|
|
 |
Author |
|
| Message | |
|
puffedpride
Joined: 05 Nov 2005
Posts: 300
Location: bristol
|
|
|
|
 |
cab
Joined: 01 Nov 2004
Posts: 32429
|
|
|
|
|
Treacodactyl
Downsizer Moderator
Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 25795
Location: Jumping on the bandwagon of opportunism
|
|
|
|
|
cab
Joined: 01 Nov 2004
Posts: 32429
|
|
|
|
|
puffedpride
Joined: 05 Nov 2005
Posts: 300
Location: bristol
|
|
|
|
|
cab
Joined: 01 Nov 2004
Posts: 32429
|
 Posted: Sat Dec 31, 05 5:46 pm Post subject: |
 
|
| puffedpride wrote: |
| Is it just cows that produce significant methane, or are other kinds of livestock gassing us also? |
All of the ungulates do it, farmed and domestic. That's cattle, sheep, deer, bison, giraffes, etc. As long as they're fed on diets rich in complex carbohydrates (and for those guys that includes cellulose, i.e. grass), they do it. |
|
|
|
|
Penelope Anderson
Joined: 21 Sep 2005
Posts: 326
Location: london
|
|
|
|
|
puffedpride
Joined: 05 Nov 2005
Posts: 300
Location: bristol
|
|
|
|
|
cab
Joined: 01 Nov 2004
Posts: 32429
|
| Posted: Wed Jan 18, 06 4:19 pm Post subject: |
|
| Penelope Anderson wrote: |
Just in from another thread "Trees are gassing us now" I thought most of the methane from the Amazon forest area was from farting cattle. It would be a very good excuse for those as want to cut them down to blame the trees, and replace them with beef cattle whose meat as we know all goes into American beef burgers, thus ensuring that they contribute to the problem too.  I am no chemist - what's the difference between methane and CO2? |
Methane, written out chemically like CO2 would be CH4. Methane is a colourless, odourless flammable gas, that when burned properly in oxygen produces one molecule of carbon dioxide and two of water.
Carbon dioxide is also colourless and odourless, but it isn't flammable. That isn't to say that it isn't reactive, its reactivity is ever so important for plants fixing carbon from the atmosphere (carbon dioxide being reacted with water and energy from sunlight, by a complex process producing sugar).
Now what we're really interested in here is how they affect the environment. Think of most of the energy from the sun as being really short wave, think of it as being visible light, or shorter wavelength (ultra violet and shorter). Such light, as you now know, goes straight through methane and carbon dioxide (thats why they're colourless). It hits the earth, and warms it up. Now, when something warms up or absorbs energy, there is always some lost, and the energy re-emitted is longer wavelength (redder, infra-red, in fact - lower energy, essentially, and in these terms that means longer wavelength).
Just like different colour filters on the front of a torch allow different colours through, so different gasses in the atmosphere will absorb different wavelengths of light. A greenhouse gas is one that will absorb some of the long wavelength energy re-emitted from the earth. This is really important, of course, as otherwise we'd be a big snowball, but because we've increased the amount of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere (carbobn dioxide, methane, certain other gasses) we're trapping more energy in the atmosphere.
Global warming is a bit of a bad name for it. Its more that there's more energy held in the system, so any weather system that can have a bit more oopmh (hurricanes, hot weather, winds, etc.) can be expected to have it.
Last edited by cab on Wed Jan 18, 06 4:21 pm; edited 1 time in total |
|
|
|
|
cab
Joined: 01 Nov 2004
Posts: 32429
|
|
|
|
|
Penelope Anderson
Joined: 21 Sep 2005
Posts: 326
Location: london
|
|
|
|
|
cab
Joined: 01 Nov 2004
Posts: 32429
|
|
|
|
|
Blue Peter
Joined: 21 Mar 2005
Posts: 2400
Location: Milton Keynes
|
|
|
|
|
Shane
Joined: 31 Oct 2005
Posts: 3467
Location: Doha. Is hot.
|
|
|
|
|
Shane
Joined: 31 Oct 2005
Posts: 3467
Location: Doha. Is hot.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Certainly its far more evocative of what it really is.
View Latest Posts