Myles Allen speaks at Northern Ireland Climate Change Summit

At a climate summit organised by the Irish Farmers Journal, Myles Allen appealed for new thinking on the assessment of biogenic methane. He argued that methane behaves in a different way to other greenhouse gases and as such, we need a separate target for biogenic methane in relation to its impact on global warming.

While carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide targets still need to by met by 2050, slowly reducing herd size to lower methane emissions by 14% would be enough to stop the the Northern Ireland agriculture sector from contributing further to global warming by 2035.

Allen added, 'This pretence that we have to reduce methane to zero is actually making a hard task impossible'.