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Tasty Seaweed Reduces Cows’ Methane Emissions by 99%

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Re: Tasty Seaweed Reduces Cows’ Methane Emissions by 99%

#221

Post by solveit »

Etheryte wrote: post #213
solveit wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely right, but the effect size is pretty damn impressive and I expect this to at least partially replicate.

Having a small sample and a large effect doesn't mean you're guaranteed at least some effect on a large sample. If anything, a very large effect is more likely to indicate a flaw in your method.

Yes, but effect sizes are relatively harder to hack/screw up (knowingly or otherwise) than p-values. My totally anecdotal impression is that findings showing large effect sizes seem to replicate better than findings showing highly significant effects.

Re: Tasty Seaweed Reduces Cows’ Methane Emissions by 99%

#222

Post by te_chris »

pandapower2 wrote: post #39
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From an environmental perspective, it's easier to directly consume fruits, vegetables and nuts yourself, rather than have an animal do the same, then eat the animal. That doesn't address the human appetite for animal proteins, but there is beyond meat.

Hopefully beyond meat and similar companies are able to continue to drive forward their research. I had a Beyond Burger for the first time recently and it was unsettling. The flavor was beef-like but the texture was wrong. I will happily eat either a beef burger or a veggie burger but the Beyond Burger is in the uncanny valley right now.

Agree, I would rather a nicely flavoured vege pattie than a fake meat one.

Re: Tasty Seaweed Reduces Cows’ Methane Emissions by 99%

#223

Post by pbhjpbhj »

jaakl wrote: post #121
dcolkitt wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At some point we will end up diverting a sizable percentage of global productivity to either scrubbing CO2 or dealing with the effects of our failure Not necessarily. Current research indicates that stratospheric aerosol injections could lower global temperatures enough to offset greenhouse gas at a price tag of $3 billion per year. That's only 0.002% of world GDP. The technology's well-understood and the effects a…

Essentially it is covering earth with special clouds. Main problem here is that you can never remove them, if you keep things on earth unchanged then over decades of our everincreasing energy consumption and co2, methane etc production you just need more and more such protection, until the sun and blue sky is never seen. It is not resolving the problem, it is just hiding it more and more.

Is it impossible to find suitable compounds that would degrade to a point of no longer working, with a reasonable half-life. So we could reapply or not as surprise to achieve the cooling needed.

[fwiw this seems a very high risk strategy to me]

Re: Tasty Seaweed Reduces Cows’ Methane Emissions by 99%

#224

Post by benj111 »

vtrips wrote: post #206
benj111 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many cows were there pre industrial revolution compared to today? I would guess at at least 2 orders of magnitude increase, is that all 'natural'?

Look I'm not putting up an argument where neither of us have the data to look at this factually, but I don't think we had any problems in the pre industrial revolution era. My point is - The focus should be on optimizing the sources that contribute the most to these emissions.

The article mentions this could reduce Australias ghg emissions by 10%, figures I've found for the UK suggest 3%. That's a massive cut no matter how you cut it, and shouldn't be ignored.

You cant just say cows were domesticated before the industrial revolution, ergo cows are ok, and shouldn't be part of the solution. Animal husbandry has changed massively in the past 2/300 years, you are comparing apples and oranges.

My 2 orders of magnitude guess is conservative. Population has increased by well over one order of magnitude since the industrial revolution. Per capita meat/dairy consumption accounts for the rest.

Re: Tasty Seaweed Reduces Cows’ Methane Emissions by 99%

#225

Post by DoreenMichele »

bencollier49 wrote: post #175
Hnrobert42 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, admittedly, but this is not reddit.

We're not allowed humour now?

It's not that. It's a combination of the guidelines discouraging insubstantive comments -- to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high -- and genuinely good jokes being hard to do.

Most of the time, if I try to crack a joke, it gets downvoted because it's insubstantive and not all that funny. Once in a while, I've gotten a fair number of upvotes for a humorous remark, such as this one under my old handle:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14995810#14996229

IIRC, it hit high 50s for total points.

