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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Stefan (09:21:31) :
“But wind the clock forward 20 or 40 years, and you’re talking about the possible causes of depression, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, colitis, osteoporosis, and so on.”
Can we change that to ‘highly probable’ and get a law passed?
kadaka (11:56:22) :
“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.”
Fructose is actually a messenger molecule switching on glycogenesis and lipogenesis. Makes sense as an associative adaptation to high-carb intake. Linus Pauling is a top source for the story of fructose. Very little can be metabolised by the human body directly hence the disease-of-affluence that gets everybody in a tizzy over high-fructose corn syrup.
Well now we are getting them all into one basket: biologists, botanist-sylvaculturists, psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, railway engineers(??), and now vegetarians. This hateful crowd is actually against the human race.
Meat production at current levels wouldn’t be sustainable if it weren’t for government intervention. Wake up, sheeple.
Regeya:
Neither would corn, or wheat or soybeans or any other food.
You grow your own soybeans?
“Producing less meat and milk will only mean more hunger in poor countries.”
I’m not sure how that could possibly be. If you free-range graze a cow, it takes about 5 acres per cow. You can grow feed corn, sure, but their digestive systems aren’t geared toward corn so you’re going to get a LOT of diarrhea, so they’re going to need a LOT of water. They take a lot of water anyway. Back to free-range cows, you’re going to get about 500 pounds of meat for 5 acres of grass. By comparison, you’ll get 750 bushels of soybeans out of 5 acres, or 45,000 pounds. I’d figure up the amount of protein and calories on that, but nutritional information tends to be given in cooked volume rather than weight. Even if you got a tenth of the protein in soybeans as opposed to eating beef, it’d still be close. Nevertheless, a cup of whole cooked soybeans and a cup of whole cooked beef is roughly the same.
C’mon, y’all haven’t so completely eschewed science that you can’t see the issue here, have you? For every step in the process of growing and processing food, you introduce inefficiency. With a vegetable crop, you go from giving the crop sun, rain, and fertilizer, then you harvest and process it, then you have it ready for human consumption. With livestock, you have the process of growing acreage solely for animal consumption, and of course as others have pointed out livestock tends to take a lot of food and water to be fit for consumption.
And as for the gas question: I’ve replaced a good deal of my meat intake with beans because my weight, my cholesterol, and BP are all out of control and I’ve decided I sort of like being alive. One thing I’ve found is that if you’ll start the beans on a “quick soak” (boil them, then cover them) then leave the beans overnight, they’ll be more easily digestible, which means less gas.
Now having said all that, I still eat animal products. We’re omnivorous creatures, after all. Once my cholesterol is under control I’ll go back to eating eggs, and I still eat some cheese, chicken, and pork (but low-salt because, sadly, salt is the main factor in my high BP.) For now, I’ve sworn off of beef almost completely–doctors have been warning us about the dangers of red meat for ages, so it just makes sense.
I suppose if I have a point it’s that a more vegetarian-oriented diet COULD mean more food for everyone, but that the real problem here in the west isn’t that we’re not vegetarian, but rather that we just eat too dadgum much and have an unbalanced diet partially thanks to government subsidies making meat artificially cheap (and again, think about the process of growing wheat or beans vs. growing a cow to understand why ground beef SHOULD, in a free market society, be more expensive than a pack of soyburgers.)
@r: Could you expand on your non-sequitur?
My family is from St. Thomas and St. Barts, so this I know,
They raise goats and sheep because the soil is rocky and the hills are steep. It is a heck of a lot of work to grow anything there except maybe bananas. Even bananas have to be watered in the dry season and water comes from a cistern. When your cistern runs dry, you are stuck.
Sheep and goats are easier. Welcome to the real world.
If you want to lower your cholesterol, stop eating sugar.
Your liver MAKES cholesterol from fructose.
I eat eggs everyday and have low cholesterol. I don’t eat sugar.
Re AdderW (08:10:32) :
It is best to read the article you link to before concluding that gorillas “probably” eat meat. Many observers have spent thousands of hours watching gorillas, and this is not observed. Just because they found a little dna in some gorilla scatt means very little, the article actually said this…Ker Than
for National Geographic News
Published March 5, 2010
Like the vegetarian who can’t resist the occasional burger, the otherwise herbivorous gorilla might succumb to cravings for its evolutionary cousins, a new study hints.
While some zoo specimens are known to eat meat, wild gorillas eat only plants and fruit, along with the odd insect—as far as scientists know (see video of wild gorillas feasting on figs).
