It’s nothing new that climate reports tend to make front-page headlines, especially for the general population. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently released a piece of their sixth assessment report, called “Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis,” which created a lot of buzz and urgency about climate change.
The 3,494-page report meticulously details what IPCC calls “a high-level summary of the understanding of the current state of the climate, including how it is changing and the role of human influence, the state of knowledge about possible climate futures, climate information relevant to regions and sectors, and limiting human-induced climate change.”
A lot of the mainstream news headlines are not necessarily what the industry is looking at in the report, Scott Yager, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) chief environmental counsel, told WLJ. In fact, there is something included in the report that is extremely important for the cattle industry: IPCC recognizes methane is actually a short-lived gas.
The tool previously used most often to calculate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and methane’s warming impact is called GWP100. This system sets the global warming potential of GHG over a time period of 100 years. Under this system, carbon dioxide has a score of 1, methane has a score of 28 and nitrous oxide has a score of 265. For example, the system logs methane as being 28 times more potent than 1 kilo of carbon dioxide over 100 years.
Yager said this system makes sense to measure carbon dioxide’s warming impact, as it lasts so long in the atmosphere, but methane actually breaks down in a matter of a decade. Therefore, measurements using the GWP100 system have actually been overrepresenting methane’s impact.
This is when a new system called GWP* enters the picture. This revised alternative uses an approach that considers the differences in how short- and long-lived pollutants warm the atmosphere. Yager said by having more governments adopt this system, there is going to be a more clear and accurate method of accounting for methane.
“Better science gives better results,” he said. The better science included in GWP* gives credibility to animal agriculture on an international scale, he added. Yager also said this new system better allows NCBA to tell the positive story of animal agriculture and show how cattle and producers can be good stewards of the land.
Report findings
The first IPCC report was released in 1990 and concluded human-caused climate change would soon become evident, but did not confirm whether it was already happening. Now, “evidence is overwhelming” that human activities are the principal cause for change, IPCC wrote.
“The main human causes of climate change are the heat-absorbing greenhouse gases released by fossil fuel combustion, deforestation, and agriculture, which warm the planet, and aerosols such as sulphate from burning coal, which have a short-term cooling effect that partially counteracts human-caused warming,” the report read.
When searching within the document for key industry terms, the words “cattle” and “ruminant” appear only a handful of times, while “agriculture” is found 175 times and “livestock” is mentioned 40 times. Conversely, “methane” is used consistently within the report—around 680 times.
The report reads that atmospheric methane concentration has grown since 2007 and is largely driven by fossil fuels and agriculture, dominated by livestock sectors. Enteric fermentation—a ruminant’s digestive process that leads to methane emissions—dominates livestock emissions by about 90 percent, according to the report.
IPCC outlined the urgency to reduce GHG emissions to net zero by 2050 to further limit the planet’s warming. The panel warned that if emissions are not reduced, it will be “beyond reach” to limit warming to 1.5 C or 2 C above pre-industrial levels. IPCC calls the 1.5-C threshold a global target because after this level, “tipping points become more likely.” A tipping point refers to an irreversible change in the climate system, which could lead to critical tolerance thresholds for agriculture and health.
IPCC will release two other reports in 2022, which will be compiled with this report and three other special reports, and released in a summary scheduled for publication in September 2022. The authors of the report are a couple hundred scientists grouped together by the World Meteorological Association and United Nations (U.N.) Environment Program. The latest report was released just prior to the U.N.’s Climate Change Conference, which will take place in late October. — Anna Miller, WLJ managing editor
