Cattle in a feedlot that sits on the northwestern edge of Garden City, Kansas. Photo: Keith Myers/Kansas City Star/MCT

Around the world, there has been a huge increase in planet-warming gases from livestock in the last 50 years. ######

"For people, the obvious answer is: whenever possible, replace beef with something else," said Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at Bard College and lead author of the study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences." If you really need it to be from animal sources, that's still OK. ###### As long as it's not beef, you have always made a significant step forward, because beef is so much more intensive than the rest."

The beef industry, not surprisingly, disputes the results of the studies. ###### The fact is the U.S. beef industry produces beef with lower greenhouse gas emissions than any other country," she said.

Beef Emissions Lead The Way

It's true that harmful gas emissions from developed countries such as the United States have been falling since 1970. ######

Beef cattle produced more than half the emissions, followed by dairy cattle (17 percent), sheep (9 percent), buffalo (7 percent), pigs (5 percent) and goats (4 percent), according to the Climate Change study. The largest increases came in Congo, the Central African Republic and Oman, the study found. ######

"More and more of the developing world is adopting the bad habits of the developed world," Caldeira said.]]>