Allan Savory gave this talk in Ireland in November 2009. About 58 minutes.

Allan Savory - Keeping Cattle: cause or cure for climate crisis? from Feasta on Vimeo.

Cindy Dvergsten has a great piece on using sheep to maintain lawns.

Methane is an important greenhouse gas that contributes to global heating. But methane emissions from ruminant digestion play a minor part in atmospheric methane levels, according to a recent article published on the website of the International Atomic Energy Agency's Animal Production and Health branch.

Atmospheric methane has stabilized at 1999 levels, though livestock numbers have been increasing by an average of about 17 million per year, according to UN FAO data. "At this time there is no relationship between increasing ruminant numbers and changes in atmospheric methane concentrations, a break from previously assumed role of ruminants in greenhouse gases."

http://www-naweb.iaea.org/nafa/aph/stories/2008-atmospheric-methane.html

Methane is an important subcycle of the carbon cycle. Methane (CH₄), like carbon dioxide (CO₂), is a transparent, odorless gas. Per gram, methane has about 21 times the greenhouse potential of carbon dioxide, but unlike carbon dioxide it breaks down fairly quickly in the atmosphere.

Methane is produced during anaerobic fermentation of plant material. In the carbon cycle, lignin and cellulose are typically broken down by methanogenic bacteria, such as are present in the digestive systems of ruminant herbivores and termites, and which cannot survive in the presence of oxygen.

Lecture to the Royal Society in October 2007 by James Lovelock. "Climate change on a living earth," 65 minutes. Lovelock eloquently depicts the fragmentation of scientific understanding, which makes us unable to grasp global heating or to counter it. "In our hubris, we believe that we can be stewards of the earth long before we understand it."

"Perhaps the saddest thing is that if we fail, Gaia will lose as much or more than we do. Not only will wildlife and whole ecosystems go extinct, but in human civilization the planet has a precious resource. We are not merely a disease; we are through our intelligence and communication the planetary equivalent of a nervous system. We should be the heart and mind of the Earth, not its malady. Perhaps the greatest value of the Gaia concept lies in its metaphor of a living Earth, which reminds us that we are part of it and that our contract with Gaia is not about human rights alone, but includes human obligations."

Draft of lecture here.

Attached are several diagrams of the carbon cycle.

See also http://managingwholes.com/water-cycle-demo-jugs.htm and http://managingwholes.com/eco-water-cycle.htm for more detail.

If we quit adding carbon to the atmosphere, it won't stop global warming anytime soon. That's why people are hoping that there are ways to get the extra carbon out of the atmosphere, and that we can put these billions of tons of it somewhere safe.

Breaking apart carbon dioxide, or extracting carbon dioxide from the air, takes work. Work means energy. It's the reverse of combustion. There's a triple problem here: the technology itself, the disposal, and the energy to do the work.

It's a common saying that you can't unscramble an egg. You break an egg into a bowl, break the yolk membrane with your fork, mix the yolk thoroughly with the white, and stir it around in a hot skillet. The cooking uncurls the egg proteins, breaking some chemical bonds and causing new ones to form.

Now we've got a scrambled egg. The egg proteins won't go back to their raw configuration when they cool, and even if they did it's impossible to wield the fork in such a way as to separate the yolk from the white. Roomfuls of the latest and greatest laboratory equipment, the best Google algorithms, or even all the king's horses and all the king's men would not unscramble our egg. The mixing and cooking are irreversible processes.

It's a familiar impasse. Can we change the way we see the problem?

Feed our scrambled egg to a hen, and tomorrow she'll lay us a new egg. Her metabolism—a product of evolution rather than technology—will break down the complex scrambled egg molecules into simpler ones and reconstitute them, with losses of course, into a new, raw egg.

Over the last decade the concept of ecosystem services such as filtration, regulation, pollination, and food production have gained currency. But these ecosystem services in turn depend on even more basic biosphere processes:

• solar energy flow
• water cycling
• nutrient cycling
• community dynamics or succession

These biosphere processes provide the foundation for all sound management, and for ecosystem services such as food, fiber, fuel, mitigation of flood and drought, water and water quality, disease regulation, and recycling of wastes--without which our economy would not be able to function.

The separation of nature and humanity, inconceivable to a hunter gatherer, resulted in a division of knowledge. Nature became an Other. Ecological or environmental literacy refers to the skills, experience, and concepts with which we understand Nature, and recognize and attempt to solve ecological problems. This ecological literacy has shown three broad stages of development.

In the first generation, species of plants and animals form the alphabet of nature. To read or understand nature, you identify and classify species, and label them with a Latin binomial. Generations of field guides, checklists, and dichotomous keys reinforce this mode.

Judgment tends to follow labeling. In 1920 in the western United States, cattle were good and wolves were bad. By 1995 popular opinion was on the way to a reverse judgment. Billions are spent each year in eradication attempts against species that are labeled non-native, invasive, or exotic, with few successes. Likewise, reintroduction of previously extirpated species, such as the wolf and bighorn sheep, are beset by expense and controversy. Though single-species management is widely discredited, it is still routinely practiced on large scales, and our agriculture is based upon it.

The species concept underpins legislation such as the Endangered Species Act of 1973. The National Science Education Standards regard the species concept as the fundamental unit of classification in biology, though a solid or clearly demarcated definition of species has yet to emerge.