| By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website |
Livestock production has a bigger climate impact than transport, the UN believes
People should consider eating less meat as a way of combating global warming, says the UN’s top climate scientist.
Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), will make the call at a speech in London on Monday evening.
Pachuri
UN figures suggest that meat production puts more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than transport.
But a spokeswoman for the UK’s National Farmers’ Union (NFU) said methane emissions from farms were declining.
Dr Pachauri has just been re-appointed for a second six-year term as chairman of the Nobel Prize-winning IPCC, the body that collates and evaluates climate data for the world’s governments.
“The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has estimated that direct emissions from meat production account for about 18% of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions,” he told BBC News.
“So I want to highlight the fact that among options for mitigating climate change, changing diets is something one should consider.”
More of the BBC article plus my response follows….
Climate of persuasion
The FAO figure of 18% includes greenhouse gases released in every part of the meat production cycle – clearing forested land, making and transporting fertiliser, burning fossil fuels in farm vehicles, and the front and rear end emissions of cattle and sheep.
The contributions of the three main greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide – are roughly equivalent, the FAO calculates.
Transport, by contrast, accounts for just 13% of humankind’s greenhouse gas footprint, according to the IPCC.
Dr Pachauri will be speaking at a meeting organised by Compassion in World Farming (CIWF), whose main reason for suggesting people lower their consumption of meat is to reduce the number of animals in factory farms.
CIWF’s ambassador Joyce D’Silva said that thinking about climate change could spur people to change their habits.
“The climate change angle could be quite persuasive,” she said.
“Surveys show people are anxious about their personal carbon footprints and cutting back on car journeys and so on; but they may not realise that changing what’s on their plate could have an even bigger effect.”
I’ve become a vegetarian. I try to minimize the use of cars. Where I’ve failed is my impact with regard to air travel. I tell people I was born a Hindu who believes in reincarnation. It will take me the next six lives to neutralize my carbon footprint. There’s no way I can do it in one lifetime.
Many of you may recall this blog entry from Congressman Dana Rohrabacher’s Floor Speech on Global Warming. He touches on the UN claim of livestock and emissions:
A 2006 report entitled “Livestock’s Long Shadow” to the United Nations mentions livestock emissions and grazing, and it places the blame for global warming squarely on the hind parts of cows. Livestock, the report claims, accounts for 18 percent of the gases that supposedly cause the global warming of our climate. Cows are greenhouse-emitting machines. Fuel for fertilizer and meat production and transportation, as well as clearing the fields for grazing, produce 9 percent of the global CO2 emissions, according to the report. And also, cows produce ammonia, causing acid rain, of course.
Now, if that’s not bad enough, all of these numbers are projected in this report to double by the year 2050. Well, not only are we then going to have to cut personal transportation, which will keep us at home, but when we stay at home, we can’t even have a bbq. And heck, they won’t even let us have a hamburger.
One of the most interesting paragraph’s refutes Pachuri’s claims quite well I think:
I would like to point out that before the introduction of cattle, millions upon millions of buffalo dominated the Great Plains of America. They were so thick you could not see where the herd started and where it ended. I can only assume that the anti-meat, manmade global warming crowd must believe that buffalo farts have more socially redeeming value than the same flatulence emitted by cattle. Yes, this is absurd, but the deeper one looks into this global warming juggernaut, the weirder this movement becomes and the more denial is evident.
What next from Pachuri? Stop bathing? Perhaps we should all mail him a bag of this:
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Drew, the list of anthropologists, landscape geographers, ethno-ecologists and other scientist/historians who have found evidence of significant and substantial ancient human impact is long and growing. The New Paradigm in environmental science and ecology holds that human beings have played a key role in nature for a very long time. Check out my website for more info about this subject.
An interesting corollary question is, if people modified vegetation and animal populations so profoundly, did they (we) also modify ancient climates? Has our interglacial Holocene hung on longer than previous interglacials because of anthropogenic influences?
My personal conclusion/hypothesis is that historical human impact on terrestrial vegetation and animal populations has been huge, but the climate is an environmental phenomenon too vast for humans to affect, then or now. However, I also wonder how so many AGW believers can at the same time be so dim and unaware of historical anthropogenic influences on terrestrial landscapes. If you accept the former (AGW), how can you possibly deny the latter (ancient anthropogenic fire and predation)?
