How much methane does a cow actually produce?

Cows are notorious for the amount of methane they produce. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas (GHG), but just how much do cows actually give off and how does this compare to other methane emission sources? This post tries to give an overview of all things methane and cows..

Where does the methane come from?

The plant diet of cows and other ruminants is high in cellulose, which cannot be digested by the ruminant itself. However, ruminants have a symbiotic relationship with colonies of microorganisms, called methanogens, which live in their gut and break down the cellulose into carbohydrates.. These carbohydrates provide both the microbial community and the ruminant with an energy source. Methane is produced as a by-product of this process.

A common misconception is that the cow’s rear end emits methane, however the vast majority is released orally. Researched carried out by Grainger et al. in 2007 found that 92-98 % was emitted orally (I won’t go into detail about how they found that out!). It is also wrong to think that all bovines emit the same amount of methane but I will go into this in more detail later on in the post.

Global Bovine Emissions

Global emissions of methane were estimated to be between 76 – 92 Tg per year (1 Tg = 1 million metric tonnes). This is roughly equal to ~10-15 % of global methane emissions, which in turn is ~15 % of global GHG emissions. Methane is a more potent GHG than CO₂, which means that gram for gram methane warms the atmosphere more than CO₂. Methane also has a much shorter lifetime in the atmosphere compared to CO₂ (~10 years compared to 100s of years) which will produce more rapid impacts on the global climate. This also means that any reductions in methane emissions will see a faster decrease in atmospheric concentrations than compared to CO₂.

Dairy vs. Beef (and some other animals)

The table and figure below compares farmed animals in the UK and their contribution to methane emissions per animal per year in kilograms. A dairy cow emits over twice the amount of methane than a beef cow and is by far the highest contributor of all the animals studied. There are also more dairy cows in the UK than beef cattle (1.81 million compared to 1.66 million). All data found from the UK GHG Inventory report 1990-2012. Other research has shown that cows emit methane at regular times of the day, specifically during feeding and milking. Although these figures do not take into account farming and transport GHG emissions and the actual amount of milk each animal produces, perhaps it would be better to buy goat milk? Although the more preferable metric of Carbon per Litre would allow a more concrete conclusion on this point.

	Kg CH4	# Dairy Cows
Pigs	1.5	74
Goats	5	22
Sheep	8	14
Beef	50.5	2
Dairy	110.7	1

Graphics credit to @OatJack.

Future Bovine Emissions

Future methane emissions are almost certainly expected to increase due to global food demand increasing from population growth. Developed nations also consume more meat, developing nations are thus expected to increase their meat consumption in future years.

Methods to reduce methane emissions from cows are summarised in the table below (taken from Reay’s book Methane and Climate Change). These have been classified into short term (available now), medium term (available in ten years) and long term (not commercially available for at least another ten years). Many of these suggestions have been disputed as they are not economically viable, especially in developing nations.

Short Term	Medium Term	Long Term
Reduce animal numbers	Rumen Modifiers	Targeted manipulation of rumen ecosystem
Increase productivity per animal	Select plants that produce lower methane yield by the animals	Breed animals with low methane yield
Manipulate diet
Rumen Modifiers

An alternate pathway would be to try and capture emissions from cows. A dairy cow can produce up to 400 litres of methane per day! When burned, this is enough energy to power a small fridge for a day. Some scientists have harnessed methane emitted from cows in backpacks (see photo and video below) however scaling this up to all 10 million cows (this includes all calves, young bulls etc in the UK alone) could be problematic!

Methane backpack. Image sourced from here: http://inhabitat.com/spiffy-backpack-traps-bovine-gas/

Click for the video: “Backpacks measure cows’ methane” (BBC News)

If you have any questions concerning this post please ask in the comments below!

4.5 Billion Years of the Earth’s Temperature

This blog post will give a brief overview of how the Earth’s temperature has changed up to the present day. We only have actual temperature measurements going back a couple of hundred years however there are several other methods we can use to give reliable estimates of the Earth’s temperature in the past. ‘Proxy’ measurements include rock sediment sampling, tree rings and ice cores. The video below gives a good introduction to how the British Antarctic Survey use ice cores to generate accurate atmospheric gas and temperature records going back 800,000 years! The diagram below shows an overview of the Earth’s temperature from 500 million years ago to the present and may help with picturing the changes in temperature when reading this post.

 Very Early Earth’s History (4.5 billion – 3.8 billion years ago)

The Earth was formed roughly 4.5 billion years ago. Until 3.8 billion years ago it was a completely inhospitable environment with the surface being mainly molten lava. The Earth eventually cooled enough for its crust to form. Land masses could then exist and, when it was cold enough to rain, the oceans formed.  Around this time the atmosphere was predominantly consisted of methane (CH₄) and ammonia (NH₃), two extremely important greenhouse gases, thus their radiative forcing kept the Earth’s atmosphere warm and toasty!

