A VIDEO FEATURING a farmer explaining how greenhouse gases emitted by cattle work falsely concludes that methane released by cows has no effect on climate change.

The methane from ruminant animals, including cows, is widely considered to be a significant source of greenhouse gases, though there are real controversies over how exactly this should be measured.

While the internet is filled with arguments denying the effects of farming on climate change, it is worth delving into one argument that methane from cow herds is harmless, as featured in a video whose popularity has endured online.

The video largely consists of a Tyrone-based social media influencer, Andrew Wright, talking to camera.

“The biggest lie in the world right now is that cows are killing the planet,” he begins in the video before launching into an explanation of how cows fit into the carbon cycle.

He says that all the carbon used by cows starts in the air and gets stored by grass. These in turn get released in the cow’s breath, turned into food or, in seven out of 10 cases, the carbon atoms are converted into methane. 

“This next bit is where scientists like to gaslight the farmers and say methane is not the same as CO2” he tells us.

Wright notes, correctly, that methane has a much stronger effect on climate change than carbon dioxide, CO2, the most talked-about greenhouse gas. 

However, he also notes that this methane will break down to CO2 and water in about 12 years. 

Wright continues: “What this means is that, if you have a stable number of animals, like this farm has for the last 12 years, as you emit the seven methane molecules, seven more that you emitted a decade earlier have just broken down back to carbon, to be reabsorbed by the grass.

“The net effect of the methane molecules emitted by my cows on global warming is zero. Factually zero,” he concludes.

The original video is years old, and was first posted on multiple social media platforms in February 2024. 

However, there have been numerous reposts of the video by various Irish users since then, including one post that has accumulated more than 340,000 views since being published on Facebook on 3 August.

Much of the video describing how carbon is taken from the atmosphere and converted into methane is factual. 

“The farmer does a pretty good job at explaining some of the carbon cycle as it pertains to ruminants,” said Gary J. Lanigan, professor and principal research officer with Teagasc.

“His final statement, however, is somewhat erroneous.”

To explain why, it is useful to clarify how greenhouse gases are counted.

The farmer is right to say that some CO2 is taken up during photosynthesis and subsequently breathed out or turned into food.

This is not counted as an emission, because it is simply atmospheric carbon being trapped and shortly re-released.

However, in cow’s stomachs, this carbon atom latches onto hydrogen instead of oxygen, creating methane, another gas which cows subsequently burp out. 

The consensus is that this methane has a significant effect on the earth’s climate, and this is what is usually talked about when people discuss emissions from cows.

“Methane is considered the second most important GHG in terms of global warming and anthropogenic climate change,” the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) told The Journal.

“It traps significantly more heat radiated from the earth’s surface, approximately 28 times more than CO2, on a weight-by-weight basis when considered over a one hundred year period, which gives it a higher Global Warming Potential (GWP).”

Lanigan notes that the effects of greenhouse gases are expressed by showing how much climate change they would be expected to cause in the next 100 years.

The use of this time frame is debated, and using a longer time frame makes methane’s damage seem less extreme compared with longer-lasting emissions. 

However, even at a 500-year timeline, methane still has a warming potential that is deemed to be eight times that of CO2.

For now at least, the GWP using a hundred-year timeframe is used as a standard measure.

 The EPA says methane accounts for more than a third of Ireland’s greenhouse gas emissions, and that these are mainly caused by ruminant agriculture, such as cows. 

So, given the severe warming effect of methane, what is the argument that the farmer in the video is making?

Essentially, he claims that carbon released by cows is generally taken from the atmosphere; it is being recycled, rather than fresh carbon being released.

(This ignores the effects of inputs or land use change, but these are not outputs of the cows themselves).

In addition, the farmer notes that if a cow population is kept steady, the amount of methane in the atmosphere due to that herd is also steady — at least after 12 years, when the oldest emissions break down at the same rate that new ones are released.

“After this original ‘pulse’ into the system there won’t be any other net contribution,” Lanigan said, contrasting this methane release with CO2, which lasts about 5,000 years in the atmosphere.

So, is the farmer in the video correct that “the net effect of the methane molecules emitted by my cows on global warming is zero”?

No — just because the methane released by the cows remains at a stable, higher level, that doesn’t mean the earth’s temperature is unaffected.

Greenhouse gases trap heat against the earth a bit like how clothes trap warmth against a person’s body — and this is a common analogy used to understand it.

As methane has a very strong warming effect, we might compare a year’s worth of methane released by a cow to a thick jumper — though one that disintegrates after 12 years.

In the first year, the wearer is comfortably warm. In the second, they don a second jumper over the first and start to get uncomfortable. By year 12, they are feeling very hot, with 12 layers of jumpers trapping heat.

However, in year 13 something new happens — the initial jumper has worn away and no longer traps heat, at which point the wearer dons a new jumper, bringing the total number of effective jumpers back up to 12.

In this hypothetical scenario, would it be fair to say that the jumpers can’t be making the wearer overheat, just because there wasn’t a net increase in jumper from year 13 onwards?

Even if the number of jumpers has become stable, they are still keeping the wearer a lot warmer than if there were none.

“Global warming increases at a faster rate when methane increases, and decreases at a faster rate too, due to its higher ability to trap heat combined with its short residence time,” Lanigan wrote.

“However, it is untrue to say that there are net-zero emissions after 12 years with a stable herd, though the emissions will be much reduced compared to the cumulative impact of CO2 or N2O.”

The EPA said that, since the 1990s, methane emissions in Ireland were declining. However, with the lifting of EU milk quotas in 2015, dairy herds expanded, causing methane emissions to rise again.

“Given the dominant contribution of the agriculture sector, particularly ruminant livestock, on Ireland’s CH4 emissions, this is clearly the main area to target policy measures to intervene,” the EPA wrote, saying that a pivot to other types of farming would “see immediate reductions in the level of methane emissions.”

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