O.K. So what’s the solution to the supposed problem highlighted by Pachauri ?
Mass slaughter of all domestic animals, and while we’re at it, let’s go the whole hog and slaughter other wildlife !! All for a theory, and it is just a theory about the causes of global warming.
Can we please get the lunatics back into the asylum!
If that is a photo of the high lord of climate change, ( Pachieri ) I ask, for someone who [snip – ad hominem removed], his comments must be taken as technical inexactitudes, no wonder that Europeans never discovered America before C/ Columbus, if was uninhabitable, How many millions of Buffalo ?
How a person appears should not be an indicator of the worth of their opinions – Anne (the new moderator)
To paraphrase the secondhand car salesman epithet levelled against Nixon, would you buy meat substitutes from someone who pedals AGW falsehodods and [snip – ad hominem removed]? How say you Patrick Henry?
See above – Anne
So, the carbon footprint for raising cattle includes transportation and fertilization. How does that compare to the transportation and fertilization footprint of raising crops? I’m guessing that no type of farming is carbon-negative or even carbon-neutral. That only leaves the animals’ emissions, which as others have pointed out, are going to be offset by whatever other organisms consume that vegetable matter.
By the way, as I only have one lifetime to reduce my carbon footprint, should I look into buying carbon-offsets from those who have multiple incarnations to work it off?
richard (23:37:24) :
Linked from that page is http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7603257.stm
Sigh.
Anne,
The eyes are the mirror of the soul; have you heard that? Look again at the picture of Pachauri and then you tell us what you see. IMO, those are the eyes of a stone cold killer who would have billions starve to death in pursuit of his religious AGW visions. You may not like it, but humans are animals and we all react viscerally to sights our brains and our bodies are programmed to fear and fight. What you see is what you get, in this case. It is not prejudice, it is knowing the enemy and he is absolutely my enemy.
Reply – There is a difference between knowing one’s enemy and needlessly taking jabs at them. Your comment did nothing to declare Pachauri as your enemy but only appeared to demean him by holding him up as an object of ridicule due to his appearance. Skeptics need to rise above that behavior at all times, IMHO. Let the warmers call us names, we don’t need to stoop to their level. – Anne
The Head of the IPCC has the science completely wrong.
First, Methane concentrations have stabilized. Cows are contributing Zero to the Zero increase in Methane. Methane is one of the success stories in the global warming fight (probably the oil and gas industry changing its practises).
Second, Pasture is CO2 sink. Each acre of Pasture sinks about 0.3 tonnes of CO2e per year.
Third, Pasture is not fertilized with Nitrogen nearly as much as other agricultural land. Consequently, the N2O emissions (the second most important GHG) are far, far less than any other agricultural land.
It is very distressing that the head of the IPCC has not even heard the message which would have been delivered by the scientists who contibute to the IPCC. It just reinforces that this is a political organization.
Anne,
Welcome to your new job.
Reply – Thanks! With all the good work that Anthony is doing here, I am happy to pitch in and lend a hand keeping all you rowdy skeptics out of trouble. – Anne.
I’m not surprised by Dr Pachauri’s statement, he is according to Wiki (if it’s accurate), a strict vegetarian. He is a strict vegetarian, partly due to his beliefs as a Hindu, and partly because of the impact of meat-production on the environment.
Alan Chappell (02:43:24) :
…. no wonder that Europeans never discovered America before C/ Columbus, …
Well we did, in 986. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bjarni_Herj%C3%B3lfsson
How many people live in India? Do they exhale CO2? Hum
Carsten, earlier still, the Solutreans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solutrean_hypothesis
As regards Lawrence G. Straus in the article, I would just reiterate that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Fittingly enough, Solutrean/Clovis culture brings us back to climate change and the extent of the last glaciation in the northern hemisphere.
Will Dr Pachauri’s next suggestion be that we should drink our own urine in order to safe water? The former Prime Minister of India, Morarji Desai, is supposed to have done this every day.
Did anybody see the following in some of the other articles on this same subject?
However, he also stressed other changes in lifestyle would help to combat climate change. ‘That’s what I want to emphasise: we really have to bring about reductions in every sector of the economy.’
This reaffirms my suspicions that the UN is using AGW as a means to equalize the economies of all nations because Kyoto gives developing countries a pass to emit CO2, it requires developed countries to pay wealth (i.e. eco-reparations) to developing countries, and now Pachauri is saying we have to live with a smaller economy and changes to our lifestyles.
