"People should give up eating meat to halt climate change"

[Needlewoman]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/env...te-change.html

Even if I hadn't started to eat low carb I would think this to be nonsense. Surely millions of large herbivores used to roam the earth before humans greatly reduced their numbers? I think the problem is the way that livestock is kept nowadays, rather than actual numbers.

[maxlharris]

People should drink more alcohol to support their meat eating if they care about warming.

A by-product of the fermentation process can be used in cattle feed and it reduces their methane emissions by 75%.

Drink hard liquor with your beef. Offset your actions.

[S Bear]

Originally Posted by maxlharris

People should drink more alcohol to support their meat eating if they care about warming.

A by-product of the fermentation process can be used in cattle feed and it reduces their methane emissions by 75%.

Drink hard liquor with your beef. Offset your actions.

Hot damn. I'm going green.

[Frank Hagan]

Lying by statistics. They don't seem to be as rigorous in determining the amount of greenhouse gasses released by our agricultural practices growing plant material ... fertilizer, tilling the soil, destruction of carbon sinks (native plants) and the burning off of them, etc. Reminds me of Dr. Mike's review of the book "The Vegetarian Myth" where the author (a former vegan) realized that more animals were killed by growing crops than by eating meat.

Besides which, I always considered cow farts as part of a short-term closed cycle. They cannot fart more greenhouse gasses than their plant matter feed takes up while growing. Bessie is in balance with her environment. It is the release of CO2 and CO2 equivalents that have been stored over eons that throw the short term cycle out of whack (i.e., carbon that has been sequestered as oil for millions of years "suddenly" released in the last 100 years).

If we really want to stop a lot of gas, make the politicians shut up!

[Artista]

Originally Posted by Frank Hagan

If we really want to stop a lot of gas, make the politicians shut up!

Amen, Frank. Listening to politicians drives me to have to drink that hard liquor with my beef...

Kathee

[jilly27]

You may enjoy reading Bjorn Lomborg's
Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming

[S Bear]

Originally Posted by Frank Hagan

Besides which, I always considered cow farts as part of a short-term closed cycle. They cannot fart more greenhouse gasses than their plant matter feed takes up while growing.

Oddly enough, that's not entirely true. Methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, and because it takes many years on average to degrade in the atmosphere (where it ends up as CO2), it packs far more punch than if that plant matter had simply been burned. Burning is a cycle. Upgrading to methane and releasing that is another matter.

That's the problem with rice paddies, too--methane from anaerobic bacteria in the mud. And rice paddies are a huge global source, but it isn't PC to complain about rice paddies.

If you really want to see some huge releases of methane, wait until the methane hydrates in the far north melt. There are also massive methane hydrate deposits along the continnetal shelves (because of the pressure, methane ices form at fairly high temperatures). Some scientists now think the previous ice age ended because of a massive release of subsea methane--which heated the globe, which made more hydrates melt...well, you get the idea.

In any case, cows ain't the problem.

[Needlewoman]

You may all be amused to see that an article on a different UK paper's website (more tabloid than The Telegraph) the Lord received a right good pasting in the comments section, bordering on abuse. I don't think the UK is going veggie any time soon.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...ve-planet.html

I do recall a suggestion from some loony Govt Dept not so long ago that we should use UHT milk instead of fresh to save energy in refrigeration. To my mind that overlooked the fact that energy would be used in the treating, that it needs refrigerating once opened, and most importantly that it tastes absolutely foul in the great British cuppa Quite apart from the fact that we would still need fridges for other things any way

Needlewoman's tip of the day: if visiting the UK never be tempted to try a cup of 'tea' from a machine, and in a restaurant or cafe, try to order a pot of tea if available, rather than a cup. Much nicer.

[S Bear]

Ultrapasteurized is okay, but UHT isn't even food as far as I concerned. I had some in Europe once. Yuck.