Australia Considers Killing Camels

Sounds like a south park episode. Its probably people that want to shoot the camels using warming as an excuse. Then again California in its climate bill said you could earn credits by chopping down old growth forests and putting up a tree farm. Stupidity is international.

http://library.thinkquest.org/03oct/00128/en/camels/effect.htm

 

Camel burgers are quite tasty, or plug a million portable methane collection units into a million camels. You can then collect and consolidate the methane for industry and defense!

 

Man, you gotta be kidding me! Use all that effort to thin out those nasty cane toads you have down there, would do a bit more good..

 

Camel Filters. I think those come in a crush-proof box.

Tom

 

And soon this morons will start killing old people to save the planet.

 

Quick.........someone tell them that Methane is a flammable gas. It can burn in boilers, they can use it to keep warm. Just hook all the camels in series, then pipe their exhaust to the boilers.

 

Hooking the camels in series for methane collection would sure help with the camel overpopulation problem.

 

Use it to keep warm? In Australia? Since when has that been a problem?

 

Well it would be much easier to just catch and domesticate them, then they could be sold to people that want them.

To put this exaggeration in perspective.

Op-Ed Contributor - The Carnivore’s Dilemma - NYTimes.com
Factory farms add huge amounts of methane. These camels eat the plants that nothing else wants that don't have fertilizer other than animal dung or pesticides applied. In other words very little.

Factory farms get the ultimate handout | Grist
Of course factory farms are one of the areas of big ghg, land, and water polution the epa doesn't want to look at.

 

Hahaha. Good one. Wait. Are you serious?

 

Duplicate post deleted

 

Typical Fox News propaganda. Publish anything that makes global warming look silly. Ruminants are always good for a laugh. So whenever there's a ruminant+GHG story, it'll get picked up. I give them credit for not using the anatomically incorrect phrase "cow farts".

Take 60 seconds on Google to find the source documents.

Austingreen got it right in his second sentence. They want to shoot the camels period. Methane is just icing on the cake.

Here, read what the Gov't of Australia says about its feral camels:

National Feral Camel Action Plan

Here's what it says. Feral camels are a pest "of national significance" in Australia, doing a lot of damage. Same old story -- exotic import, no natural predators, breed rapidly, long lifespan. Apparently the herd is growing 10% a year. So many camels that the competition for forage is hurting the domestic cattle industry.

So they want to thin the wild herds to reduce the damage. And at the bottom, one sentence, "oh, and by they way, they are a source of methane".

Is this worthwhile from a GHG perspective alone? That's what the Northwest Carbon proposal was about. That's a private-sector entity with a patent on some type of method for doing the killing and figuring the emissions savings. So they are the ones pushing the GHG angle.

But the line about this being one of Australia's largest sources of GHG emissions is nonsense. Based on the cite above, that's 1 ton C02 equivalent per animal, so 1M tons for killing 1M animals. Total for Austrialia is 435M tons C02 equivalent. [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions"]List of countries by carbon dioxide emissions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame] It's under 0.25%.

Whereas if you look at the US greenhouse gas inventory, all cattle operations (both enteric fermentation and waste) account for about 3.6% of total US GHG emissions (assuming I did the arithmetic correctly).

2011 U.S. Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report | Climate Change - Greenhouse Gas Emissions | U.S. EPA

So maybe feral camels are the biggest source of Australian GHGs arising from a pest that nobody wants. But they aren't a very big source as a fraction of Australia's total emissions. They'll kill them because they are an exotic pest that's trashing the landscape, and they are costing the cattle industry. The Northwest Carbon proposal said $100/camel in lost cattle industry productivity due to the competition. The GHG savings are not negligible but they are hardly the driver.

 

austingreen is usually pretty spot on with regards to this kind of stuff.

Fortunately for California there is new information coming out of Blodgett Forest Research Station that shows the old growth trees sequester more carbon than young growing trees. This assume the old growth tree is still growing. But like the camels, someone just wants to profit off selling cut trees and planting new ones. There is always some sort of profit involved with these schemes.

 

I can't believe so many replies. We need to focus on real GW issues, like the sheep in New Zealand.

 

That is one of the things that disgusted me with kyoto

Sheep flatulence inoculation developed - Telegraph

But they have spent time solving the "problem"

But here is the real sheep problem
Daily Kos: Global Warming: Hyper Intelligent Carnivorous Sheep in New Zealand Edition

 

they should be pureeing cane toads and turning them into biodiesel. Or perhaps they've abandoned all hope of eradicating that malevolent species.

 

Hold on this is a very serious issue...
If they exterminate all the camels, how will anyone know what a camel toe is?

 

Well AG I had to thank you for that post too.