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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%

#401

Post by shlant »

gridlockd wrote: post #400
shlant wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Food isn't all about efficiency This thread you have been commenting on is talking about efficiency... > I think it's equally likely that it'll stay an overpriced niche product You say, ignoring that the opposite is happening > Yet, it's more expensive, so there clearly other inefficiences in that process It's still currently expensive because of the sunk cost of R&D. Now it's just about demand and scale which are…

> This thread you have been commenting on is talking about efficiency... Yes, but this kind of raw input efficiency isn't the only consideration when it comes to food. There would still be plant-based products that are more efficient to grow than other plant-based products. Apples are cheaper to grow than Oranges, which is exactly what this comparison of food for livestock against food for people is. Beef production…

> Beef production is 100% efficient at producing beef. Milk production is 100% efficient at producing milk.

Alright, I think there is little point in continuing this discussion. You don't seem to understand what "efficient" means and have weak, unrelated, unsubstantiated retorts for everything. I'm sure you'll always argue that beef isn't that bad/"is efficient for what it is" regardless of the reality (which is saying a lot considering beef is the worst of all the meats).

You are free to eat what you want, but at least own up to the reality of your food choices.

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

#402

Post by tripzilch »

jkettmann wrote: post #342
tripzilch wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the methane is already there (having been produced a long time ago), just under ground. I could be mistaken. But even then I'm not sure how those algae would help ...

There seems to be two sources of "frozen" methane. The one you're referring to is on the ground of the oceans kind of trapped in ice. The other one is organic matter inside permafrost on land. When this warms bacteria become active and decompose the organic matter releasing methane. It was only a naive relation I saw between the bacteria inside the cows stomach and the one in the permafrost ;-)

TIL, thanks.

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

#403

Post by gridlockd »

shlant wrote: post #401
gridlockd wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This thread you have been commenting on is talking about efficiency... Yes, but this kind of raw input efficiency isn't the only consideration when it comes to food. There would still be plant-based products that are more efficient to grow than other plant-based products. Apples are cheaper to grow than Oranges, which is exactly what this comparison of food for livestock against food for people is. Beef production…

> Beef production is 100% efficient at producing beef. Milk production is 100% efficient at producing milk. Alright, I think there is little point in continuing this discussion. You don't seem to understand what "efficient" means and have weak, unrelated, unsubstantiated retorts for everything. I'm sure you'll always argue that beef isn't that bad/"is efficient for what it is" regardless of the reality (which is sayi…

"You have weak arguments" isn't much of an argument either, you know.

I'm well aware of what "efficient" means. I do not disagree that shoving raw plant material down people's throats is an extremely efficient way to feed them. A slightly less efficient way would be to prepare that plant material into something more palatable. Livestock is far less efficient still, and at the other end of that "efficiency spectrum" you have something like Kobe Beef.

Yet, if I was to argue that we should all be eating cheap US beef instead of expensive Kobe beef because that is more efficient, it would be an obviously silly argument. Both products just don't play in the same league.

> beef is the worst of all the meats

In what sense? Environmentally? Perhaps. Nutritionally? Absolutely not.

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

#404

Post by chrisco255 »

algorias wrote: post #258
chrisco255 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter if it has a strong effect at the molecular level if it exists in miniscule quantities 4 orders of magnitude less than water vapor while not trapping any part of the light spectrum that is not already captured by H2O and CO2. It has negligible, near zero effect at present. Sorry, if you factor the 20x factor for methane heat retention times .00017 it's the equivalent of increasing the amount of water…

Well, here's an analogy: If you have $1000 salary and $900 of fixed expenses (+ $100 of disposable income), then a reduction of just 10% in your salary reduces your disposable income by 100%. A reduction of 20% in your salary puts you deep into the red and will eventually make you homeless. Climate is like your budget. There's a lot of factors flowing into it, and even a very small change (e.g. 0.1% additional water…

That's a bad analogy because the climate is not a single variable, number one. Two, your percentages are off by orders of magnitude with regards to Methane. Methane, as I said above, is 0.00017% of the earth's atmosphere. Even if it is 20 times more effective at retaining heat than Water Vapor (4% of earth's atmosphere), it's the equivalent of increasing your fixed expenses by .004%, or 4 cents by your $1000 example. 4 cents is negligible. No accountant would even bother listing it.

