Does basic cybernetics prove that estimating our methane emissions is impossible?

[teo123]

Anyway, I've written a paper about the problem in Croatian language and I will try to have it reviewed by some expert. Because I really want to know whether our methane emissions are increasing or decreasing.

[brimstoneSalad]

Bigger cows output more methane Teo. There's not much you can do to drastically reduce methane emissions per kg of dead cow flesh. Confining them and not letting them move fattens them up a little faster relative to food intake, but methane remains roughly proportional to calorie intake.

But the problem is that many vegans are claiming that grass-fed cows emit around 3 times as much methane per a litre of milk than grain-fed cows.

What is that based on?

Almost all cows are pasture or hay fed for the first part of their lives. I know of no protocol in actual use commercially that is 100% grain (as opposed to hay silage which may be from a grain producing plant's leaves) from birth to slaughter. Finishing is the last fattening up period which relies more on grains (usually not 100%, but it's a lot), and which is roughly half the duration of the grazing period.

My understanding is that actual methane emissions per day may be slightly lower for grass, probably due to lower calorie consumption, but because it requires more days to grow a cow to slaughter size on grass that total methane emissions are actually a little higher. I don't think I've ever heard anything like tree times higher.

IIRC methane production is around 20% higher for pasture finished cattle. It also requires much more land, so we can look at the opportunity cost of carbon sequestration from not allowing that land to rewild, but that's aside from the point on methane.
I don't think these LCAs account for methane released by manure lagoon strategies vs. more aerobic decomposition of dispersed feces. I would be a little surprised but not completely shocked if they ended up being about the same in terms of methane output.

But it's even more important to be able to detect situations when the experts are not actually saying what the politicians and activists are saying that they are saying.

Figure out how to find credible sources of expert consensus, don't try to do your own statistical analysis.

And it's not me who noticed the problem, it's the Quora user called Malcolm Forster who informed me of the problem.

Just as recovering substance abusers should not associate with other substance abusers, you should not be associating with conspiracy theorists.

Methane concentration in the atmosphere is increasing over time. It reaches equilibriums pretty fast in geological time, it just rises with a new source until the equilibrium is reached. If it's going up, so is production. It doesn't mean it's all directly anthropogenic (although a lot of that recent increase is probably indirectly so, fueled by global warming increasing the output of other sources like wetlands and melting permafrost), but you trying to data crunch it away or find any kind of answer in mathematics is very much like your weird atmospheric refraction theories in flat-Earthism. Mathematical analysis is not going to help you glean any new insight. Experts are not mathematically incompetent, but beyond that it's pretty straight forward- A positive slope means a new or increasing source has shown up/is showing up or a methane sink has been lost/is being lost, that's it. The data is not so clean as to give the equivalent of a forensic time of death in year month day and hour. If you had better direct data on anthropogenic sources you might be able to subtract that and then correlate natural sources to temperature rises to do better predictions, but that's a kind of data we're lacking so there's nothing you can do. It's something experts are working on. You're not one of them.

It's embarrassing that you're trying to write papers on this, that's not the way to find out something. Scientific paper submissions are not your personal Quora.

Anthropogenic methane emissions from animal agriculture are increasing because beef consumption is still increasing, better management is practically a rounding error. Given the increase, I don't even think perfect management of manure (the biggest factor in animal ag. that is within human control, aside from just not eating meat) is going to be enough to see any net reductions.
Whether methane emissions from landfills and the oil industry (including old open wells) are increasing or decreasing is a better question, because good management in that domain returns enormous dividends. This is a matter of ongoing empirical study. You will need to stay tuned.

The total is increasing anyway. If we've reduced methane emissions from direct sources, indirect ones have taken up the balance which is very concerning. This is why this is such an urgent matter of research. But you're not contributing here. You have to make on the ground measurements, not Java script.

[teo123]

but methane remains roughly proportional to calorie intake

Er... No, it is approximately proportional to the cellulose intake. The bacteria in cows emit methane when digesting cellulose.

What is that based on?

As far as I can see, on two things:
1) Massive differences in the way carbohydrates are stored in grass compared to how they are stored in grain. The carbohydrates in grass are mostly cellulose, and carbohydrates in grain are mostly starch. Digestion of starch doesn't emit methane, the digestion of cellulose, the way the bacteria in cows do that, emits a lot of methane. Sure, the bacteria in kangaroos are capable of digesting cellulose without emitting as much methane, but that's not useful to us now.
2) Massive differences in feed-conversion ratio between grass-fed cows and grain-fed cows. It takes around 3 kg of grain to produce one litre of milk, but it takes much more grass to do that.

