The Role Greenhouse Gas Emissions From Cows Play in Climate Change | CLEAR Center. By Amy Quinton Inside the University of California, Davis, dairy barn, a Holstein cow has its head and neck sealed airtight inside a large, clear-plastic chamber that resembles an incubator for newborns. While giant tubes above the chamber pump air in and push air out, the cow calmly stands and eats her feed. Equipment inside a nearby trailer spits out data. This is how Frank Mitloehner measures gases that come from cows’ stomachs and ultimately contribute to global warming. Quantifying these emissions is key to mitigating them, and Mitloehner is one of several UC Davis researchers investigating economical ways to make livestock production more environmentally sustainable around the globe.
Cattle are the No. 1 agricultural source of greenhouse gases worldwide. With the escalating effects of climate change, that fact has advocates urging the public to eat less beef. The plastic chambers help measure the amount of gases coming from the cow's stomach more precisely. The global problem. Comparable GHG emissions from animals in wildlife and livestock-dominated savannas | npj Climate and Atmospheric Science. Livestock-mediated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are considered a large causative agent of climate change, with up to 3.75 Gt CO2-eq emitted yearly1. A large part of them is attributed to low-input livestock systems in regions with vast savanna landscapes, with Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia specifically accounting for 0.68 (18% of livestock GHG) and 0.73 (20% of livestock GHG) Gt CO2-eq, respectively1.
Natural rangelands, including savannas, store large amounts of soil carbon and have the capacity to act as carbon sinks, especially when restored from degraded states. However, the current emissions attributed to livestock are considered to exceed the mitigation capacity of rangeland soils2. The bulk of direct GHG emissions attributed to livestock consists of methane (CH4) produced during the enteric fermentation in the rumen and CH4 and nitrous oxide (N2O) released by manure, so that grazing livestock is considered an intense GHG emitter3. Revealed: how climate breakdown is supercharging toll of extreme weather | Climate crisis. The devastating intensification of extreme weather is laid bare today in a Guardian analysis that shows how people across the world are losing their lives and livelihoods due to more deadly and more frequent heatwaves, floods, wildfires and droughts brought by the climate crisis. The analysis of hundreds of scientific studies – the most comprehensive compilation to date – demonstrates beyond any doubt how humanity’s vast carbon emissions are forcing the climate to disastrous new extremes.
At least a dozen of the most serious events, from killer heatwaves to broiling seas, would have been all but impossible without human-caused global heating, the analysis found. Most worryingly, all this is happening with a rise of just 1C in the planet’s average temperature. The role of global heating in supercharging extreme weather is happening at “astonishing speed”, scientists say. The key findings Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, Germany Flooding, July 2021 Jacobabad, Pakistan Heatwave, May 2022 The impossibles. Data Overview – Berkeley Earth. The datasets presented here have been divided into three categories: Output data, Source data, and Intermediate data.
The Berkeley Earth averaging process generates a variety of Output data including a set of gridded temperature fields, regional averages, and bias-corrected station data. Source data consists of the raw temperature reports that form the foundation of our averaging system. Source observations are provided as originally reported and will contain many quality control and redundancy issues.
Intermediate data is constructed from the source data by merging redundant records, identifying a variety of quality control problems, and creating monthly averages from daily reports when necessary. Time Series Data Land Only (1750 – Recent) Berkeley Earth’s primary product is an analysis of summary air temperatures over land. Land + Ocean (1850 – Recent) Berkeley Earth combines our land data with a modified version of the HadSST ocean temperature data set.
Gridded Data Source Data. #ShowYourStripes. DRIAS, Les futurs du climat - Accueil. Book reviews. Scientists warned the President about global warming 50 years ago today | Dana Nuccitelli | Environment. Fifty years ago today, as the American Association for the Advancement of Science highlighted, US president Lyndon Johnson’s science advisory committee sent him a report entitled Restoring the Quality of Our Environment. The introduction to the report noted: Pollutants have altered on a global scale the carbon dioxide content of the air and the lead concentrations in ocean waters and human populations. The report included a section on atmospheric carbon dioxide and climate change, written by prominent climate scientists Roger Revelle, Wallace Broecker, Charles Keeling, Harmon Craig, and J Smagorisnky. Reviewing the document today, one can’t help but be struck by how well these scientists understood the mechanisms of Earth’s climate change 50 years ago.
The report noted that within a few years, climate models would be able to reasonably project future global surface temperature changes. Only about one two-thousandth of the atmosphere and one ten-thousandth of the ocean are carbon dioxide. Alaska on the edge: Newtok's residents race to stop village falling into sea | Environment. What is a climate refugee?
The immediate image that comes to mind of “climate refugees” is people of small tropical islands in the Pacific or of a low-lying delta like in Bangladesh, where inhabitants have been forced out of their homes by sea-level rise. The broader phenomenon is usually taken to be people displaced from their homes by the impact of a changing climate – although the strict definition of a refugee in international law is more narrow including people displaced by war, violence or persecution, but not environmental changes. With climate change occurring rapidly in the far north, where temperatures are warming faster than the global average, the typical picture of the climate refugee is set to become more diverse. Sea ice is in retreat, the permafrost is melting, bringing the effects of climate change in real time to residents of the remote villages of Alaska. "I dream about the water coming in," she said.
In the dream, Warner climbs on to the roof of her small house. 1 of 20. The Burning Question | A book by Mike Berners-Lee and Duncan Clark | We can't burn half the world's oil, coal and gas. So how do we quit? Climate Change | New Scientist. Climate Vulnerability Monitor 2012 - DARA. “This second edition of the Climate Vulnerability Monitor is the splash of cold water we desperately need to awaken us from our climate change complacency.”
Robert Glasser, Secretary-General of CARE International The Climate Vulnerability Monitor 2nd Edition reveals that climate change has already held back global development and inaction is a leading global cause of death. Harm is most acute for poor and vulnerable groups but no country is spared either the costs of inaction or the benefits of an alternative path. Commissioned by the world’s most vulnerable countries and backed by high-level and technical panels, the new Monitor estimates human and economic impacts of climate change and the carbon economy for 184 countries in 2010 and 2030, across 34 indicators. Watch the videos and view the photo gallery of the global launch of the Climate Vulnerability Monitor 2nd Edition, Sept 26th, Asia Society, New York > Use the worldmap to browse data by country or compare countries.