Mark Bittman from the New York Times opened a can of worms with this little blog post this week:

"A report from Science News (via Food Times) argues that beef produces 19 kilograms of CO2 for every kilogram served; that grass-fed beef is worse — yes, worse — for global warming than feed-lot beef; and that for every percentage reduction we make in meat consumption we’ll see a corresponding reduction in its contribution to global warming."
- Mark Bittman, Meat and Global Warming

From that Science News article he linked:

"[Green house gas emissions are] roughly on the order of 50 percent higher in grass-finished systems."

"The reason: "It's related to the much higher volumes of feed throughput and associated methane and nitrous-oxide emissions." He added that most pastures were highly managed, and subject to "periodic renovations and also fertilization." Finally, with grass-fed cattle "there is also a high [grass] trampling rate. So the actual land area that you need to maintain magnifies that difference."

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Are cows the cause of global warming?

A cow does on overage release between 70 and 120 kg of Methane per year. Methane is a greenhouse gas like carbon dioxide (CO2). But the negative effect on the climate of Methane is 23 times higher than the effect of CO2. Therefore the release of about 100 kg Methane per year for each cow is equivalent to about 2'300 kg CO2 per year.

Let's compare this value of 2'300 kg CO2: The same amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) is generated by burning 1'000 liters of petrol. With a car using 8 liters of petrol per 100 km, you could drive 12'500 km per year (7'800 miles per year).

World-wide, there are about 1.5 billion cows and bulls. All ruminants (animals which regurgitates food and re-chews it) on the world emit about two billion metric tons of CO2-equivalents per year.

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FEED LOTS

Total cattle numbers in the U.S. were at 97 million head on Jan. 1, slightly above the 96.7 million on Jan 1, 2006.

THAT IS A LOT OF MANURE, BUT

 
what was on the vast grasslands of the plains before the white man came?

 65 million bison,all emitting methane,

 NOW THAT WAS A LOT OF MANURE !!!

WHY DIDN'T WE HAVE THE GREEN HOUSE PROBLEM BACK THEN ??????