The climate change farce is growing ever worse. Now Moose belches are being cited as a cause of climate change. [via Instapundit -> News & Comment]

Norway is concerned that its national animal, the moose, is harming the climate by emitting an estimated 2,100 kilos of carbon dioxide a year through its belching and farting.

Norwegian newspapers, citing research from Norway's technical university, said a motorist would have to drive 13,000 kilometers in a car to emit as much CO2 as a moose does in a year.

Bacteria in a moose's stomach create methane gas which is considered even more destructive to the environment than carbon dioxide gas. Cows pose the same problem . . .

Norway has some 120,000 moose but an estimated 35,000 are expected to be killed in this year's moose hunting season, which starts on September 25 . . .

Well, climate is always changing, and there have been moose around for a long time, so I suppose they can be damned as contributors . . . if you are intellectually bankrupt. Moose, like cows, are ruminants that harbor symbiotic bacteria in their rumens. These bacteria - just like those in the soil, swamps, and just about everywhere else that there is organic matter and water - digest cellulose, producing methane in the process. Their cousins, aerobic bacteria, do much the same thing in airy places but produce CO2 rather than methane. Pick your GHG: potent but short lived CH4 or less potent and many times longer lasting CO2. Pay now, or pay later.

But wait. If there were no humans around - just moose, deer and the undomesticated ancestors of cattle - all the plant material would still get eaten or just rot in the swamp. There must be something special, something extra about human activities. Do you suppose it could have something to do with all that Norwegian fossil fuel that powers their economy?

Wing nuts use these factoids to support their biases. Right nuts such as Krumm assert that "A car is no more destructive to the environment than a couple of farting moose." Left nuts assert that cattle should be eliminated. One wants to minimize the effects of fossil fuels on the environment, the other seeks to support pseudo-environmental and quasi-religious doctrine.

It's the bacteria folks. They will do their work whether there are any ruminants around or not. Fossil fuels, however, would be released into the environment much more slowly if not for our efforts to find and use them. Sooner or later it would all be belched up due to plate tectonics and resultant volcanoes and such, but at any given time most of it would be out of the loop, resting beneath the surface, and so not a player in atmospheric dramas.

There are other sources of atmospheric carbon that we can do something about. One that might be interesting to right nuts determined to defend fossil fuel use is soil tillage. Every time a field is plowed up it releases tons of CO2 and CH4 into the air. The soil bleeds GHGs when disturbed, like puncturing a rotting corpse. And that's not counting the outgassing from the loss of natural ground cover such as forests and grasslands. See Necessary Heresy for other recent discussion of this. See Dead Dirt and Piled Higher for older discussion. Search Rattan Lal using your engine of choice for much more.