IPCC’s Dr. Pachauri must be having a conniption fit about now, since he’s been an advocate of meat free global warming salvation.
From the American Chemical Society:
Eating less meat and dairy products won’t have major impact on global warming
SAN FRANCISCO, March 22, 2010 — Cutting back on consumption of meat and dairy products will not have a major impact in combating global warming — despite repeated claims that link diets rich in animal products to production of greenhouse gases. That’s the conclusion of a report presented here today at the 239th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society.
Air quality expert Frank Mitloehner, Ph.D., who made the presentation, said that giving cows and pigs a bum rap is not only scientifically inaccurate, but also distracts society from embracing effective solutions to global climate change. He noted that the notion is becoming deeply rooted in efforts to curb global warming, citing campaigns for “meatless Mondays” and a European campaign, called “Less Meat = Less Heat,” launched late last year.
Reducing consumption of meat and dairy
products might not have a major impact in
combating global warming despite claims
that link diets rich in animal products to
production of greenhouse gases.
Credit: Wikimedia
“We certainly can reduce our greenhouse-gas production, but not by consuming less meat and milk,” said Mitloehner, who is with the University of California-Davis. “Producing less meat and milk will only mean more hunger in poor countries.”
The focus of confronting climate change, he said, should be on smarter farming, not less farming. “The developed world should focus on increasing efficient meat production in developing countries where growing populations need more nutritious food. In developing countries, we should adopt more efficient, Western-style farming practices to make more food with less greenhouse gas production,” Mitloehner said.
Developed countries should reduce use of oil and coal for electricity, heating and vehicle fuels. Transportation creates an estimated 26 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., whereas raising cattle and pigs for food accounts for about 3 percent, he said.
Mitloehner says confusion over meat and milk’s role in climate change stems from a small section printed in the executive summary of a 2006 United Nations report, “Livestock’s Long Shadow.” It read: “The livestock sector is a major player, responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions measured in CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalents). This is a higher share than transport.”
Mitloehner says there is no doubt that livestock are major producers of methane, one of the greenhouse gases. But he faults the methodology of “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” contending that numbers for the livestock sector were calculated differently from transportation. In the report, the livestock emissions included gases produced by growing animal feed; animals’ digestive emissions; and processing meat and milk into foods. But the transportation analysis factored in only emissions from fossil fuels burned while driving and not all other transport lifecycle related factors.
“This lopsided analysis is a classical apples-and-oranges analogy that truly confused the issue,” he said.
###
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The entire AGW movement is a long planned attack at our civilization.
It’s worse than Communism and it will kill more people if we fail to stop it.
Our current civilization would not have been possible without carbon fuels and we won’t be able to maintain it without it.
Everything will stop.
We need 4 calories of oil to produce one calorie of food.
The Greens undermine our entire civilization.
The entire plan is nothing more but a crime against humanity.
This is the most evil doctrine that ever faced the world and we have to ERADICATE it.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Blast those typos! Should read “over”.
Trevor (08:41:39) :
Many of the comments here are missing important points.
Beef cattle are frequently raise on pasture and hay (dead grass) and then briefly fed higher quality meals to “fatten” or bring them to market weight with the correct distribution of lean mass to body fat.
http://www.ehow.com/how_5757057_feed-longhorn-cattle-market-weight.html
The following document suggests that nothing is simple in this age of large scale advanced agricultural production. Farming families often send one to law school, one to ag school, and one to business school – and diversify from there as the number of siblings and marriages increase the size of the family.
http://agbiopubs.sdstate.edu/articles/ExEx5032.pdf
Cathy (08:42:30) :
They’re taking this country apart – brick by brick, regulation by regulation, tax by tax
I think they are positively increasing their productivity, now it is not brick by brick but wall by wall and all taxes together, that’s progress….iveness ☺.
“AdderW (08:10:32) :
Have you ever seen a weak gorillia? ”
Gorillas can’t curl a 50 pound dumbbell. Humans can.
Re: CRS, Dr.P.H. (23:27:21)
In rice production, the fields are flooded, which leads to things decaying under the water thus methane is produced. And this accounts for 1/5 to 1/4 of human-caused methane emissions.
Well, previously the helpful Army Corps of Engineers helped drain off nearly all of the Florida Everglades, as well as numerous other swamp reclamation and similar wetlands draining programs.
Now in our more environmentally-aware times, we are either refilling these formerly wet areas or simply letting Nature drown them again.
Which will undoubtedly lead to greater methane generation than if the areas were allowed to remain dry. And methane is a Dangerous Potent Greenhouse Gas.