But a recent study found DNA from monkeys and small forest antelopes called duikers in the feces of wild African western lowland gorillas in Loango National Park in Gabon.
The discovery raises the possibility that gorillas might have a secret meat habit—scavenging or hunting discretely.
(See gorilla pictures.)
Gorillas Eating Insects That Eat Mammals?
There may well be more mundane explanations for the surprising finding—explanations that’d have to be ruled out before gorillas could be reclassified as meat-eaters, said study co-author Grit Schubert, a primatologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
For example, gorillas are known to eat ants that scavenge the carcasses and bones of monkeys and other mammals. When gorillas eat the ants, they may also be ingesting—and later expelling—the mammal DNA in the ants’ digestive tracts, the study authors speculate.
Another possibility is that the mammal DNA came from live monkeys or duikers that had been probing the gorilla feces for edible seeds or other leftover plant bits.
Or the mammals “might have just licked it, sniffed it, or peed on it,” Schubert said.
“There’s plenty of opportunities” for adding mammal DNA to gorilla scat after the fact, Schubert said. “I don’t really think they’re eating meat.”
As to this… Al Gore’s Holy Hologram (09:54:10) :
“AdderW (08:10:32) :
Have you ever seen a weak gorillia? ”
Gorillas can’t curl a 50 pound dumbbell. Humans can.”
Did a climate scientist do this study?
Commercial soy beans are grown from plants that have been genetically modified to withstand high doses of the weed killer Round Up.
It follows that there is lots of weed killer used on commercial soy beans.
Soy beans have estrogen like chemicals in them. It will feminize you if you are a male. What an excess of estrogens do to a female, I am not sure, but I don’t want my daughters or myself to be guinea pigs.
I have not seen a single study done that differentiates between fresh red meat and cured meats like cold cuts and hot dogs.
Lowering your salt intake will definitely lower your high blood pressure.
And by the way, my aunts goats and sheep don’t eat feed corn. They eat the underbrush of the jungle.
Re: regeya (20:06:26)
I’ve replaced a good deal of my meat intake with beans because my weight, my cholesterol, and BP are all out of control and I’ve decided I sort of like being alive.
Study from Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) published 2007, first study I could Google up although there are others. It got to the point where the paradigm could change, and low-carb diets couldn’t be merely dismissed out of hand as “fad diet” quackery, and official scientific studies were and are getting done. Atkins is very successful at doing the main thing doctors recommend, getting the weight off. And the other important benefits come along with it.
From the Introduction: (brackets added around references, formatting issue)
From the Comment section:
What convinced me to try it was reading Dr Atkins’ New Diet Revolution. A practicing physician reporting case after case of his approach working. Triglycerides were dramatically lowered, and they are an important indicator of potential heart attack risk. Cholesterol profile improved. Diabetics had to work carefully with their primary physician, as their medication needs dropped off. They could go from needing insulin to just medication to no medication. The last part really irritated me, as here is a treatment that works, yet as it’s not “accepted” diabetics are strung out along a path of increasing insulin resistance going to runaway glucose levels and death. So many lives could be saved and improved if doctors could admit that, yes, their advice has been wrong for decades. Shouldn’t the health of a patient take precedence over a doctor’s pride?
It’s tough to cut through the internet “noise” dismissing Atkins as a fad. Well, here is one study, linked to other trials, that shows it works. You can buy the book, read up on it. Then there was the research method I used, I tried it and it worked. First diet that ever did work for me.
And yes, you can have carbs, and veggies, and certain fruits. Primary thing is not spiking the blood sugar levels with foods that readily convert to glucose thus provoking an insulin release. There are adjustments, such as diabetics are likely aware of, for things that take awhile to digest thus don’t produce a spike.
And to address it in case it comes up, Dr. Atkins was not “morbidly obese” when he died. He suffered a massive head wound, grey matter visible. Then came days of IV fluids going in faster than fluid was going out, leading to a large fluid thus large weight gain, over 60 lbs, then multiple organ failures. Snopes covered it, you can make up your own mind about the matter.
Even those cute little pandas eat meat.
I’ve seen videos from National Geographic of Pandas catching bamboo rats and eating them.
The pandas in the national zoo were given fresh insect-free bamboo. The pandas were not doing well. The zoologists realized that pandas in the wild usually eat INSECTS with their bamboo to get a little extra protein and other nutrients.