Scientific findings should not be ignored

I SHOULD like to thank Dr Tom Greeves for his interesting and thoughtful recent letter which comments on an exchange of views between Anton Coaker and myself regarding cattle and methane published in the Western Morning News.

I have to stress that my correspondence to the paper was prompted by the bellicose statement in Mr Coaker’s initial article which read: ‘This undoubtedly includes the spurious and completely unfounded presumption that methane from cows is a problem – which as the chemistry of cow burbs shows – is a complete lie. They’re part of a pre-existing natural and, crucially, short cycle’; a statement that was un-caveated by any reference to the situation on Dartmoor or more generally in the uplands of South-West England. The scientific literature clearly points out why Mr Coaker’s view is wrong.

In the UK context, Defra reports that 36% of total agricultural greenhouse gas emissions (GhG) are accounted for by methane emissions, the main drivers of which are enteric emissions from nondairy cattle (41%), enteric emissions from dairy cattle (24%) and enteric emissions from sheep (17%). The annual enteric emissions of methane from non-dairy and dairy cattle are around 7.4 and 4.3 million tonnes CO2 equivalent, so over 26% of the total emissions of methane from agriculture.

As I’m sure Dr Greeves would acknowledge, nowhere in my correspondence did I advocate any solutions, simple or otherwise, to GhG emissions including methane, of which cattle at home and abroad are a significant source. My concern is that for whatever reason, people do not seek to ignore hard-won scientific findings or try, both unhelpfully and in my view very ignorantly, to denigrate them as ‘pseudoscience’ without any evidence as Mr Roger Mason did in his letter which was also published in the WMN.

I agree that careful and painstaking research is required to fully quantify human impacts on our environments and sensitive ecosystems. I was therefore interested to read in the findings from the ‘Mires Projects’, to which Dr Greeves refers, the investigators conclude that although rewetting increases methane releases in the short-term, these may very well be more than reversed in the longerterm as the vegetation reverts to blanket bog.

Professor Bruce Webb Exeter, Devon