Overseer and farm greenhouse gas emissions are back in the news today.  The need for the regulation of farmers to be underpinned by good science comes into the picture, too.

Robin Grieve, chairman of FARM (Facts about ruminant methane) issued a press release calling on politicians to wait for science to catch up with their rules, regulations and diktats.  Regulators must not make the same mistake with farm greenhouse gas emissions as they did with Overseer, he said.

Councils and Government attempting to regulate farm activities without having the tools to measure what it is they are regulating, is a classic example of politicians running ahead of the science.

Our environment deserves better than having our politicians blundering their way along a regulatory path when they don’t really know what they are talking about or dealing with. “You can’t manage what you can’t measure” is a farm adage that our politicians would be well advised to learn from.

Overseer was never the tool for the job and the zest with which our politicians adopted it as a tool to regulate, despite knowing its deficiencies, should be concerning to any fair minded person who cares for the environment.

Farm greenhouse gases were subject to the same disregard by our politicians when some decades ago they adopted the CO2 equivalent system to quantify methane emissions, despite being told by the climate scientists at the time that it was not fit for purpose.

The CO2 equivalents system does not take in to account the cyclical nature of ruminant methane emissions which leads to it massively overstating the impact of methane emissions and renders it meaningless. To use this system at all is to deny science.

If improving water quality and stopping global warming are important to our politicians, Grieve concluded, they will call time on overzealous regulations that lack scientific credibility, and instead seek enduring solutions that are science based.

Source:  Scoop