Re: Tasty Seaweed Reduces Cows’ Methane Emissions by 99%

#226

Post by haffi112 »

solveit wrote: post #221
Etheryte wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a small sample and a large effect doesn't mean you're guaranteed at least some effect on a large sample. If anything, a very large effect is more likely to indicate a flaw in your method.

Yes, but effect sizes are relatively harder to hack/screw up (knowingly or otherwise) than p-values. My totally anecdotal impression is that findings showing large effect sizes seem to replicate better than findings showing highly significant effects.

It could be an example of publication bias, from the wiki article on effect size [1]:

An example of this is publication bias, which occurs when scientists report results only when the estimated effect sizes are large or are statistically significant. As a result, if many researchers carry out studies with low statistical power, the reported effect sizes will tend to be larger than the true (population) effects, if any.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_size

Re: Tasty Seaweed Reduces Cows’ Methane Emissions by 99%

#227

Post by [deleted] »

hannob wrote: post #172

Skeptical science remark: This whole "if cows eat seaweed that'll vastly reduce their carbon footprint" is based on a single study with 12 cows. If you take into consideration that especially small, never replicated studies often don't hold up to scrunity the next thing to do is not to ask how to produce the seaweed. The next reasonable step would be to try to replicate this study in a larger sample (and probably als…

[deleted]

Re: Tasty Seaweed Reduces Cows’ Methane Emissions by 99%

#228

Post by rubber_duck »

blue_devil wrote: post #198

More of a philosophical perspective here: The eco-systems on Earth have evolved over a long time. Without bias against scientific progress, why do we think we can "solve" this without going down a slippery slope of creating another problem? When is comes to complex systems that we don't completely understand, maybe the simplest solution is to just restore the system, that is "give up" on cows as human feed.

Restoring what system - nature is not some harmonious place where everything just works and people came and ruined it - there were plenty of extinction events prior to humans, evolution can lead to dead ends and get stuck at local minima. It doesn't optimize for a lot and collects garbage allong the way (eg. eye optic nerve blind spot)

Man made climate change is showing us how vulnerable we are to changes in the Earth ecosystem - instead of putting our heads in the sand and hoping everything goes back to the way it was while we pray to the weather gods we could actually figure out ways to engineer our environment and become more resilient to such changes.

If we are so sensitive to climate change what would happen in another Chicxulub impactor scenario - another global extinction ? Not to mention much more probable global disasters like disease outbreaks.

Re: Tasty Seaweed Reduces Cows’ Methane Emissions by 99%

#229

Post by m0zg »

throwaway3627 wrote: post #174
m0zg wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> you'll give them 2 grand a year to stop eating beef I think the vast majority of people would turn down your offer. There's too little enjoyment in life as it is. Life without steaks and beer is not worth living for most people.

I bet this is unfortunately, uncomfortably true. There are major behavioral changes needed that can't be left to incentives or voluntary changes when survival is at stake. ICEs, meat agriculture, airline travel, unconfined clinker manufacturing and fossil fuel extraction must end if we're to survive this climate emergency. In addition, Be/CCS must happen, such as ferrous ocean seeding and seaweed extraction for conta…

>> There are major behavioral changes needed that can't be left to incentives or voluntary changes when survival is at stake.

This was tried several times in different contexts (prohibition, war on drugs, etc), and it fails every time.

Make alternatives appealing and people will run to them in droves. That is the only feasible path forward if you're hoping any change will be adopted by a large majority of people.

Very few people will give up steaks or Hawaii vacations when all is said and done, unless you offer them a better alternative.

Re: Tasty Seaweed Reduces Cows’ Methane Emissions by 99%

#230

Post by redka »

Accacin wrote: post #200

Disclaimer: I'm plant-based, and of course biased. What would it take people to realise that eating meat is just not good for the environment and rather than going through all these 'fixes', just stop eating meat? We're getting to the point where we're going to have to sacrifice some 'comforts' IMO.

Do you think it's been proven enough to be sure that plant based diet is better in terms of GHGE than meat based diet? There are also health concerns that come along with cutting meat entirely from ones diet. Would you say it's easy to hit all required protein's targets while eating only plant foods?
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