What's wrong with that calculation is that it fails to take into account the carbon-capturing effects of pastures. Cows make land more fertile, and more fertile land means more plants grow on it, and more plants means capturing more carbon. Allan Savory is claiming that, if done properly, pasture-raised cows can be so efficient that they capture more carbon than they emit. That is almost certainly bullshit quantitatively, but that effect is real qualitatively. Most likely it results in pasture-raised cows emitting around 20% more methane (rather than 300%) than grain-fed cows.

Figure out how to find credible sources of expert consensus

Then, tell me, what do experts say, are our methane emissions increasing or decreasing?

but you trying to data crunch it away or find any kind of answer in mathematics is very much like your weird atmospheric refraction theories in flat-Earthism

Hahaha! A complete rejection of the quantitative methods (such as Flat-Earthism) is the equivalent of trying to do a proper statistical analysis?

Experts are not mathematically incompetent

How much do you think climatologists know about cybernetics? I would wager that if you ask an average climatologist whether the concentration of methane in the atmosphere with respect to our methane emissions is an IT1-type system, they would either not understand the question or they would give an intuitive but wrong answer "yes".

It's embarrassing that you're trying to write papers on this, that's not the way to find out something. Scientific paper submissions are not your personal Quora.

Then what the hell is the peer-review there for?

[teo123]

Just as recovering substance abusers should not associate with other substance abusers, you should not be associating with conspiracy theorists.

And how do you know that Malcolm Forster believes any conspiracy theory? He simply informed me that the argument I used, that this diagram shows our methane emissions are decreasing because the 2nd derivative of the curve is negative, is wrong. I fail to see where the conspiracy is here.

[brimstoneSalad]

Anaerobic bacteria are perfectly happy to turn many kinds of carbohydrates into methane if the cow does not absorb them fast enough. It's not as simple as cellulose content. Very high starch content may favor other pathways which may produce a little less methane per calorie, but it's not like the bacteria are uninvolved. The reduction just apparently isn't that drastic.

And no, it's not due to Savory bullshit evening the scales. Soil sequestration is modest and limited, it stops building up over time to reach a new equilibrium.
https://oms-www.files.svdcdn.com/produc ... report.pdf
You need to stop spreading regenerative agriculture pseudoscience.

Starch just isn't a magic bullet. It's still an anaerobic environment well suited to methane production.

Just as recovering substance abusers should not associate with other substance abusers, you should not be associating with conspiracy theorists.

And how do you know that Malcolm Forster believes any conspiracy theory? He simply informed me that the argument I used, that this diagram shows our methane emissions are decreasing because the 2nd derivative of the curve is negative, is wrong. I fail to see where the conspiracy is here.

I thought you were saying this person was putting you onto the whole erroneous argument against modern climate science that you're making.

[brimstoneSalad]

but you trying to data crunch it away or find any kind of answer in mathematics is very much like your weird atmospheric refraction theories in flat-Earthism

Hahaha! A complete rejection of the quantitative methods (such as Flat-Earthism) is the equivalent of trying to do a proper statistical analysis?

You were promoting some kind of alternative optics, without understanding optics. Here too you're failing to understand the basics.

It's embarrassing that you're trying to write papers on this, that's not the way to find out something. Scientific paper submissions are not your personal Quora.

Then what the hell is the peer-review there for?

For peers who have something to contribute. People who have been educated on the basics. If you want to be taught, take a class. If you want me to spend time explaining this in more detail for you because you genuinely want to understand, then we can maybe arrange some tutoring, although I'm reluctant.

[teo123]

Anaerobic bacteria are perfectly happy to turn many kinds of carbohydrates into methane if the cow does not absorb them fast enough. It's not as simple as cellulose content. Very high starch content may favor other pathways which may produce a little less methane per calorie, but it's not like the bacteria are uninvolved. The reduction just apparently isn't that drastic.

I don't understand.
Are you implying that cow's blood sugar levels don't spike when they are eating grain? Because they don't spike when cows are eating grass: the bacteria digest the cellulose into unsaturated fatty acids, not into glucose. And that when a grain-fed cow is given antibiotics, its blood sugar levels start spiking? Is that what you are saying? Seems fairly easy to disprove experimentally, even without the methane-measuring devices.

But we do have methane-measuring devices now that measure how much methane cows emit, that have been used to experimentally prove that cows whose diet is supplemented with seaweed emit a few times less methane.

