5 ms·

Can someone explain to me how our planet managed global warming when billions of bisons, deers, cows, sheep and other animals roamed our planet before? How much

by 6d6b73 5y ago

Can someone explain to me how our planet managed global warming when billions of bisons, deers, cows, sheep and other animals roamed our planet before? How much methane did flocks of pigeons generate if they were so large that they were able to darken the sky?

stjo 5y ago
> How much methane did flocks of pigeons generate if they were so large that they were able to darken the sky. Sorry, what?
- 6d6b73 5y ago
  Pigeons poop. If there is a lot of them there is a lot of poop. Lota of pigeons-> lots of poop-> lots of methane
  - 0xfaded 5y ago
    Cows have bacteria in their rumen which produce methane. As a curiosity, I ddg’d “do pigeons fart”, and according to pigeonpedia they do not because they have short digestive tracts lacking gas producing bacteria. https://pigeonpedia.com/do-pigeons-fart/ https://pigeonpedia.com/do-pigeons-fart/
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    Bird poop tends to be dispersed (with some exceptions), and so will tend to decompose aerobically, which does not produce methane.
reubenswartz 5y ago
There are actually far more domestic livestock now than there were bison back in the day. Just a lot less roaming. Pigeons don’t produce methane the way ruminants do AFAIK. And, methane from livestock is only part of humanity’s climate altering activity.
- guerby 5y ago
  I wanted to check, I don't know if the following sources are reliable: http://www.ozarkbisons.com/aboutbison.php http://www.ozarkbisons.com/aboutbison.php "Table : before 1800 60 million bisons in North America" https://www.nass.usda.gov/Newsroom/2021/01-29-2021.php https://www.nass.usda.gov/Newsroom/2021/01-29-2021.php "There were 93.6 million head of cattle and calves on U.S. farms as of Jan. 1, 2021, according to the Cattle report published today by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS)." I didn't find number for ruminant megafauna in prehistoric times.
0xfaded 5y ago
I think this xkcd sums it up nicely: https://xkcd.com/1338/ https://xkcd.com/1338/ Humans are good at cultivating farting animals.
CyanBird 5y ago
Well, exaggerations aside such as blocking the sun, cows and pigs represent 60% of all mammal biomass on earth right now ... > Humans account for about 36 percent of the biomass of all mammals. Domesticated livestock, mostly cows and pigs, account for 60 percent, and wild mammals for only 4 percent. > The same holds true for birds. The biomass of poultry is about three times higher than that of wild birds. > "It is definitely striking, our disproportionate place on Earth," Milo told The Guardian. "When I do a puzzle with my daughters, there is usually an elephant next to a giraffe next to a rhino. But if I was trying to give them a more realistic sense of the world, it would be a cow next to a cow next to a cow and then a chicken ... [0] I would love to see how that compares to the great bison herds, or the great African savanna migrations Maybe as an idea, just the food and the fact that bison etc used to have a more active life and varied foods than modern cows meant that they released less methane? Lastly, ought be noted that methane releases from industrial agriculture are very much under counted and that might need to be accounted into the comparison [1] [0] https://www-ecowatch-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.ecowatch.com/amp/biomass-humans-animals-2571413930 https://www-ecowatch-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.ecowatch... [1] https://www-technologynetworks-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/amp/methane-emissions-from-livestock-may-be-routinely-undercounted-349404 https://www-technologynetworks-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/ww...
- truffdog 5y ago
  It wasn't an exaggeration- https://blog.history.in.gov/flocks-that-darken-the-heavens-the-passenger-pigeon-in-indiana/ https://blog.history.in.gov/flocks-that-darken-the-heavens-t... Pre-Columbian animal density in the Americas was insane, from cod in the east, to buffalo in the middle, to salmon and sardines in the west. People thought it was limitless until it very abruptly wasn't.
  - shipman05 5y ago
    > Pre-Columbian animal density in the Americas was insane, from cod in the east, to buffalo in the middle, to salmon and sardines in the west. People thought it was limitless until it very abruptly wasn't. I'm unsure about the fisheries, but the other numbers are debated now. Until very recent times, the reports of European explorers pushing into the interior of North America were taken as a good proxy for the pre-Columbian state of those areas. We now know that those areas were far more densely populated before 1500 than they were more than 200 years later when European settlers started moving in. European diseases preceded European settlers and completely wiped out much of the continent's population. AFIK, it's still being debated, but it seems reasonable that: - Predators like wolves kept large herd animal numbers relatively low - Large populations of Native Americans killed those predators but continued to keep the numbers of herd animals low via hunting - Native American population collapse coupled with low numbers of predator species allowed bison herd numbers to explode - European settlers arrived in the 1700s and 1800s and made the mistaken assumption that both the Native American and bison populations they encountered represented the way things had always been.
ben_w 5y ago