The Oxygen Explosion (2.5 billion – 500 million years ago)

Oxygen (O₂) in the atmosphere was almost non-existent until ~2.5 billion years ago. The evolution of cyanobacteria, which produced oxygen as a bi-product of photosynthesis, meant that O₂ levels dramatically increased. This rapid change in atmospheric composition caused widespread extinctions of most of the previous anaerobic bacteria. This ‘new’ atmosphere made the Earth much colder as there were no longer bacteria emitting radiative forcing-methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It is thought that the average temperature at the equator was roughly the same as current Antarctic conditions!

History of the Earth’s Temperature. originally sourced from here.

500 – 250 million years ago

During this period the Earth’s atmosphere became more stable, eventually cooling to similar temperatures to today’s average (see first section on plot above where the temp change is ~0 ΔT).

Animal Evolution (250 – 65 million years ago)

During this time the evolution of aerobically respiring animals occurred, i.e. DINOSAURS! This meant the concentration of CO₂ increased and global temperatures increased again. We know that there was a sudden decrease in temperatures around 65 million years ago which resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs. The most widely accepted reason for this is a massive comet hitting the Earth sending huge amounts of matter (read: aerosols) into the atmosphere. This caused a global decrease in temperature due to an increased albedo effect (for more information about this and the contribution of aerosols to this effect please read my previous blog: An introduction to aerosols).

Thermal Maximum (55 million years ago)~55 million years ago, records show a massive warming of between 5-8 ⁰C in just 20,000 years (It is thought that during this time it was so warm palm trees could have grown in the poles!). The direct cause is still disputed amongst scientists, however it is generally agreed that a sudden release of carbon into the atmosphere caused the warming. This was probably in the form of methane from either the ocean bed or from within ice structures called clathrates. It was after this period that mammals started to evolve.

 

Ice Age (35 million years ago)

The thermal maximum continued to around 35 million years ago when the Earth cooled into the Ice Age. The theory behind this change in temperature is that a type of fern named Azolla became extinct. The Azolla then sank to the bottom of the ocean, taking with it much of the carbon absorbed as carbon dioxide, therefore removing it from the atmosphere. With the carbon dioxide not present to act as a greenhouse gas, global temperatures decreased again. Unlike the last period of cooling, this time the Earth had fully formed continents, including mountain ranges, and land mass at the South Pole (Antarctica). This new land coverage helped amplify the cooling via circulation.

An ice age is defined as when a planet’s poles are covered with ice, so technically we are still in one! Within an ice age there are periods of glacials and inter-glacials. Glacials are episodes of colder temperatures whereas inter-glacials are warmer time phases. Both will last several thousands of years. These changes in climate can be explained with the Milankovitch cycles (please read post #2 – The Milankovitch Cycles – for more information). NB: You can see on the plot above sections labelled ‘the mini ice age’ and ‘the medieval warming’ period. I plan to do future blogs on these events as this post is getting far too long!

Recent Warming (1880 – present day)

The warming we have seen in recent years has been like nothing experienced before in the Earth’s history. The last 100 years of warming has cancelled out the previous 6000 years of cooling that occurred before. The video below (sourced from NASA) shows just how dramatic the rate of global warming is over this time period.

Thanks for reading to the end of this post, it ended up a bit too long! Next time I want to introduce an event called the Northern Atlantic Oscillation: the phenomenon that is thought to have caused the medieval warming period.

A brief introduction to aerosols..

Let’s skip the chit chat and go straight into post number three… Spray-cans will come to mind for many people when they first think of aerosols, but this term has a much more general meaning and plays an important role in climate science. Anything that has a suspension of liquid or solid in a gas is deemed an aerosol. In fact, a spray-can may actually contain hundreds of different individual aerosols.

A simple demonstration that shows the significance of aerosols in the atmosphere is the ‘cloud in a bottle’ trick. A trickle of water is added to an empty bottle and the cap put on. By just shaking and squeezing the bottle (simulating pressure changes that occur every day in the Earth’s atmosphere) no cloud is formed. However, if smoke is added, from a blown out match for example, and then the bottle squeezed, a small vapour cloud becomes visible – try it yourself or see the video of it below!

These tiny particles – aerosols – are necessary for clouds to form anywhere in the world. The photograph below shows how clouds have formed from aerosols released by ships.

Cloud formation using aerosols emitted from ships

Aerosol sources can be both natural and anthropogenic. The photo above is an example of industrial aerosol emissions but other major sources can include deserts (in the form of dust and sand) and from fires / biomass burning, which can be both natural and manmade, even tiny ice crystals can be classed as aerosols. One of the global climate models, Global Earth Observing System Model – Version 5 (GEOS-5) has simulated the emissions and transportation of all major aerosols from September 1^st 2006 to March 17^th 2007 and the video can be seen below. For a description of the colours see the figure description.

Summary copied directly from you tube link: “Dust (red) blows over the Saharan desert and interacts with two Atlantic tropical cyclones. Sea salt (blue) churned up from the ocean by surface winds is most prevalent along mid-latitude storm tracks and fronts in the Southern Ocean and within tropical cyclones. Organic and black carbon (green) burst from extensive biomass burning in South America and Africa. Sulphate (white) arises from three primary sources: fossil fuel emissions over Asia, Europe, and the United States; a persistently active volcano in Mozambique, Africa; and a large eruption from the Karthala Volcano on Grande Comore Island, Comoros, in January 2007.”