And even if what you are saying is true, the math still doesn't add up that grass-fed cows emit only 20% more methane per a litre of milk than grain-fed cows. There is still a huge difference in feed-conversion ratios.

You need to stop spreading regenerative agriculture pseudoscience.

I'm sorry, but that seems to be the only way the math adds up. And, as an engineer, I value mathematical arguments over ideological arguments.

Starch just isn't a magic bullet.

You are right in that the substances found in seaweed appear to have an even greater effect.

I thought you were saying this person was putting you onto the whole erroneous argument against modern climate science that you're making.

So, yeah, you completely ignored what he has to say and made huge assumptions what he actually meant. How nice of you!

Here too you're failing to understand the basics.

And how do you know you understand the basics correctly?

[teo123]

It's not as simple as cellulose content.

Look, my experience has taught me that, whenever somebody says "It's more complicated than that." (AKA, going against the Occam's Razor), and doesn't have mathematics that explains that, he is almost always wrong. Even when somebody has mathematics, they are often wrong (like when Flat-Earthers have mathematics which argues that the perspective makes things appear bigger simply by them moving upwards or downwards), but without mathematics...

[brimstoneSalad]

It's not as simple as cellulose content.

Look, my experience has taught me that

My experience has taught me that you're a conspiracy theorist at heart Teo, and you're almost always wrong about everything. Betting against your assumptions has a good track record.

whenever somebody says "It's more complicated than that." (AKA, going against the Occam's Razor),

You're not following Occam's razor, nor do you understand it even now after all of this time.
You can't make the simplest assumptions possible in the context of your ignorance about biology and claim that's the most likely. It is the explanation with the fewest additional assumptions accounting for all of the myriad variables and experimental data that is the most likely.

You're wasting everybody's time, including people you're subjecting your papers to.

I don't understand.

That we agree on. But more importantly, nobody understands it very well because it's a matter of ongoing research.

You need to stop spreading regenerative agriculture pseudoscience.

I'm sorry, but that seems to be the only way the math adds up. And, as an engineer, I value mathematical arguments over ideological arguments.

These are direct measurements Teo, and we're talking about methane not CO2 equivalents and sequestration. Shut up about it or you're going to get banned again.

So, yeah, you completely ignored what he has to say and made huge assumptions what he actually meant. How nice of you!

This person is not here arguing Teo, you are. I'm not addressing the arguments of somebody who isn't here and you didn't even quote as far as I could tell.

You're a waste of time, so much so that I've started to not read your posts. Which means you should just be permanently banned because if even I won't read your posts anymore all you're doing in effect is spamming.

Here too you're failing to understand the basics.

And how do you know you understand the basics correctly?

You're trying to trick me into tutoring you for free. Lately you've gotten so little response that you've taken to trolling and baiting people. It's not going to happen. I've seen that you've made multiple threads with this claim too, and you're trolling up (related) bad economic claims too.

If I thought this was something normal people were remotely confused about, then I'd write on it, but I don't think most people are delusional enough to make the same basic mistakes you're making.

I spent enough time on this to understand the mistake you're making, but I should not have because it was a waste of time. I'm not wasting more time trying to explain it to you. Particularly when you're being an asshole and keep trying to bait me with topics I've told you to drop.

You've been banned so many times for forum rule violations that you try to skirt them and bait in any way possible, but you just shouldn't have been allowed back.
If anybody has any objections or thinks what Teo has been ranting about needs more time spent on explaining, please post here to note them, otherwise I think he just needs to be banned indefinitely because he has not shown any real improvement in behavior.
Speak now or forever hold your peace.

[Red]

You've been banned so many times for forum rule violations that you try to skirt them and bait in any way possible, but you just shouldn't have been allowed back.
If anybody has any objections or thinks what Teo has been ranting about needs more time spent on explaining, please post here to note them, otherwise I think he just needs to be banned indefinitely because he has not shown any real improvement in behavior.
Speak now or forever hold your peace.

I vote Aye.

At this point Teo's posts are borderline spam since he is obviously very bored and doesn't realize that it's very rude and impolite to constantly bait arguments to waste people's time, especially when he keeps pinging people (mostly you and me it looks like) and makes the same tired arguments he's been corrected on years ago. I know since the forum has been very quiet recently it's tempting to allow any form of activity, but Teo isn't helpful on that front, just annoying, and frankly I think it's more likely he runs people off the forum like he has at least once already, or even deters people from joining altogether when they see his inane pseudoscientific ramblings which reflects poorly on the rest of us and makes it look like we're all just mad conspiracy theorists.

But that's Teo for ya.