The importance of flatulence

Vincent J. Curtis

15 Nov 22

The climate danger of bovine flatulence has been in the news for several years.  It’s been mentioned at the COP27 conference presently going on at Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt.  New Zealand just announced a plan targeting cows and sheep whose belches and flatulence allegedly release dangerous amounts of methane into the atmosphere.

Some basic facts about methane, the principle component of natural gas and bovine flatulence, include: that, besides absorbing in a narrow band in the infra-red spectrum, it is present in the atmosphere in a concentration of only 1.9 ppm, growing at a rate of 0.015 ppm per year.  Because methane readily reacts with oxygen, atmospheric methane readily degrades to CO2 and water vapor under the influence of ultraviolet light.

The narrow band at which methane absorbs IR light is overlapped by a large absorption band of water vapor, and water vapor is by far the most important greenhouse gas.  This overlap and low concentration renders the greenhouse effect of atmospheric methane negligible.

This is the difference between lab and real world results.  Sure, methane absorbs strongly in a lab setting, but in the real world, between its low concentration and the band overlap with the high concentrations of water vapor, the “greenhouse effect” of methane amounts to nothing.  And there is no reasonable likelihood it will even amount to anything.

As a research scientist it always amazed me how non-scientists acted like they knew more about science than real scientists did, and went on a tear over lab results they didn’t understand.

The importance of flatulence isn’t that it represents a danger to the climate, but that nonsensical reaction to it is driving nonsensical political action.

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