There were an estimated 3-5 billion passenger pigeons in the Americas before Europeans arrived. There are currently about 1.5 billion cattle worldwide, and each one weighs a lot more than 3 pigeons. Worldwide livestock biomass significantly exceeds worldwide wild animal biomass: https://xkcd.com/1338/ https://xkcd.com/1338/ The current livestock population can only be supported by industrialised agriculture. Livestock biomass is also artificially increased both by many generations of selective breeding and by a known effect of certain hormones and antibiotics. The actual methane emissions are a lot more complex than just count or biomass, as demonstrated even by the headline of the link (you wouldn’t see 55%, let alone 80%, if it wasn’t): https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0247820 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... Finally, this planet does not actively manage global warming. It goes though glacial and interglacial periods precisely because of the absence of active management. The natural causes of this lead to the pre-industrial cycles, and are why the average temperature of this planet is so much higher than the average temperature of the moon: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=average%20temperature%20earth%2C%20moon http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=average%20temperature%2...
- 6d6b73 5y ago
  And maybe these cycles are how the planet self regulates?
  - simonh 5y ago
    The point is it doesn't self-regulate, which as the poster pointed out is why it veers precariously into and out of ice ages and thermal maxima.
    - smolder 5y ago
      If these fluctuations aren't part of a roughly stable pattern of self-regulation, why hasn't Earth gone into such an extreme ice age or thermal runaway that it it's unrecoverable and can't support life? Would you say it's externally regulated as opposed to self-regulating, maybe? Sheer luck?
fzzzy 5y ago
They were not fed unnatural diets which caused them to produce a shitload of methane.
- gtirloni 5y ago
  Cattle is Brazil roams free and eats grass.
  - bogomipz 5y ago
    This has traditionally been true for neighboring Argentina as well which is widely known for it's prized grass-fed Pampas cattle. My understanding is that this has been changing however in recent years.
ed25519FUUU 5y ago
Pastured cattle have a NET NEGATIVE effect on carbon. They’re not carbon emitters. Pasturing them sequesters carbon in the ground and their manure improves the local soil biome. Feed lot cattle are another story.
- 0_____0 5y ago
  I can believe that for carbon specifically, but what about their general GHG impact?
dylan604 5y ago
While there's an underlying point that could be gleaned from your inane post, you could make it without sounding like a blubbering idiot. Do cows/cattle/livestock produce methane? Yes. So do humans. How did the planet manage? For one, there was a helluva lot less other greenhouse warming gases in total larely due to human's industrial revolution. Once humans found out about using coal/oil/etc, it quickly dwarfed anything ever seen other than volanic eruptions. The livestock methane argument has always sounded like a BigOil tactic rather than a scientific one to deflect blame, and then championed by someone like PETA to help further their agenda. How significant would livestock methane emmisions be to the climate if ICE pollution was elminitated?
abecedarius 5y ago
One serious answer is the work of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Savory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Savory There are claims it's all bullshit (ahem); I wouldn't automatically trust either side.
bryanlarsen 5y ago
Wild ruminants eat grass. Domesticated ruminants mostly eat grain. That accounts for the bulk of the difference AFAIK.
- Zababa 5y ago
  In America maybe? In France grain is ~25% of what cows eat: https://idele.fr/?eID=cmis_download&oID=workspace://SpacesStore/10b22a31-862e-440f-a079-c1710d964e72 https://idele.fr/?eID=cmis_download&oID=workspace://SpacesSt...
  - bryanlarsen 5y ago
    25% of the mass might be 90% of the calories.
    - Zababa 5y ago
      Or it could be 5% of the calories, and unless you have some source on cattle nutrition this is just baseless speculation.
      - bryanlarsen 5y ago
        I spent twenty years of my life feeding cattle.
        Zababa 5y ago
        I'll retract the "baseless speculation" part then. Sorry, that was needlessly aggressive.
stefantalpalaru 5y ago
> Can someone explain to me how our planet managed global warming when billions of bisons, deers, cows, sheep and other animals roamed our planet before? A constant number of cows produce a constant amount of methane which plateaus quickly due to its very small atmospheric half-life. "Additional methane emission categories such as rice cultivation (RIC), ruminant animal (ANI), North American shale gas extraction (SHA), and tropical wetlands (TRO) have been investigated as potential causes of the resuming methane growth starting from 2007. In agreement with recent studies, we find that a methane increase of 15.4 Tg yr−1 in 2007 and subsequent years, of which __50 % are from RIC (7.68 Tg yr−1), 46 % from SHA (7.15 Tg yr−1), and 4 % from TRO (0.58 Tg yr−1)__, can optimally explain the trend up to 2013." - ["Model simulations of atmospheric methane (1997–2016) and their evaluation using NOAA and AGAGE surface and IAGOS-CARIBIC aircraft observations" (2020)](https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/20/5787/2020/ https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/20/5787/2020/) "On November 17, 2003 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that the concentration of the potent greenhouse gas methane in the atmosphere was leveling off and it appears to have remained at this 1999 level (Figure 1). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 acknowledged that methane concentrations have plateaued, with emissions being equivalent to removals. These changes in methane atmospheric dynamics have raised questions about the relative importance of ruminant livestock in global methane accounting and the value of pursuing means of further suppressing methane production from ruminants. At this time there is no relationship between increasing ruminant numbers and changes in atmospheric methane concentrations changes, a break from previously assumed role of ruminants in greenhouse gases (Figure 1)." - ["Belching Ruminants, a minor player in atmospheric methane" (2008)](http://www-naweb.iaea.org/nafa/news/2008-atmospheric-methane.html http://www-naweb.iaea.org/nafa/news/2008-atmospheric-methane...)

