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Comments 1 to 25 out of 162:

1. dana1981 at 14:10 PM on 26 September, 2010
   Bit of an odd looking cow!
2. Johngee at 20:36 PM on 26 September, 2010
   I'm a lecturer at a construction college of further education in the uk. Many of the courses we deliver have extensive sustainability units and of course co2 emissions are at the top of the list. This site and others like it have helped me build a picture of the whole issue for which I am most grateful. I was questioned the other day about this exact issue but the argument went... If we have gone from 1 billion to nearly 7 billion in 200 years and in that time have cut down massive quantities of vegetation without planting more then surely some of the rise is attributable to the rise in co2 - ie we have messed with the carbon cycle? Well yes, population is the elephant in the room said I. Then I pointed out all the evidence showing that we can attribute the rise in co2 to the combustion process (o2 levels dropping, c12/c13 ratio falling and of course how much we have burned compared to co2 rise). However it does seem to many an obvious equation...Less plants - less o2 is produced - more people combining carbon and oxygen - co2 has to increase surely? I suppose it comes down to how much GHG's humans bodily functions produce annually compared to how much is recycled by plants annually. I can feel myself beginning to answer my own question here! Does anyone have any figures relating to this topic?
3. Phil at 21:23 PM on 26 September, 2010
   Johngee @2, All the CO₂ we exhale comes from burning food. An expanding human population means more crops - otherwise we'd starve. So there is no nett contribution to GHG from human respiration. I would imagine most deforestation is for agriculture i.e. replacing one sort of vegetation with another. This is not harmless - forests are good "carbon sinks" (all that wood is "locking up" carbon) and they photosythesize all year round unlike crops. Forests may be more efficient at absorbing CO₂ because of their height too. I have no figures - sorry, but to do this calculation you would need to take into account the changes in other animal populations (down for wild animals, up for domesticated) as well. I would doubt whether such comprehensive figures are available
4. Dikran Marsupial at 21:28 PM on 26 September, 2010
   johngee@2 wrote: "I suppose it comes down to how much GHG's humans bodily functions produce annually compared to how much is recycled by plants annually." The figures shown below suggest that the CO2 flux into the atmposphere from terrestrial plants is about 60Gt C per year (which is vast) if you divide that 60Gt by the human population it would give the number of tons of carbon we would need to consume each year to balance the flux from land plants, I doubt any of us eats quite that much! ;o)
5. Johngee at 22:06 PM on 26 September, 2010
   You see... That's all I was missing!!! The carbon we breathe out comes from the food we eat via cell respiration! Sometimes it has to be said several ways before I get it. A very dead argument methinks.
6. Phil at 22:50 PM on 26 September, 2010
   Johngee @2 said: I'm a lecturer at a construction college of further education in the uk. I think the construction industry has a hugely important role in reducing CO₂ emissions, and I for one (and I'm sure many more here) are very happy to see people like you making use of sites like Skeptical Science.
7. muoncounter at 22:55 PM on 26 September, 2010
   Breathing and bags of lettuce? From a USEIA report regarding the drop in US CO2 emissions in 2009: In 2009, energy-related CO2 emissions in the US saw their largest absolute and percentage decline (405 million metric tons or 7.0 percent) since the start of EIA’s comprehensive record of annual energy data that begins in 1949 ... Changes in CO2 emissions can be decomposed into changes in four major contributing factors: population, per capita GDP, energy intensity of the economy, and carbon intensity of the energy supply. All of these fell in 2009 except for population. Population grew 0.9 percent. So it would appear that what we do and how much of it we do are far more significant than what we eat.
8. Johngee at 23:11 PM on 26 September, 2010
   @phil. Cheers for that. It feels like your shouting on deaf ears most oif the time though... something called economics keeps getting in the way.
9. Byron Smith at 20:25 PM on 27 September, 2010