Doesn’t anybody else see what’s going on here?
“No more wonderful days on the farm. Cool mornings, warm cow-pies to mush between the toes…”
We preferred to blow them up with firecrackers.
Final reflection on blowing stepping in / blowing up cowpies:
‘A boy’s will is the wind’s will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.’
How’s that for a non-sequitur?
I think the IPCC is actually an arm of Mad Magazine. This Pachuri is a relative of Alfred Neuman:
The asymmetry of the eyes is remarkable…mirror images, if you will…difference in the cheekbones, true…but….
Splendid “Madness”…has to be part of Mad’s incredible plan…
WRT Pacharui’s carbon load.
Reincarnation provides interesting possibilities for alleviating an oversized carbon footprint during this lifetime.
“I tell people I was born a Hindu who believes in reincarnation. It will take me the next six lives to neutralize my carbon footprint. There’s no way I can do it in one lifetime…”
But must he take stock of his transgressions in previous lives? Are the cycles endless, and if so, isn’t the biomass accretion of previous lives also endless? Or perhaps this constant rebirthing is a mere redistribution, rather than a net accumulation of biomass, assuming one takes on additional living forms in each successive incarnation.
Or, if one lives a moral life, does one get “better and better” with age? I.e., closer to one’s penultimate avatar, prior to becoming a Brahman – or a Brahma bull? The devout Hindu / AGW believer must be on the horns of a real dilemma.
Maria McCaffery, Chief Executive of British Wind Energy Association countered:“We don’t have to pay for wind power it just comes to us naturally and is totally sustainable. ”
Wow! Free windmills. No maintenance. I want some.
Perhaps Pachauris believes the old Russian fable: A genie appears to a poor farmer, granting one wish. Farmer says: “My neighbor has a cow. I do not. Kill my neighbor’s cow.”
Art Buchwald said it was hard to write satire, as reality was so strange.
The statement by Pachauri is great.
The AGW bandwagon can only continue to roll while the public takes it seriously. From the papers and the broadcast media, the world’s top scientists are all agreed and that’s why the governments have to act with unpopular measures such as higher taxes. Most members of the public aren’t in a position to question the world’s top scientists but increasingly, they’re starting to believe it’s a tax raising scam and generally something to make life less pleasant and more regimented.
Now, when the Chief of the World’s Top Scientists comes out with an obvious load of nonsense like this, lights start coming on and other things may be looked at, such as spending a lot of money on windmills, every extreme event being interpreted as caused by AGW and the green propaganda we are paying to be bombarded with. If people at large refuse to take it seriously and complain it will stop.
The top article today shows the earths temperatures dipping yet again and continuing an overal downward trend going back the best part of a decade.
The sun is virtually free of sunspots and subject to ongoing discussions may have been free of sunspots altogether the week before last – the first time this has happened since 1913.
Also we understand that the Aqua satellite has compromised the Climate Computer Models…they are up the creek. But we are not supposed to know.
What do we get?…this pillock trying to tell us we are under threat from Global “Warming”……hahahahahahahah.
Try Global “Cooling”!……err 20 years of it at -2C average from where we are today according to the real experts.
James,
Leaving aside the issue of Pachauri’s Hindu beliefs and the sanctity of cows in Hinduism, one needs to consider that totally switching to a vegetarian diet, would require lot more vegetables and lentils to be grown for the growing population of the world. Lots and lots more veg, as meat provides sustenance in a more efficient manner then vegetables. Besides, cattle can feed in pastures not suitable for industrial agriculture, thus converting a poor food – grass, into a highly efficient food for humans – meat and milk.
One sure way to reduce energy consumption, is for bureacrats, politicians, and hundreds of their advisors and hangerson, in the UN, the EU, and other government agencies, to stop flying around the world – to nice resorts such as Bali. I realise this is a small bit, but if they can just stop this, then they will not need to waste so much energy as well as mountains of paper, as there is no freebie at the end.
james griffin
As you wrote, global cooling is the real threat. This will lead to a shorter growing season, and thus a shortfall in food. Global cooling will also lead to much more use of fuel for domestic heating. But the politicians need the money now, and AGW is the vehicle they have created for this. They are not concerned about the problems in 20 years, for they will be out office by then. They want to raid public wallets NOW.