Are Cow Farts Causing Global Warming?

Put a Cork in It, Bessie!

It seems in our world today that Global Warming is the hot topic (no pun intended) on everyones list. From news anchors to celebrities, everyone's trying to get a piece of the global warming action. Actual at times I get a little tired of hearing about it. No matter what side you are on though, we all can agree that we need to take better care of our earth. But what about the cows?

The first time I read anything on this was about a month ago while going through my daily ritual of reading the top headlines on MSNBC. Usually anything involving funny bodily functions, such as farting, entertains me so I continued to read on. I couldn't believe my eyes as I thought to myself, "oh great, another scapegoat for environmentalists to blame the world's problems on." However, as I read further I was intrigued to learn that we really can blame it on the cows, or at least partially.

It turns out that just one cow, in one day, can put out enough methane gas to fill around 400 one liter bottles, (and you thought your husband was bad). Methane, for those of you who may be uninformed, is one of the leading causes of ozone depletion. How it works is that as the cow passes gas, the methane produced heads up to the ozone layer and adds to its ever expanding hole. So I guess you could say from hole to hole damage. Unfortunately, it's not just cows that are the problem. Pretty much all farm animals because of their diets emit large amounts of Methane, believed to be twenty times more harmful than carbon-dioxide to the environment. So what can we do?