Cattle industry working to reduce methane emissions
A new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said scientists are observing changes in the earth’s climate that are “unprecedented in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years”.
Released in Geneva on August 9, the report, Climate Change 2021: the Physical Science Basis, said some of the changes already set in motion already, such as continued sea level rise, would take hundreds or even thousands of years to reverse.
IPCC explained that this report is the first instalment of its Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), which it will complete in 2022.
It provides new estimates of the chances of crossing the global warming level of 1.5°C in the next decades, and finds that unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to close to 1.5°C or even 2°C will be “beyond reach”.
It said the evidence is clear that carbon dioxide is the main driver of climate change, but it said other greenhouse gases, notably methane, also have an effect. The new IPCC report says methane from fossil fuel sources has slightly higher emission metric values than those from biogenic sources, but Professor Frank Mitloehner of the University of California, Davis, said in immediate response to the report that cattle industries can also play an important role in reducing methane levels.
He said that mitigating methane will be crucial to keeping global temperature increases under 1.5°C and that cattle industries can help combat rising temperatures by reducing methane emissions from cattle. “A lot of work is being done right now,” Professor Mitloehner said. “We have two trials in our lab looking at feed additives that will reduce enteric methane.”
