05.14.2026
05.14.2026
Climate Pseudoscience Debunked: Livestock Methane Fears are Baseless
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By Gregory Wrightstone
Policymakers are demanding that farmers scale back meat production, reengineer agricultural systems, and burden consumers with higher grocery bills to prevent a fabricated climate catastrophe. This is fearmongering based on false claims that methane emitted as a byproduct of livestock digestion contributes significantly to allegedly dangerous atmospheric warming.
Happily, the pseudoscience of this campaign against ruminants—mainly cattle and sheep—is refuted in a paper published by the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. Even if all 1.6 billion of Earth’s cattle were killed, the amount of warming averted would be an immeasurably small 0.04 degrees Celsius, according to the paper. The temperature reduction from killing all 1.3 billion sheep would be 10 times smaller. Even more absurdly, New Zealand’s national goal of reducing cattle and sheep emissions would affect temperature by no more than 0.000008 degrees Celsius. That is eight one-millionths of a degree.
Even these tiny amounts would be made smaller by the emissions of wild ruminants, such as deer and termites, replacing domesticated animals as agricultural lands reverted to forests and grasslands.
“No rational person would invest a single dollar to achieve such insignificant temperature reductions,” says the paper, which was authored by Deborah Alexander, Methane Science, Accord, Clevedon, New Zealand; James D. Ferguson, professor emeritus, University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine; Albrecht Glatzle, Rural Association of Paraguay; William Happer, professor emeritus, Department of Physics, Princeton University; and William A. van Wijngaarden, Department of Physics and Astronomy, York University, Canada.
https://co2coalition.org/2026/05/14/climate-pseudoscience-debunked-livestock-methane-fears-are-baseless/
