The Fireless Locomotive

Dragon Heart wrote in news:9bbb9633-bc1a-462d-92cb- snipped-for-privacy@d77g2000hsb.googlegroups.com:

methane, not CO2. However one has to remember there wouldn't be a fraction of the number of cows as there are now were it not for the fact that they are expecially bred to serve the human population.

We have lots and lots of cows here in New Zealand, to the point where the effluent run-off is becoming a problem. The reason we have them is that yanks, Brits, Europeans ... keep demanding more and more milk products from us and keep offering more and more money for said products. Our poor farmers just can't resist and are cutting down forests planted for timber production, tossing sheep aside (you don't want the wool anymore as you prefer petroleum based fibers) and bulldozing the orchards to provide you all with your demands. If you'd all just stop eating we could cut the methane production by 90%.

Greg.P.

Wouldn't farming become more efficient if we were all to become vegetarian?

Depends, NZ cows are grass fed, not grain fed. We're not about to start posting you cabbages and Lima beans from New Zealand. Per calory, there's less cost/energy usage in shipping you cheese and meat from NZ than cabbages etc from Spain and Italy. Your own meat production requires winter shelter, grain production and transport etc which is less efficient than half way around the world transport, so you buy fom us. We find the products to produce that make sense economically, which partially equates to efficiency. In return we buy Peco products and ITV TV programmes which can't be produced as economically here because our market is much smaller. We did used to buy Austin Allegros and Brush Electrics, but to be honest we found it much more efficient to do without those.

Greg.P. NZ

That's going to depend on which group of animals in N.America you consider should have precedence, the bisons/cattle, or the humans.

1600ad: 1 million humans + 100 million bisons. 2000ad: 500 million humans + 100 million cattle.

What was that about methane production and culling stock numbers?

Regards, Greg.P.

Can't disagree there, andnot forgetting ASH!

Here's a stunner - the "greenhouse gasses" given off buy food that we throw away in landfill (that's food that has gone out of date, not proper "waste") are equivelent to removing one in five cars from the road. Puts things in perspective, doesn't it! If nothing else it shows that attacking the easy targets is politicaly expedient rather that sensible, as is ever the case with the green bridage...

Cheers Richard

I wonder how many cows there are in North America now compared to the millions of bison that used to roam until man slaughtered the lot. Not a huge difference, I'll bet!

Cheers Richard

You live too far withdrawn and isolated from nature - Pacific Island atolls disappearing under rising sea levels and rapidly changing weather patterns make the situation reasonably certain. By the time we're 100% sure you'll be sea creatures developing gills.

It should be noted that very rapid climate change has been found in the past too - notably at the end if the last ice age at the time the English Cannel and North Sea were formed, so rapid change has to be taken in historical context too. Whatever "side" one may be on, the debate is nowhere near as black and white, or certain, as either side would have it.

Cheers Richard

It depends on how one feels about chemicals. Without "natural" fertilisation chemicals are needed instead. A trip to Norfolk will show what that has done to soil quality and run-off problems. Also, cows aren't just providers of meat. Gone are the days (since BSE) when *everything* used to be used, but the cow is still used for other things. Plus, of course, a lot of land suitable for animals is entirely unsuitable for growing crops, so that land would be wasted if not used by animals. Mankinds combining of farming animals and crops together did not come about by accident.

And I can't abide vegetarian food - which matters a lot to me!

Cheers Richard

news:9bbb9633-bc1a-462d-92cb-

Point of order, Mr. Chairman. Some UK cattle may be corn fed, but the vast majority are fed of silage over winter (with supplements in cattle cake as required) and grass in the summer.

I'm affraid NZ cheese and meat only reprsent a small market share these days, Britsh producers have made significant headway since all the health scares a few years back. I'd hazard we use more Canadian cheese than NZ these days, and significant amounts of Irish butter. Our local Morrisons only had UK lamb last time I went looking for some (I was looking for Welsh lamb, which cannot be beaten!).

Cheers Richard

Soemone commented that methane production must be up since there are more cows - I was merely pointing out that with the now gone millions of baffalo the numbers may well be similar, so methane levels may not have changed much from that source. Nothing to do with human population.

As an aside, and having sat behind some whilst doing carriage driving, there are now more horses in the UK than there has ever been. The horse is infact the first wind powered animal, often with lumpy bits....

Cheers Richard

Gosh, really? We must be so uneducated......

Things are changing, that's a fact and nothing new. They may or may not be changing more rapidly than before, that's up for debate, but is a concern.

What is far more certain is that barking up the wrong tree looking for quick-fix solutions will help no one, and could even make things even worse by introducing imbalances.

Cheers Richard

You are correct that water vapour is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

They can when the radiation is at a different wavelength in the spectrum.