Aerosols have both positive and negative radiative forcing effects (for more information on radiative forcing please read my first post! – An Introduction to Global Warming). The diagram below shoes the major contributors to global warming and whether they have a positive effect (a warming – coloured red) or negative effect (a cooling – coloured blue) on the Earth’s climate. The highlighted box shows the contribution from aersols – a very negative effect! However the black lines show how much of this estimation is uncertain. There is a large amount of research currently trying to reduce these uncertainty bars so we can be more sure of how much an overall effect aerosols have on our climate.

Global average radiative forcing estimates and ranges. Originally produced by the IPCC.

There are two main ways aerosols effect our climate. The first is a ‘direct‘ way. I.e through re-radiating energy (warming the Earth) or reflecting incomming sun’s rays back out to space (cooling the Earth). Again, my first post explains this in more detail. The other way aerosols effect our climate is called the ‘indirect effect‘. As aerosols are needed as ‘seeds’ for clouds to form, an increase in aerosols can cause an increase in cloud number thus increasing the Albedo effect. When aerosols help form clouds they are referred to as ‘cloud condensation nuclei’ (CCN). The more CCN present the whiter the clouds can appear which further increases the albedo effect.

As you read this you may be thinking, the more aerosols present the better in the atmosphere as they have an overall cooling effect of climate however not all effects of aerosols are good. Aerosols can have a huge impact of air quality and atmospheric pollution. The recent smog events in Singapore (shown in the picture below) are thought to have occurred because of aerosols released from illegal biomass burning from Indonesia and travelling up to Singapore where they formed these smog clouds which can have severe health effects.

Comparison of Singapore skyline from Feb 2012 and June 2013. Image originally from BBC News website.

Any questions or comments please write them below, or perhaps even a request for future posts?? Next time I plan to give a very brief overview of the history of the Earth’s temperature has changed over 65 millions years. They’ll be videos in that one as well!

Thanks for reading.

A brief Introduction to Global Warming

Hello and welcome to my first blog post! I can’t really start without an explanation of how global warming occurs, as this is one of the most fundamental reasons why climate science exists! So here we go…

The Earth’s atmosphere allows life as we know it to exist. Without it, global temperatures would be around 33-35 ^oC colder. The gases that make up our atmosphere can absorb some of the sun’s energy leading to an increase in temperature. Energy from the Sun reaches the Earth in the form of light and heat. The Earth has the ability to absorb all of this radiation but some is reflected back into space either by the Earth’s surface or by its atmosphere. This process is called the Albedo Effect and without it the Earth would be much warmer. The Earth re-radiates energy at a slightly longer wavelength that can be absorbed by some atmospheric gases. These gases then re-radiate this as thermal energy.

A measure of how strong an effect this re-radiated energy has on the Earth’s temperature is called a gas’ radiative forcing. Radiative forcing is the difference between radiant energy received by the earth and energy radiated back into space, and its units are in watts per meter squared (Wm^-2). The gases that contribute most to the greenhouse effect, in terms of their radiative forcing, their lifetimes and also their abundance in the atmosphere include carbon dioxide (CO₂), water vapour (H₂O) and methane (Ch₄). The relationship between temperature and concentrations of these gases is strikingly positively correlated, as the graph below shows. In another blog I plan to explain more about how the Earth’s temperature has changed throughout geological history.

Record of the Earth’s temperature and carbon dioxide concentrations taken from ice core data in Antarctica.

Almost all atmospheric gases have both natural and anthropogenic (man-made) sources. In fact, for most of the major greenhouse gases natural sources outweigh man-made. Since the Industrial Revolution, however, anthropogenic emissions have been rapidly increasing. The plots below, published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), show just how high the atmospheric concentrations have risen. It is this increase, or offset from the pre-industrial balance between sources and sinks, that is causing temperatures to rise. For more information on the IPCC and its soon to be released 5th assessment report click here.  Or if you want a more detailed summary of all the aspects of climate change this ‘summary for policy makers’ is really interesting.

Time series of Methane (CH4), Carbon Dioxide (CO2) and Nitrous Oxide (N2O) emissions for the last 10,000 years.

Of course natural variability also affects the earth’s climate and can contribute to global warming. Examples of natural variability include variations in the Earth’s orbits (i.e. Milankovitch cycles – more to come in another blog), solar radiation variability, lunar tides and interactions between the oceans and the atmosphere. The world’s scientific community agree that the Earth is currently warming however there is a degree of discussion about how much human impact is contributing to global warming. The IPCC has stated that ‘the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations’. Very likely being classed as a >90% probability.

Thanks for reading what I hope is the first of many blog posts.  Next up I will discuss changes to climate that occur on longer times scales, i.e changes to the Earth’s orbit about that sun.