   Welcome Kate and I'm thrilled that you're contributing here! I wonder whether this piece could be improved with some more figures on the exact amount of CO2 that human respiration contributes. I get the idea that we're only exhaling the carbon that has first been photosynthesised out of the atmosphere, but from one point of view, the origin of the CO2 is irrelevant, what matters is the total amount. So I wonder whether this argument could be supplemented with a consideration of the total contribution of human respiration to CO2 emissions (for completeness, perhaps we would also need to consider human CH4 emissions...).
10. Gianfranco at 01:19 AM on 10 May, 2011
    Good qualitative picture. Now could you please add some quantitative data e.g. how much net CO2 on average does a single tree or a square mile of forest absorb through photosynthesis? How much net oxygen does it release? P.S. "net" to take into account plants respiration. Thank you very much.
11. timdiller at 01:21 AM on 10 May, 2011
    How much fossil carbon in the human carbohydrate diet? Is it negligible? If not, then breathing is not net zero. There's an increasing popular literature devoted to showing the synthetic origins of much of what we call "food." (See Michael Pollan's "In defense of food" for example.) This is not a comment about the carbon intensity of agriculture (a separate discussion) but rather the source of the carbon in the carbohydrate content of our diet. There are many chemicals (polyethylene glycol, for example) in our diet that are synthesized from petroleum. I would be interested to know what portion of the CO2 breathed out by humans has fossil C. I think this would rather strengthen the "real food" argument more than anything else.
12. CharlesW at 14:16 PM on 20 June, 2011
    When I was a kid in the 1970s, there were 4 billion people. Now there is 7 billion. So there should be more CO2 due to breathing now than in the 1970s, not to mention the increased livestock.
    Response: (DB) Human respiration is part of the natural carbon cycle and has no net long term impact, unlike the bolus injection of fossil fuel CO2 into the carbon cycle.
13. j87 at 20:16 PM on 26 June, 2011
    This article doesn't quite hit the nail on the head. For example, CO2 emmissions from burning coal or oil are also part of this cycle.. The plants that absorb the CO2 grow, die, fall to the ground, are pressurised for millions of years and then turn into Coal or Oil. So isn't burning fossil fuels just an extension of this carbon cycle?
14. Robert Murphy at 20:54 PM on 26 June, 2011
    j87, #13 "For example, CO2 emmissions from burning coal or oil are also part of this cycle." That carbon had been locked out of the carbon cycle for hundreds of millions of years. What we are doing is reintroducing it to the carbon cycle, at a very great speed, far faster than natural carbon sinks can absorb it. Therefore, atmospheric CO2 is steadily rising. "The plants that absorb the CO2 grow, die, fall to the ground, are pressurised for millions of years and then turn into Coal or Oil." Almost all of the plants that die now decay and ultimately release CO2 back into the cycle. They do not become coal or oil.
15. Rob Painting at 21:00 PM on 26 June, 2011
    J87 - No. We are referring to 'natural' carbon cycling. Fossil fuels were removed from the surface carbon reservoirs a long time ago, and played no part in the carbon cycle. Humans then came along, extracted, refined and burnt those fossil fuels, releasing all that 'additional' carbon back into the atmosphere. Hence we have a problem of humungous proportions.
16. danno at 11:37 AM on 22 March, 2012
    "When I was a kid in the 1970s, there were 4 billion people. Now there is 7 billion. So there should be more CO2 due to breathing now than in the 1970s, not to mention the increased livestock." We also now grow more food to feed the extra people. Any CO2 we breathe out was carbon we locked up in plants before eating them.
17. danno at 11:39 AM on 22 March, 2012
    Methane from livestock is a different matter.
18. Bob Loblaw at 12:35 PM on 22 March, 2012
    There are two ways to look at the effect of human breathing and CO2: 1) what we exhale, and how we acquired that CO₂ - fixed from the atmosphere by plants, so not a net contribution to atmospheric CO₂ 2) don't try to estimate the fluxes in and out, and just look at the change in storage. On that basis, I'm fairly sure (99-44/100ths % pure) that the 7 billion people we have now store more carbon (i.e., weigh more in total) than the 4 billion in the 1970s, so humans represent a net sink of carbon, not a source. Once climate change is bad enough that we see large decreases in the human population, we'll become yet another source of positive feedback as the stored carbon is released back to the atmosphere.
19. DavidFaubion at 15:35 PM on 18 January, 2014