So how does all this sum up in the Green Logic World? We have to destroy the planet to save the planet?
Gee. The reality of turning billions of hectares into fields for grain and vegetables finally hits someone in the face. What a bunch of dolts.
Henry chance (07:13:25) :
Didn’t know much about the actual study. Good to see that site, thanks.
I just saw a cartoon in Funny Times where an angry-looking diner with a full plate said, “I’m not a vegetarian because I love animals. I’m a vegetarian because I hate vegetables.”
Perhaps some digging around on the farm will yield another ‘Gate’…
“Mitloehner says confusion over meat and milk’s role in climate change stems from a small section printed in the executive summary of a 2006 United Nations report, “Livestock’s Long Shadow.” It read: “The livestock sector is a major player, responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions measured in CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalents). This is a higher share than transport.”
Mitloehner says there is no doubt that livestock are major producers of methane, one of the greenhouse gases. But he faults the methodology of “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” contending that numbers for the livestock sector were calculated differently from transportation. In the report, the livestock emissions included gases produced by growing animal feed; animals’ digestive emissions; and processing meat and milk into foods. But the transportation analysis factored in only emissions from fossil fuels burned while driving and not all other transport lifecycle related factors.
“This lopsided analysis is a classical apples-and-oranges analogy that truly confused the issue,” he said.
Farmgate anyone???
I am glad someone is trying to set the record straight, I have been shocked at the stone wall silence from scientists when claims about cows causing global warming first surfaced – its utter garbbage!
Cows are part of the contemporary carbon cycle, they do not remove co2 reserves locked away underground, burn them and it new co2 to the cycle, they merely act as part of the contemporary cycle by recycling co2. You grow food for the cow, it absorbs co2, cow eats food and releases it as co2 (methane changes to co2 in the atmosphere). At last some one is setting the idiots straight – even though it is very basic science!!!
This is a perfect example of how “Greenies” jumped on the AGW band wagon to promote their own views i.e. we should all be vegan / vegetarian. That winds me up, I am vegetarian, but I would never try and force my way of life onto someone else, people are welcome to eat animals as much as they want!
In a third world country? They don’t need to do that. Slaughter near the barn. Cook, salt, and/or dry the meat.
Lance (23:05:37) :
“Does he imagine that people in Addis Ababa are going to install expensive and inefficient technologies like photo-voltaics and wind turbines”
The fundamental problem with wind turbines in the ‘developed world’ is social acceptance of intermittent power. Hence wind power is expensive because we demand a backup generator for then the wind isn’t blowing.
In ‘electricity deprived’ places, intermittent electricity is a huge improvement over no electricity. People will just schedule their electricity consuming tasks for when the wind blows.
Things like propane refrigerators used to be quite common in rural areas of the US that didn’t have reliable electricity. Natural gas heat, hot water and stoves are still quite common.
And yet another rural station shows nothing going on the last 130 years:
http://www.robertb.darkhorizons.org/TempGr/Winn1.GIF
Winnemucca, Nevada. A place you stop at for gas on I-80 on your trip across the Intermountain West.
On diet: After many years of production machine work, which could be 10-hour aerobics sessions, I was still very large on a regular diet, about 280 lbs at the lowest. Later I went Atkins, very low carbs with a Centrum-equivalent daily vitamin/mineral supplement. At the time I was going back to college, not exercising, in what seemed like no time I was down to under 190, a weight I probably hadn’t seen since middle school, and definitely felt to be in the best health of my life, with little appetite yet lots of energy. Then I took up doing the cooking for the old folks, ate like them. And slowly, disgustingly, it came back to where I was nearly my heaviest ever. Now I shun carbs, don’t quibble about the fat intake, and the weight is slowly coming off.
On Atkins, your carb intake is so low that it is insufficient to maintain the blood glucose level, so your liver takes up generating glucose from fat, and the fat can be in your diet or hanging on your bones, wherever it can get it. A calorie is not a calorie, as it takes energy to make the conversion thus more calories are needed to generate a given amount of glucose than if you had consumed carbohydrates. It is also a proven treatment for diabetes, as you are simply not eating enough carbs to spike your glucose levels thus do not need insulin anyway.
I have come to believe humans have “winter” and “summer” metabolisms, which makes sense given my Northern European heritage as it would lead to increased survival rates. In the warm times when the plants yielded their tasty bits that gatherers could find, humans would eat them, gorge if possible, and put on weight as the insulin from the pancreas caused the excess carbs to be stored as fat. Then in the cold times, the “lean” times, without the tasty plant bits the body would switch over to fat burning, and people survive just fine on only meat.