by 6d6b73 5y ago

stjo 5y ago

> How much methane did flocks of pigeons generate if they were so large that they were able to darken the sky. Sorry, what?

6d6b73 5y ago
Pigeons poop. If there is a lot of them there is a lot of poop. Lota of pigeons-> lots of poop-> lots of methane
- 0xfaded 5y ago
  Cows have bacteria in their rumen which produce methane. As a curiosity, I ddg’d “do pigeons fart”, and according to pigeonpedia they do not because they have short digestive tracts lacking gas producing bacteria. https://pigeonpedia.com/do-pigeons-fart/ https://pigeonpedia.com/do-pigeons-fart/
- pfdietz 5y ago
  Bird poop tends to be dispersed (with some exceptions), and so will tend to decompose aerobically, which does not produce methane.

reubenswartz 5y ago

There are actually far more domestic livestock now than there were bison back in the day. Just a lot less roaming. Pigeons don’t produce methane the way ruminants do AFAIK. And, methane from livestock is only part of humanity’s climate altering activity.

guerby 5y ago
I wanted to check, I don't know if the following sources are reliable: http://www.ozarkbisons.com/aboutbison.php http://www.ozarkbisons.com/aboutbison.php "Table : before 1800 60 million bisons in North America" https://www.nass.usda.gov/Newsroom/2021/01-29-2021.php https://www.nass.usda.gov/Newsroom/2021/01-29-2021.php "There were 93.6 million head of cattle and calves on U.S. farms as of Jan. 1, 2021, according to the Cattle report published today by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS)." I didn't find number for ruminant megafauna in prehistoric times.

0xfaded 5y ago

I think this xkcd sums it up nicely: https://xkcd.com/1338/ https://xkcd.com/1338/ Humans are good at cultivating farting animals.

