Bullshit!

Back in time, some people had written a book.
And started living by it.
Things went on rather good so more and more people joined the new tradition.

After a while, after things had become so good that some of the people had enough spare time to think, some of these thinkers had noticed that some of the facts contradicted what was written in the book.
Hence some of the people had reached the conclusion that the book was not entirely right.

That even if following ‘the book’ had brought them that far, they no longer had to follow it to the t.
And they had learned to be suspicious of every written word… of all previously held convictions…
They called this new habit ‘science’.

Things went on. From good to even better.
Now many more people had enough time to spare. To think, to play… to read…

Trying to fulfill this new ‘need’, some enterprising people have transformed news gathering and publishing into a show.
Until then, news had to be exact. Hence they were published only after a close scrutiny.
After the ‘transformation’, speed and entertaining value took precedence over trustworthiness.

Furthermore, people less than passionate about knowledge had started to invade the scientific realm.

A study linking autism and vaccines had been published in a prestigious scientific magazine.
And then retracted.

With two consequences.
Some parents decided to ‘risk it’ and a lot of people were left with the impression that science had become unreliable.
That science was no longer above fraud.

““Science is at once the most questioning and . . . sceptical of activities and also the most trusting,” said Arnold Relman, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, in 1989. “It is intensely sceptical about the possibility of error, but totally trusting about the possibility of fraud.”Never has this been truer than of the 1998 Lancet paper that implied a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and a “new syndrome” of autism and bowel disease.“

Fast forward to the present day.
When an editor had put together a title pretending that a “herd of 170 bison could help store CO2 equivalent to almost 2m cars, researchers say”.

Really?!?

Let me look closer.
“2m” stands for 2 million, right?
And since a conventional car spews a little over a ton of CO2 each year, that title meant that each of those 170 bison was supposed to bury 11765 tons of CO2 each year. Give or take…
But there’s a second problem.
‘Climate warriors’ are ‘mad’ about cows. We are constantly bombarded with news stating ‘the cows are belching so much methane that the polar ice caps are going to melt during our lifetime’.
What about bison? Which are, for all practical purposes, wild cows… Don’t they also belch methane?
Try reading the article and see if you understand the difference between cows and bison…

Did your homework?
No?

OK, here’s my version.
Bison grazing in the wild are a close system.
The vegetation they feed on ‘sequester’ CO2 from the atmosphere and transform it into cellulose, using energy from the Sun. Through grazing, the bison encourage the vegetation to transform more CO2 into cellulose versus the situation where the bison were not doing their thing.
Some of the extra cellulose gets eaten by the bison and ends up being transformed into the best natural fertilizer known to nature. Which further encourages the vegetation to sequester even more CO2 from the atmosphere.
A cow living on a pasture – and allowed to roam as freely as a bison herd – does more or less the same thing.
But a cow living in a stable is an ‘open system’. It is fed a lot of corn and soy. Transported from afar and which totally changes the chemistry going on inside the cow. Corn and soy accelerate the rate of growth – the reason for feeding them to the cows – but result in the cows producing a lot more methane than when naturally feeding themselves on grass. Further more, the manure thus produced is never returned where the corn and soy had been produced.

The consequences?
While in a close system the result of photosynthesis – sequestered carbon – slowly accumulates in the soil, in an open system the metabolic results of the plants and animals involved are spread around the globe. Add to that the huge amount of (fossil) energy implied in growing the plants and transporting the goods around the planet and you’ll start to understand the difference between bison/cows grazing on a pasture and cows being fed in a barn corn and soy imported from Brazil.

Why didn’t you read this in the article above?
Where did the aberration regarding each bison being able to sequester almost 12 000 tons of CO2 came from?
Why people don’t care anymore about science?

I’m sorry, you’ll have to figure these out by yourself.

“This headline and article were amended on 16 May 2024. Due to an error in the original research, a previous version stated that Carpathian ecosystems browsed by (170) bison could store 2m tonnes of carbon, equivalent to the emissions of 1.88m average US cars petrol a year. The research authors have since retracted these figures, which were due to a coding error. The correct figure is that bison could store 54,000 tonnes of carbon, equivalent to the emissions of 43,000 average US petrol cars.”