We keep hearing calls for us to give up meat and dairy. It's one of the very most effective things that you can do on an individual level to combat global warming. Is it really? Do the meat and dairy industries truly contribute all that much? And by giving up your favorite steak, is that really going

to have any impact at all? Well, we're going to find out today on Skeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com. Cows and Global Warming

Welcome to the show that separates fact from fiction,

science from pseudoscience,

real history from fake history,

and helps us all make better life decisions

by knowing what's real and what's not.

Years ago, when I first heard that cows burping and farting was a major contributor to global

warming, I wasn't sure if it was satire or real.

I had to admit it sounded more like a joke than science.

Here were the far-out hippy liberal extremists really scraping the bottom of the barrel to frighten us into becoming

vegans, or something.

And honestly, it wasn't really high on my radar for a long time while I was writing

about other aspects of warming, mainly things like the proof that all the incremental warming

of the last couple hundred years is human-caused.

Proofs like spectroscopic analysis of our atmosphere

layers to prove that the excess heat is being trapped by CO2. And like isotopic analysis of that

carbon proving that it came from the burning of fossil fuels and from nowhere else. So eventually,

staying on the path of science brought me back around to cow farts, because

why not?

One of the biggest stories in the intersection of agriculture and warming research is the

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