CyanBird 5y ago

Well, exaggerations aside such as blocking the sun, cows and pigs represent 60% of all mammal biomass on earth right now ... > Humans account for about 36 percent of the biomass of all mammals. Domesticated livestock, mostly cows and pigs, account for 60 percent, and wild mammals for only 4 percent. > The same holds true for birds. The biomass of poultry is about three times higher than that of wild birds. > "It is definitely striking, our disproportionate place on Earth," Milo told The Guardian. "When I do a puzzle with my daughters, there is usually an elephant next to a giraffe next to a rhino. But if I was trying to give them a more realistic sense of the world, it would be a cow next to a cow next to a cow and then a chicken ... [0] I would love to see how that compares to the great bison herds, or the great African savanna migrations Maybe as an idea, just the food and the fact that bison etc used to have a more active life and varied foods than modern cows meant that they released less methane? Lastly, ought be noted that methane releases from industrial agriculture are very much under counted and that might need to be accounted into the comparison [1] [0] https://www-ecowatch-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.ecowatch.com/amp/biomass-humans-animals-2571413930 https://www-ecowatch-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.ecowatch... [1] https://www-technologynetworks-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/amp/methane-emissions-from-livestock-may-be-routinely-undercounted-349404 https://www-technologynetworks-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/ww...

truffdog 5y ago
It wasn't an exaggeration- https://blog.history.in.gov/flocks-that-darken-the-heavens-the-passenger-pigeon-in-indiana/ https://blog.history.in.gov/flocks-that-darken-the-heavens-t... Pre-Columbian animal density in the Americas was insane, from cod in the east, to buffalo in the middle, to salmon and sardines in the west. People thought it was limitless until it very abruptly wasn't.
- shipman05 5y ago
  > Pre-Columbian animal density in the Americas was insane, from cod in the east, to buffalo in the middle, to salmon and sardines in the west. People thought it was limitless until it very abruptly wasn't. I'm unsure about the fisheries, but the other numbers are debated now. Until very recent times, the reports of European explorers pushing into the interior of North America were taken as a good proxy for the pre-Columbian state of those areas. We now know that those areas were far more densely populated before 1500 than they were more than 200 years later when European settlers started moving in. European diseases preceded European settlers and completely wiped out much of the continent's population. AFIK, it's still being debated, but it seems reasonable that: - Predators like wolves kept large herd animal numbers relatively low - Large populations of Native Americans killed those predators but continued to keep the numbers of herd animals low via hunting - Native American population collapse coupled with low numbers of predator species allowed bison herd numbers to explode - European settlers arrived in the 1700s and 1800s and made the mistaken assumption that both the Native American and bison populations they encountered represented the way things had always been.

ben_w 5y ago

There were an estimated 3-5 billion passenger pigeons in the Americas before Europeans arrived. There are currently about 1.5 billion cattle worldwide, and each one weighs a lot more than 3 pigeons. Worldwide livestock biomass significantly exceeds worldwide wild animal biomass: https://xkcd.com/1338/ https://xkcd.com/1338/ The current livestock population can only be supported by industrialised agriculture. Livestock biomass is also artificially increased both by many generations of selective breeding and by a known effect of certain hormones and antibiotics. The actual methane emissions are a lot more complex than just count or biomass, as demonstrated even by the headline of the link (you wouldn’t see 55%, let alone 80%, if it wasn’t): https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0247820 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... Finally, this planet does not actively manage global warming. It goes though glacial and interglacial periods precisely because of the absence of active management. The natural causes of this lead to the pre-industrial cycles, and are why the average temperature of this planet is so much higher than the average temperature of the moon: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=average%20temperature%20earth%2C%20moon http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=average%20temperature%2...

