The College Fix

There’s been quite a stink over farting, belching farm animals ruining the planet, and professor Frank Mitloehner wants to clear the air, reports The Billings Gazette.

In 2006, the United Nations concluded the livestock industry was a big contributor to climate change, but Mitloehner, an air quality specialist at the University of California-Davis, said recently in a speech that methane gas from livestock was misidentified as the bigger greenhouse gas source than airplanes, trains and automobiles combined, the newspaper reports.

“In its report “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” the U.N. concluded that livestock were contributing 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases — allegedly more than the entire world’s transpiration. The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change used the report to forecast that Himalayan glaciers might vanish within 25 years.

Outside groups reacted to the U.N.’s claims by launching efforts to slow global warming by getting the public to go meatless one day a week, as way of lowering demand for livestock products.

Mitloehner convinced the U.N. to recant its claim in 2010. … Mitloehner contends that the best way to curb methane emissions from livestock is to modernize farms, making them more efficient.

Last month the United Nations also made Mitloehner chairman of its new Food and Agriculture Organization, which will measure the environmental impacts of the livestock business.

Well, that news doesn’t stink.

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