MBQ

Why have people like you started using emotive language like "deniers", reminiscent of "holocaust deniers"?

If the evidence is so good, why does it need to be distorted so much, e.g. the infamous hockey stock curve.

We were all being told we were going to freeze to death in an imminent (on geological terms) ice age.

No, it's know that certain mathematical models can show this effect in certain models of the atmosphere.

Only recently, NASA had to quietly admit that the warmest day on record was not quite as recent as many would have us believe. The data and models are certainly not infallible.

MBQ

In article , snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com wrote:

But, of course, water vapour has a short lifetime in the atmosphere (most of us have noticed this at one time or another..). Of the order of a few days, from memory; whereas CO2 has an atmospheric lifetime which is much longer - of the order of 10s of years (again, from memory, though I could get my copy of Houghton out if anyone wants confirmation).

/Precisely/. Doing simple 1st order modelling, you can treat the Sun as a black body at 5780 K and the Earth as one at about 300-odd K. That means that most of the emission from the Sun is in the visible range, so most of the initial incoming radiation is in the visible range - and that's where the Earth's atmosphere is highly transparent (you can confirm this by looking upwards on a clear day: being able to see the Sun confirms that the atmosphere is transparent to most radiation from the Sun...). This sunlight doesn't do much to warm the atmosphere initially ('cos the atmosphere is transparent in the visible range) so it goes to heat the ground, which is opaque (again, easy to confirm: look downwards..). The warmed ground - at about 300-odd K - emits in the infra- red range, and certain atmospheric molecules (notably CO2 and water vapour, plus trace stuff like Methane) absorb strongly in the infra-red. So the atmospheric gas warms a bit - and having warmed, it loses anergy by radiation. This radiation is emitted in all directions, so some of it goes back downward. Once that's understood, you can treat it as a successive-shell problem with radiative transfer between shells - this is literally undergraduate physics (it's a neat problem to set students). Incidently, the reason that CO2 stays mixed and doesn't settle out is that the heating source for the lower atmosphere is at the bottom - the ground warmed by incoming sunlight and emitting infra-red. This means that the air is hottest close to the ground, and so tends to rise, with cool air from slightly further up sinking to take its place. This keeps everything well mixed (in fact, collision rates in the atmosphere below about 100km are high enough to keep things well mixed - it's only higher than that you find heavier and lighter gases separating).

That's the very basic stuff. For a good introduction to the very complex science of the real atmosphere and recent climate change, I'd recommend John Houghton's "Global Warming: the complete briefing". A full, nearly-up-to-date treatment of the science is in "Cimate Change 2007: the physical science basis" which is volume 1 of the 2007 IPCC report. Both are published by Cambridge Univ. Press.

Because Chorley and those who chimed in on his side refer to hoaxes, distortions, the "climate change brigade", etc etc and so forth. One of our local deniers talks about the "bean sprouts and granola crowd." Same problem. (FWIW, I'm a carnivore.)

What hockey stick curve? Are you referring to exponential growth curves? What's your problem with those? If you don't want the data plotted as a hockey stick, just plot them on logarithmic co-ordinates of the appropriate power. The curve will then be a straight line. Or even a curve that slopes down to the right... Magic! But the reality won't be different just because you change the graphics.

See below.

Quite so. And those models show that there is a range of climate change rates possible, depending the rates at which atmospheric constituents change (for example - other factors may also change the rates.) That's why I said that nobody knows for sure. When tested against historical data, the models are pretty good. That pretty good match makes the models reliable enough that when current rates of CO2 increase in the atmosphere indicate a probably rapid climate change, one should take heed. It's better to act as if the worst will happen than assume you'll stay lucky.

BTW, if the reference to "mathematical models" is supposed to raise doubts, keep in mind that's all we have. All science and technology relies on mathematical models. True, we all have imprecise, vague and often wrong models of reality in our heads, but even so those models are essentially mathematical.

So what? Who said the models were infallible? And what does one warmest day mean? Nothing. The trends over time are what matter. The historical trend until ca. 1950 was for the planet to cool down - we should be seeing the signs of a shift into a "small" ice age, such as the one that lasted from ca. 1100-1600 (and destroyed the Icelanders' Greenland settlement.) But we are seeing an opposing trend.

Footnote about mathematical models: when we learned about principal and interest in middle school math class many years ago, and about population growth rates in geography class, I applied the interest calculation to the then human population. I predicted 6,000,000,000 people by ca. 2000. I was almost spot on.

Counting everything north of the Panama Canal and the Caribbean Islands, that's about right. In round numbers, Canada is 30 million, USA 300 million and Mexico 100 million.

Q: What's the difference between a buffalo and a bathroom?

A: You can't wash your hands in a bison.