dioxide (there's just less of it up there). Greenhouse gases affect climate, by trapping the suns warmth in our atmosphere, when it would normally just reflect back out to space.

Research is being undergone currently to reduce the amounts of methane that cows burp, by changing their diet.

Answer 3

because the byproducts of the fermentation that takes place in their rumen is methane and CO2.

after the digested matter exits it continues to decay releasing more CO2 and greenhouse gases.

things like this would be handled better if the cow dung was deposited in a digester and composted there to make energy, before being spread on feilds for fertilizer.

soon, farmer co-ops will probably be doing this to save money on energy on their farms, as well as become more environmentally friendly.

Answer 4

Okay.

Techinal terms: Cows produce methane which then allows greenhouse gases to produce more.

Slang terms: Cows fart it goes in the air makes the world a hotter place.

Answer 5

Cows produce waste, methane, CO2 etc. Or when their waste decomposes or breaks down green house gases are released, which contributes to global warming.

Answer 6

1. They eat grass. Grass is part of the planets natural cooling mechanism. It's like our sweat really. Imagine how hot you'd be without sweat!

2. We eat cows. Cows have to be cooked before being eaten. All that cooking creates tons of heat. Stir fryed beef is widely recognised as the main culprit.

Answer 7

Cow farting releases methane with is a greenhouse gas like CO2.

Answer 8

Cows contribute to global warming because they release methane which is a greenhouse gas.

Answer 9

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, in a report called "Livestock's Long Shadow," says, "The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global."

"The findings of this report," it says, "suggest that it should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity."


Chewing Your Cud
Cows do not add to the amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

They do not run aground and spill crude oil. But they do ruminate -- which is to say that they give off methane when they chew their cud and belch, and nitrous oxide and ammonia when they leave manure all over the barnyard.

So that pungent odor you smell on a farm? It's bad for the global environment.

Methane, while less prevalent in the air than carbon dioxide, is 23 times more potent as a heat-trapping gas, the FAO report says.

Do some math, the authors say, and you find that livestock is responsible for 18 percent of the world's greenhouse gas problem.

What's more, cows take up a lot of space, grazing on land that could feed many more of the world's people if it were used for crops.

The FAO says grazing takes up 26 percent of the land on Earth that is not covered by ice -- 30 percent if you count the land used to grow feed for the animals.

And livestock does a lousy job of cleaning up after itself.

Farm waste, washed downhill by rain, is a major source of water pollution. The methane and ammonia in cow dung rise into the air with evaporating water -- and fall back down as ingredients of acid rain.

In China, phosphorus and nitrogen contamination are flowing into the South China Sea, killing off marine life.

In Latin America, forests that would soak up carbon dioxide are instead chopped down, so that farmers can use the land for their cattle.

And on and on, enough to make for a 400-page report.


The FAO says the problem "needs to be addressed with urgency." But it says the good news is that "major reductions in impact could be achieved at reasonable cost."

It might be cheaper, some scientists have argued over the years, to control methane emissions from agriculture than carbon dioxide from cars and industry.

Cows' diets could be modified. Manure could be recycled; it's already dried and burned as a fuel in many poorer countries -- and because it comes from animals, it counts as "renewable."

What complicates it, though, is that livestock is used for food. If you want to control greenhouse gases, will people be willing to eat less meat?

Different groups that spar over environmental issues had reactions that fit their existing positions.

"Yup. … Next year the Democrats will have the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] regulating exhaust emissions of cows," wrote one person in a blog forum. "Heehee."

But at one environmental group that has called for caps on carbon dioxide emissions, a staff member, asking that the group not be named, called the report "bullsh--."

Answer 10

you mean contribute to global warming, not 'make' global warming. cows don't make global warming.
they produce a lot of methane gas when they digest their food.
then they drop wind, and release the methane gas.

Answer 11

Cows fart almost continuosly and their farts are made largely of methane which is a very powerful greehouse gas. many times more so than CO2 or CO