See the rest of my post: The point I am making is that, when the sites that say this are very clearly biased, you have no reason to trust anything they cite as fact, and have no reason to think they are giving you all relevant information. As to the study you cite at 51%, it is very clear that the authors of the paper were very much trying to get every last little bit of emissions out of animals, going so far as to even count their every last breath as an emission source. The reality is more neutral than that, and probably lies between the 20 and the 50 percent statistics, and is probably closer to 30 from what I have seen online. Of course, even if cattle did take up fifty percent of worldwide emissions, I wouldn't care very much. Cattle aren't something that is like fossil fuels, something that creates massive amounts of carbon purely in releasing/burning carbon stored eons ago. Any emissions from cows, assuming we do not continue to expand land for more cows, is going to be offset by growing the crops to feed them in the first place. Seriously, their "scientific" article starts off with "What if climate change was caused by cows pigs and chickens". That isn't reasonable. These so called facts are nothing but insulting and misleading.I try (but don't always succeed) to judge content on its own merit and not on the labels attached to it or domain names
I'm pleased to see that you're driven by science and facts. I assume you mean the whole of animal production and not just cows. In any case I very much doubt that. Have you got a study supporting this claim?Any emissions from cows, assuming we do not continue to expand land for more cows, is going to be offset by growing the crops to feed them in the first place.
I do mean animal production, and I am assuming a closed system where people find dirt, plant crops, feed those crops to cows. Whatever cows produce has to come from somewhere, so any building materials or carbon emissions are going to come from their feed. In order to produce this carbon in the food, the plants have to absorb and take out of the atmosphere an equal amount of carbon. There are cases where emissions can come from how food is grown with tractors, the production of fertilizer, etc. Those I do not consider directly under "emissions from cows" because they are third party things that often involve the use of fossil fuels, and can change with time to become more efficient or not release greenhouse gases. As for methane being 20 to fifty times the potential of carbon dioxide: methane degrades into carbon dioxide with a half-life of twenty years, not enough time for it to have a significant impact on the atmosphere without us already releasing massive amounts of it at once, which we do not.