Belching Moose is a big global warming issue?

Question

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070822/sc_afp/sciencenorwayclimate;_ylt=AhkZb4jyZaQTIXhdXr2QIM2s0NUE

Answer 1

Contributing factors of less than 5% are considered insignificant unless you are talking about the half a percent of greenhouse emissions that man makes...then it is not only significant, it is THE cause of all the problems.

Or hadn't you heard?

Answer 2

As sorry as I am to say it, it's true.

It's the same with cows (even worse, actually).

With the growing human population, we need more and more meat. So farmers are getting huge amounts of cows to sell for big profits. What do cows do all day? Eat, fart and poop.

Cows eat grass. Grass soaks up carbon dioxide.

Cows also pass gas. The gas we're talking about here is methane. Methane is a greenhouse gas, like carbon dioxide. Except worse. Methane is something like 200x more potent of a greenhouse gas than CO2. The only reason you hear more about CO2 than you do methane is that CO2 is much much much more common. And because of that, it is the driving force of the greenhouse effect.

I can only assume moose also eat, fart and poop all day long too.

:-)

Answer 3

There is a very old theory in Paleontology that this might have been what killed the dinosaurs.

During the 1980's they found that there were way more dinosaurs than had been thought. It was suggested their methane could have changed the climate enough to kill them off. We now have better ideas about why they died, but it was a perfectly respectable theory until then.

Answer 4

Needs to be kept in context. Moose belch methane due to their complicated digestive system, methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. The total they belch and fart each year is the equivalent of 2100kg of CO2.

One American citizen makes the same contribution as 13 moose and all the moose in the world contribue the same to global warming as a single city does.

Moose are just one of literally thousands of contributors to global warming. So yes it's an issue but it's far from a major one.

Answer 5

There are many natural sources and sinks of carbon, and these natural flows of carbon, considered together, are larger than the amount of carbon compounds put into the air by humans.

The carbon in the natural flows can be identified by the isotope ratios of 13C to 14C. Carbon in fossil fuels, long buried in the Earth, have a different ratio of these isotopes.

The excess carbon dioxide that is causing GW has the signature of fossil fuels.

Moose belches have the isotopic signature of a natural flow, since the Moose belch carbon originates in vegetation.

Answer 6

An individual moose does emit a fairly large amount of methane in its burps. However, the small number of moose on the planet make it a virtually insignificant contributor to global warming.

The same is true of cows. As they're also ruminant animals, they emit methane when they burp, and there are a lot more of them than moose so it's actually a reasonably large contribution. But it's still only about 3% of human greenhouse gas emissions (it counts as human because they're raised as livestock).