6d6b73 5y ago
And maybe these cycles are how the planet self regulates?
- simonh 5y ago
  The point is it doesn't self-regulate, which as the poster pointed out is why it veers precariously into and out of ice ages and thermal maxima.
  - smolder 5y ago
    If these fluctuations aren't part of a roughly stable pattern of self-regulation, why hasn't Earth gone into such an extreme ice age or thermal runaway that it it's unrecoverable and can't support life? Would you say it's externally regulated as opposed to self-regulating, maybe? Sheer luck?

fzzzy 5y ago

They were not fed unnatural diets which caused them to produce a shitload of methane.

gtirloni 5y ago
Cattle is Brazil roams free and eats grass.
- bogomipz 5y ago
  This has traditionally been true for neighboring Argentina as well which is widely known for it's prized grass-fed Pampas cattle. My understanding is that this has been changing however in recent years.

ed25519FUUU 5y ago

Pastured cattle have a NET NEGATIVE effect on carbon. They’re not carbon emitters. Pasturing them sequesters carbon in the ground and their manure improves the local soil biome. Feed lot cattle are another story.

0_____0 5y ago
I can believe that for carbon specifically, but what about their general GHG impact?

dylan604 5y ago

While there's an underlying point that could be gleaned from your inane post, you could make it without sounding like a blubbering idiot. Do cows/cattle/livestock produce methane? Yes. So do humans. How did the planet manage? For one, there was a helluva lot less other greenhouse warming gases in total larely due to human's industrial revolution. Once humans found out about using coal/oil/etc, it quickly dwarfed anything ever seen other than volanic eruptions. The livestock methane argument has always sounded like a BigOil tactic rather than a scientific one to deflect blame, and then championed by someone like PETA to help further their agenda. How significant would livestock methane emmisions be to the climate if ICE pollution was elminitated?

abecedarius 5y ago

One serious answer is the work of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Savory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Savory There are claims it's all bullshit (ahem); I wouldn't automatically trust either side.

bryanlarsen 5y ago

Wild ruminants eat grass. Domesticated ruminants mostly eat grain. That accounts for the bulk of the difference AFAIK.

Zababa 5y ago
In America maybe? In France grain is ~25% of what cows eat: https://idele.fr/?eID=cmis_download&oID=workspace://SpacesStore/10b22a31-862e-440f-a079-c1710d964e72 https://idele.fr/?eID=cmis_download&oID=workspace://SpacesSt...
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  25% of the mass might be 90% of the calories.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    Or it could be 5% of the calories, and unless you have some source on cattle nutrition this is just baseless speculation.
    - bryanlarsen 5y ago
      I spent twenty years of my life feeding cattle.
      - Zababa 5y ago
        I'll retract the "baseless speculation" part then. Sorry, that was needlessly aggressive.

stefantalpalaru 5y ago

> Can someone explain to me how our planet managed global warming when billions of bisons, deers, cows, sheep and other animals roamed our planet before? A constant number of cows produce a constant amount of methane which plateaus quickly due to its very small atmospheric half-life. "Additional methane emission categories such as rice cultivation (RIC), ruminant animal (ANI), North American shale gas extraction (SHA), and tropical wetlands (TRO) have been investigated as potential causes of the resuming methane growth starting from 2007. In agreement with recent studies, we find that a methane increase of 15.4 Tg yr−1 in 2007 and subsequent years, of which __50 % are from RIC (7.68 Tg yr−1), 46 % from SHA (7.15 Tg yr−1), and 4 % from TRO (0.58 Tg yr−1)__, can optimally explain the trend up to 2013." - ["Model simulations of atmospheric methane (1997–2016) and their evaluation using NOAA and AGAGE surface and IAGOS-CARIBIC aircraft observations" (2020)](https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/20/5787/2020/ https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/20/5787/2020/) "On November 17, 2003 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that the concentration of the potent greenhouse gas methane in the atmosphere was leveling off and it appears to have remained at this 1999 level (Figure 1). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 acknowledged that methane concentrations have plateaued, with emissions being equivalent to removals. These changes in methane atmospheric dynamics have raised questions about the relative importance of ruminant livestock in global methane accounting and the value of pursuing means of further suppressing methane production from ruminants. At this time there is no relationship between increasing ruminant numbers and changes in atmospheric methane concentrations changes, a break from previously assumed role of ruminants in greenhouse gases (Figure 1)." - ["Belching Ruminants, a minor player in atmospheric methane" (2008)](http://www-naweb.iaea.org/nafa/news/2008-atmospheric-methane.html http://www-naweb.iaea.org/nafa/news/2008-atmospheric-methane...)