    Factor in all the fuel and oxygen spent in agriculture, storage and transport. Then, calculate how deep each of our carbon sink is on average. The more local our food source, such as our back yards, the deeper your carbon sink. Can we dig the treasure of honest living on the beautiful Earth?

20. dwdeclare at 01:59 AM on 28 March, 2014

    So is James Lovelock wrong when he says in his book The Vanishing Face of Gaia (2009):

    I have mentioned several times before that breathing is a potent source of carbon dioxide, but did you know that the exhalations of breath and other gaseous emissions by the nearly 7 billion people on Earth, their pets and their livestock are responsible for 23 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions?

21. Dikran Marsupial at 03:49 AM on 28 March, 2014

    @dwdwclare If Lovelock is going to take exhalations as contributing to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions then you would need to consider the food we eat as being carbon uptake.  Respiration is carbon neutral, the carbon in the food we eat originally came from the atmosphere, so when we breathe it out again, we are just returning it to the atmosphere and it has no net effect on atmospheric CO2 levels.

    Taking carbon out of the lithosphere and putting it into the atmosphere does however affect atmospheric CO2 concentrations (and indeed increases the total amount of CO2 circulating through the carbon cycle).

    It could be that Lovelock is making a subtle point that requires greater context to be apparent.

22. dwdeclare at 06:06 AM on 28 March, 2014

    @Dikran Marsupial Here is the entire paragraph:

    It is surprising that politicians could have been so unwise as to agree on policies many decades ahead. Perhaps there were voices from scientists who warned of the absurdity of such planning, but if so they do not seem to have been heard. Even if we cut emissions by 60 per cent to 12 gigatons a year it wouldn’t be enough. I have mentioned several times before that breathing is a potent source of carbon dioxide, but did you know that the exhalations of breath and other gaseous emissions by the nearly 7 billion people on Earth, their pets and their livestock are responsible for 23 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions? If you add on the fossil fuel burnt in the total activity of growing, gathering, selling and serving food, all of this adds up to about half of all carbon dioxide emissions. Think of farm machinery, the transport of food from the farms and the transport of fertilizer, pesticides and the fuel used in their manufacture; the road building and maintenance; supermarket operation and the packaging industry; to say nothing of the energy used in cooking, refrigerating and serving food. As if this were not enough, think of how farmland fails to serve Gaia as the forests it replaced did. If, just by living with our pets and livestock, we are responsible for nearly half the emissions of carbon dioxide, I do not see how the 60 per cent reduction can be achieved without a great loss of life. Like it or not, we are the problem – and as a part of the Earth system, not as something separate from and above it. When world leaders ask us to follow them to the inviting green pastures ahead they should first check that it really is grass on solid ground and not moss covering a quagmire.

    Let me also ask, if respiration is carbon neutral why would cow burps and farts add to the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere? Please don't for a moment think I'm trying to dispute the veracity of anthropogenic climate change being largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels. I'm just asking because I'm curious.

23. scaddenp at 06:20 AM on 28 March, 2014

    dwdeclare - the issue with cow burps etc is methane - a potent GHG that would not normally be produced if grass were not eaten by a ruminant. Eventually methane oxidizes to CO2 but while present in the atmosphere it contributes strongly to the greenhouse effect. You will see that greenhouse gas inventories are expressed in terms of CO2e (CO2 equivalents) rather than CO2 though the accounting for methane in this method has some issues. Methane from ruminants is increasing only because the number of ruminants has been increased by intensive farming practices.

    I think the article should perhaps also mention that there is another way to track the source of the increase in the CO2 in the atmosphere - carbon isotopes. Fossil fuels have no C14. C13 ratios are also different for different sources.

24. Tom Curtis at 07:01 AM on 28 March, 2014

    dwdeclare @22, it becomes clear from the broader context that Lovelock is in fact talking about (primarilly) fossil fuel emissions in the production of food rather than mistakenly considering respiration as a form of net emissions.  Because those fossil fuel emissions are for the most part normal industrial emissions, they can for the most part be eliminated by the same processes used to eliminate emissions from the rest of industrial civilization, and Lovelock's pessimism is largely unwarranted.

    There are a couple of subtleties involved, however, one of which you draw attention to.  Methane has a far higher forcing per unit carbon than does CO2.  Therefore, the emission of methane by cows in the form of burps and farts represents a transformation of CO2 into methane, and a net short term increase in radiative forcing.  Short term because after about 15 years (from memory), the methane in tha atmosphere has transformed back to CO2.  The same applies to methane released from swamps (natural) or rice fields (anthropogenic).

    The second subtley is far more important.  Most fertilizer used in modern agriculture is produced from methane plus components in the atmosphere.  The essential step is the Haber-Bosch process:

    N2 + 3 H2 → 2 NH3 (ΔH = −92.4 kJ·mol−1)

    The hydrogen is produced through one of several processes from methane, of which the two step process may be considered representative:

    CH4 + H2O ⇌ CO + 3 H2

    CO + H2O ⇌ CO2 + H2

    Combining these reactions, we see that for each 8 nitrogen atoms in fertilizer, 3 methane atoms are used in its production, and 3 CO2 molecules released to the atmosphere.  By mass, that means that for each 28 Kg of Nitrogen produced in fertilizer, 9 Kg of carbon is consumed as methane, or released to the atmosphere as CO2 in addition to that emitted in producing the energy to drive these reactions.

    How significant this is can be seen from wikipedia:

    "The Haber process now produces 500 million short tons (454 million tonnes) of nitrogen fertilizer per year, mostly in the form of anhydrous ammonia, ammonium nitrate, and urea. 3–5% of the world's natural gas production is consumed in the Haber process (~1–2% of the world's annual energy supply).  In combination with pesticides, these fertilizers have quadrupled the productivity of agricultural land:

    "With average crop yields remaining at the 1900 level the crop harvest in the year 2000 would have required nearly four times more land and the cultivated area would have claimed nearly half of all ice-free continents, rather than under 15% of the total land area that is required today."

    
    Due to its dramatic impact on the human ability to grow food, the Haber process served as the "detonator of the population explosion", enabling the global population to increase from 1.6 billion in 1900 to today's 7 billion. According to Howarth (2008), nearly 80% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber-Bosch process. Since nitrogen use efficiency is typically less than 50%, our heavy use of industrial nitrogen fixation is severely disruptive to our biological habitat."

    (My emphasis)

    As a rule of thumb, if 80% of nitrogen in human tissue originates from the Haber-Bosch process, then without that process the sustainable population will drop by 80%.

    Clearly the hydrogen in the Haber Bosch process could be collected by catalyctic processing of water.  That would need to be made significantly more economicly efficient, however, to compete with current methods of production.  One of the reasons we should rapidly convert electricity production to carbon neutral methods is just to allow more time before we need to modify the industrial manufacture of fertilizer, both in terms of emissions, and in terms of the availability of methane.

25. bill4344 at 10:22 AM on 28 March, 2014

    Ah, Haber and Bosch, the two most influential people you've never heard of!

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