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

#405

Post by Kaibeezy »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #214
Kaibeezy wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked a small town butcher in Scotland if his beef was grass-fed and got seriously laughed at. Then he sold me some damn good steaks.

Because it was, or because it wasn't? I mean, I'd guess it was, but equally it could be "why do you care, it tastes good", so ...?

It’s was A) “that’s what cows eat”

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

#406

Post by shlant »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #327
asciimo wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely. We'll never harvest more than 10% of the energy we feed livestock. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level

There are plenty of things that animals can eat that are inedible to humans, or at the very least unpalatable. Tree fodder, rapeseed meal, sunflower husks, wetland reeds. Feeding animals nothing but corn and soybean is a travesty for a number of reasons but that doesn't mean meat production as a whole needs to stop.

> Feeding animals nothing but corn and soybean is a travesty for a number of reasons but that doesn't mean meat production as a whole needs to stop.

Best estimates show that 70%+ of cows and 98%+ of all other meat comes from factory farms(CAFO's)[1], so to say "meat production as a whole needs to stop" is not that far off when almost all of it is what you would describe as "a travesty".

Good luck finding enough "Tree fodder, rapeseed meal, sunflower husks [and] wetland reeds" to make up for it. We don't have enough grazable land in the WORLD to support the kind of meat consumption in most 1st world countries[2].

1. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iUpRFOPmAE5IO4hO4PyS...

2. https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets

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

#407

Post by m0zg »

hinkley wrote: post #388
m0zg wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. Counterintuitively to some, 10 times 5% improvement is 63% improvement overall, not 50%, and 8% improvement on top of 50% improvement is 62% total, not 58%. That said, 50% reduction is only doable with nuclear energy. Environmentalists who refuse to even discuss it (which, anecdotally, is most of them) aren't really environmentalists at all. They're the PR wing of the "renewables" lobby.

There's a lot of bad faith on both sides there. The embodied carbon footprint of just the concrete for a conventional nuclear plant is truly breathtaking. And there are designs that use bodies of water for cooling and cause thermal pollution problems. Clinton power plant, for example, made the lake unfit for recreation due to an amoeba that causes encephalitis. The locals tried for decades to block that getting built…

Would the locals be OK with a gigantic coal or gas power plant nearby? One with equivalent output? That's (on a macro scale) the real question here. If we are to believe the world is going to pass the point of no return in "12 years", I'd say making a lake unsuitable for recreation ranks pretty low on the list of priorities.

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

#408

Post by brianpan »

concert-gilled wrote: post #301
brianpan wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps one step further is to bypass even the plants and produce protein directly from CO2! https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/08/nasas-idea-for-making...

> It's a high-protein, flour-like ingredient that contains 50 percent protein content, 5–10 percent fat, and 20–25 percent carbs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoning > Protein poisoning was first noted as a consequence of eating rabbit meat exclusively, hence the term, "rabbit starvation". Rabbit meat is very lean; commercial rabbit meat has 50–100 g dissectable fat per 2 kg (live weight). Based on a carc…

Ew. You're not supposed to just eat this. It's a protein replacement. Still eat your fruits and veggies and everything else.

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

#409

Post by tmalsburg2 »

joombaga wrote: post #333
tmalsburg2 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a small sample, the observed effect needs to be large in order to cross the threshold for statistical significance. It could still be a fluke and the true effect zero or even negative.

What's the tendency when a study with a small sample size that show a large observed effect get performed on larger samples? Has it been studied?

It depends. If the original study was published only because it had a positive result (significance filter, usually true), we expect the effect to be smaller in a larger replication. It's called Type M error, with M for magnitude. And, yes, large scale replications typically show smaller effects or no effects. See this paper for details: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17456916145516...
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