Is bird poop canceling out cow flatulence?
No, that’s not a joke title. See this:
Between the months of May and September, tens of millions of migratory seabirds converge on the Arctic where they eat, breed and poop.
Over time, the nitrogen in seabird droppings breaks down into ammonia, and it’s estimated that colonies emit some 40,000 tons of it into the atmosphere every year.
Now, researchers believe that has a knockon effect in cloud formation…
‘Our chemical-transport model simulations indicate that the pan-Arctic seabird-influenced particles can grow by sulfuric acid and organic vapour condensation to diameters sufficiently large to promote pan-Arctic cloud-droplet formation in the clean Arctic summertime.
‘We calculate that the resultant cooling tendencies could be large’…
As for cows, the jury is out, but it seems the evidence is mixed for farts (see this) but fairly clear for burps.
I saw someting at Real Clear Science (I think) the other day that said that burps can be managed by adding a small amount of dried red algae to their food.
I wonder what their models would say about migrating passenger pigeons. There was a time when they were so populous that a person could stand in one place and never see the sky for three days as they flew overhead.
Must…preserve…warming trends…
Kill…all…seabirds…
Atmospheric chemistry is so complicated and uncertain that almost everything can be guessed about it but nothing can be proved.
Another humorous assertion: Russian newspaper “Zavtra” of communist-monarchist bent published a genealogy study claiming that the mother of Trump, Ann MacLeod, was a direct ascendant of the Viking chieftain Rurik, one of the founders of the Russian state and also the founder of Tsars dynasty which ruled Russia for 700 years. The last Tsar of this dynasty was Ivan The Terrible. There are still no responses from president-elect if he has any claims for Russian throne, but his popularity in Russia is growing so fast that soon will be comparable with that of Vladimir Putin.