I know people will say you must eat plant products for certain nutrients, however… Our tastes have changed, we stick to the skeletal meat, and have been told how awful the organ meats are since they are fatty. Yet as our ancestors knew and the meat-eating animals know, there is a good deal of nutrition in the organ meats. Cats, as I have seen, might only eat the innards of a small rodent and leave the rest. If we are not worried about fat in the diet, since fat is fuel, then there is no great reason to not eat the organs, except perhaps the taste. Once you get used to eating practically all of the critter, you get practically all the nutrition you need to survive, and prosper.
Some of us are just better off living as primarily carnivores, with the occasional eating of plant matter. Perhaps far more of us than the PETA people would ever dare to consider there being.
Someone at Fox News mst be reading WUWT – they just covered this story , albeit briefly . They also covered the scentless flower story last night . At the end of the story , they cited Roy Spencer as having said something to the effect that the researchers must have mixed some mushrooms with the flowers .
I can honestly say that of all the reasons I went veggie less greenhouse gases was not even on the list. If they keep this BS up I might just go out for a bunch of ribs! 🙂
Also covered on FOX…
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/03/23/eat-meat-reduce-global-warming/
Richard Black at the BBC has picked up on this one here “UN body to look at meat and climate link”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8583308.stm
Vegetarians with an agenda want us to think that vegetarian is natural… They like us to believe that the diet of the Native Americans were a good example but..
The diet of the Native Americain consisted mostly of guts and grease:
http://www.westonaprice.org/Guts-and-Grease-The-Diet-of-Native-Americans.html
All of the foods considered important for reproduction and all of the foods considered sacred were animal foods, rich in fat. According to Beverly Hungry Wolf, pemmican made with berries “was used by the Horns Society for their sacred meal of communion.” Boiled tongue was an ancient delicacy, served as the food of communion at the Sun Dance. A blood soup, made from a mixture of blood and corn flour cooked in broth, was used as a sacred meal during the nighttime Holy Smoke ceremonies.19
Bear was another sacred food-altars of bear bones have been found at many Paleolithic sites. Cabeza de Vaca reports that the Indians of Texas kept the skin of the bear and ate the fat, but threw the rest away. Other groups ate the entire animal, including the head, but recognized the fat as the most valuable part.
Modern food writers who assure us we can enjoy the superb health of the American Indian by eating low fat foods and canned fruits have done the public a great disservice. The basis of the Indian diet was guts and grease, not waffles and skimmed milk.
Having been veggie now for close to 2 years I must say in all honesty I don’t miss meat. There is also a lot of bad veggie advice out there. Being told I’m not “really vegetarian” because I eat whey and egg whites (protein) is kind of funny. They are the 2 best sources of protein (high PDCAAS, low-no fat) and I consider essential. Add in low glycemic load veggies, berries and fruits along with mono-unsaturated fat and you have an excellent diet for human health.
I make exceptions for B12 and purified fish oil because the plant based EPA is all short chain and needs to be converted to long chain in the body (9 step process? not very efficient or reliable). Both are essential for human health and hard to get in a veggie diet.
If you do try the veggie diet out (and yes I recommend it) be practical and keep your health first in mind not the agenda someone wants to impose on you. The AWG bandwagon is just the latest in a long list of ways people try to manipulate others into doing what they want on a lot of issues. In the end they do themselves a great disservice and lose all credibility. That is too bad because resource efficiency and veggie diet can stand on their own IMHO.
I did earnestly try a vegetarian diet because my former husband was vegetarian. I became quite ill from it. Apparently too much grain is not good for me. He did very well on it.
My thinking got quite fogged, I got rashes and I gain quite a bit of weight. Vegetarianism is not for every one.
I had to laugh when my daughter, at one point thought that she wanted to be a vegetarian. She changed her mind when she realized that she would have to actually eat vegetables. She thought she was going to eat only cupcakes and ice-cream.
I do like vegetables, but mostly I like meat with my meat.
I also have to laugh a little when I am shown those videos of pasty white flabby chickens raised in factories. How they are kept in climate controlled houses with automatic sanitation and little room to spread their wings…
I do feel sorry for them, but I laugh because most PEOPLE I know CHOOSE to live that way!
An interesting article, Anthony, but I’m afraid your headline:
is way overstated. A paper presented at the ACS and the ACS are not the same thing. A more accurate, but still catchy, title would be:
Charles Higley (08:56:11) :
Actually, it goes like this.
Biofuels = soybean meal + corn protein + biodiesel + ethanol + yummy steaks, eggs and chicken wings.