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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   26057 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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Yes it is a cycle, but if you replace a cycle where the carbon exists 500 years as a tree and 70 years as CO2 by a cycle where it exists 1 year as corn, 14 years as a cow and 70 years as CO2 it has a huge impact on the quantity of CO2 in the air.

Anyway oil is also natural, it did not magically appear under the ground. It's just a very long cycle.

And by the way I don't care about vegans, anyone thinking bees should consent to give you their honey is dumb

Yeah, the geological carbon cycle is still a cycle, but slow enough there's no equilibrium at human timescales.

At least when I was in college the geo cycle, rock weathering, and vulcanism was considered the most probable driver of temperature over geologic time. Burning coal is basically short-circuiting that cycle by releasing fossil carbon that wouldn't have subducted and come out of a volcano until a hundred million years from now.

It's like comparing surface eddies with a deep ocean current.

Cows don't eat trees (much) though -- they eat grass, and after a year that grass is turning back into CO2 one way or another.

The land used for the grass and the cereals could be used for something else (growing trees, for example). And by eating the grass and anything green in the grass cow do prevent trees to grow.

Moreover the grass produces CO2 if it's not eaten by some other animal while the cow produces CH4. CH4 has a stronger greenhouse effect than CO2 and then it quite rapidly degrades and becomes CO2.

Again, biological carbon cycle. Even the massive reforestation of agricultural land in the last century has only been a one-time temporary reduction in atmospheric CO2. Trees don't magically suck carbon out of the atmosphere and sequester it out of the biosphere; only some species of shelly plankton do that. And the very, very slow work of bogs creating coal deposits.

The land used for the grass and the cereals could be used for something else (growing trees, for example).

No, it couldn't -- cows (in the US) primarily graze in a place that has been know for hundreds (maybe more) of years as "The Great Plains" -- trees don't grow there.

Anyways, trees don't fix carbon either -- it doesn't really matter what you grow there, it's going to rot eventually.

Moreover the grass produces CO2 if it's not eaten by some other animal while the cow produces CH4. CH4 has a stronger greenhouse effect than CO2 and then it quite rapidly degrades and becomes CO2.

Actually proving that this made any difference would require writing out (and balancing) all of the reactions involved, including the ones taking place in the cow -- just saying "cows produce methane and that's even worse than CO2" doesn't really say anything about the quantities involved. I'm not going to do that work, because I'd be quite surprised if it didn't pencil out as a wash -- but you are welcome to write it up and if the methane from a cow's farts ends up significantly more impactful than all of the carbon contained in the grass a cow would eat over the course of a year I will eat a steak my words.

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