Virtuous Vegetarians
According to an article in The Christian Science Monitor:
American meat eaters are responsible for 1.5 more tons of carbon dioxide per person than vegetarians every year....
It's not just the well-known and frequently joked-about flatulence and manure of grass-chewing cattle that's the problem, according to a recent report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Land-use changes, especially deforestation to expand pastures and to create arable land for feed crops, is a big part. So is the use of energy to produce fertilizers, to run the slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants, and to pump water.
"Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today's most serious environmental problems," Henning Steinfeld, senior author of the report, said when the FAO findings were released in November.
Livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions as measured in carbon dioxide equivalent, reports the FAO. This includes 9 percent of all CO2 emissions, 37 percent of methane, and 65 percent of nitrous oxide. Altogether, that's more than the emissions caused by transportation.
The latter two gases are particularly troubling – even though they represent far smaller concentrations in atmosphere than CO2, which remains the main global warming culprit. But methane has 23 times the global warming potential (GWP) of CO2 and nitrous oxide has 296 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide."
Comments
Having said that, isn't it true that global warming can't ultimately be halted? Please point me in the direction of truth. I can find theories to back up any idea. Facts would be great.
Sheryl --
You might want to read this brief "History of Climate", published by Dr. Richard A. Muller on his website. It is an excerpt from the first chapter of his book Ice Ages and Astronomical Causes. There is also this article, Rememberance of Things Past: Greenhouse Lessons From the Geologic Record. If you're up for it, you might want to read this 18-page report (in PDF form): Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis - Summary for Policymakers issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the World Meteorological Organization, "the UN system's authoritative voice on the state and behaviour of the Earth's atmosphere, its interaction with the oceans, the climate it produces and the resulting distribution of water resources".
It makes life easier if we can always assume that the world divides into the good parts and the bad parts, the virtuous way of doing things and the evil way, the correct and the incorrect. We are thereby relieved of having to weigh what we do because we have an easy method of choosing
The article cited above appealed to me because I am already a vegetarian -- have been for almost thirty years -- and I now learn that I can claim an extra measure of virtue for that decision. Since I am, essentially, a lazy S.O.B. I will take all the ethical freebies I can get.
Now, however, just to make things more complicated, comes this article in Slate magazine, entitled Organic Farming: Not Sustainable?, which links to a research report compiled by the Manchester School of Business for the United Kingdom's Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs which, in turn, raises questions as to whether organic foods are always preferable to the alternatives in terms of their environmental impact.
It's not easy being Green.
I'm working on the enormous pdf file. (I wonder when I last read that large a pdf all the way through?)
A couple of comments before I greet my husband for the day.
First, it's still subjective that we are changing the course of the environment as stated here: " Although regional temperatures during the Holocene Maximum were on the order of 1°C warmer than present, the warming did not occur at the same time in all places; thus the global average temperature may not have been significantly different from now."
The point I make is that even the people who might know are NOT able to be decisive.
Figure 1-5 Climate for the last 420 kyr, from Vostok ice
"From this plot, it is clear that most of the last 420 thousand years (420 kyr) was spent in ice age. The brief periods when the record peaks above the zero line, the interglacials, typically lasted from a few thousand to perhaps twenty thousand years.
These data should frighten you. All of civilization developed during the last interglacial, and the data show that such interglacials are very brief. Our time looks about up. Data such as these are what led us to state, in the Preface, that the next ice age is about to hit us, any millennium now. It does not take a detailed theory to make this prediction. We don’t necessarily know why the next ice age is imminent (at least on a geological time scale), but the pattern is unmistakable."
If we are headed absolutely headed for an Ice Age, why the worry over global warming? (Obviously I missed something in school)
As I understand, there is clear patterning of climate and even our current state can be documented as part of an inevitable trend. My only thought is that we most likely will cause the trend to happen at a sooner rate through the use of fossil fuels etc.
Last question, was being vegetarian your idea or your wifes and are you lacto, ovo, vegan....which? I am familiar with the types because I grew up and lived in later life 5 miles from a town based on 7th day adventist principal as well as vegetarian ideals. Anyway, it's intriguing to me but I'm pretty picky and worry about whether I could handle all the things I might have to give up. That and I'm pretty sure I couldn't convince my husband to go with me. I'd be interested in your tale of how you managed it and what the struggles are, if any.
Thanks for all the info and I'll read the pdf when I have spare time later on.
You're a great resource.
Green is my favorite colour. ;-)
So some warming might be good in the long term but I fear it might become too much unless some actions to reduce it are taken now because the carbon dioxide, once in the atmosphere, does not go away unless plants take it up and those plants are buried (that is where we get coal and oil). Methane, also known as natural gas (CH4), might be light enough to escape into space.
I think the key piece of information is what computer simulations predict the effect of greenhouses gases will be long term irrespective of whatever natural cycle we happen to be in at the moment.
Sheyl:
I'm glad you think I'm a good resource.
I'd like to address your more substantive comments --
a) I think you misunderstood the stuff about the Holocene. He wasn't saying we can't be decisive about the situation now. He was saying that some people might be tempted to say, on the basis of superficial similarities, that the Holocene proves that global warming won't be so bad -- but that's a mistake because the pattern in which the warming occurred in the Holocene is very different than the way it is occurring now. That's what he means when he says, just a few words later "For this reason, we cannot turn to such times for reliable models, or analogs, of what is now anticipated, or cite them as evidence that humankind has in the past experienced increases in global temperature equivalent to those projected for even the early stages of enhanced greenhouse warming." I'm pretty sure he is responding to bogus arguments he has seen elsewhere.
b) With regard to your seconde point -- it comes from a different source, the first chapter of a book entitled Ice Ages and Astronomical Causes. That first chapter gives a brief history of climate but the book as a whole advances a theory. As far as I can tell it is a respectable theory -- the man is not a crackpot -- but it is still too early for it too have been either accepted or rejected by the scientific community. If you look at the very end of the excerpt to which I pointed you he says the following: ."the more likely scenario for the early 21st century, is the continued gradual growth of global warming." Why does he say this? Isn't he undercutting his own theory? No. Because he is talking about geological time scales -- thousands (or possibly tens of thousands) of years. The dangers from global warming, on the other hand, will play out over decades (or, if the skeptics are right and we are lucky, over centuries). The data Dr. Muller deals with are hundreds of thousands of years in which human beings had no impact (or next to no impact) on the environment. His model doesn't really factor us in at all. In far less than a millenium we will:
1) learn to have much less impact on the environment; or
2) abandon this planet; or
3) drastically reduce our numbers; or
4) wipe ourselves out.
As far as I know, every scientific expert on the subject believes that human beings are having an impact on the environment. Most believe that the impact is drastic and that we must do something about it now -- within the next decade or so. Some believe that we have time to study some more and figure out exactly what to do. The trend is not inevitable; there are things we can do.
Unless we make a really concerted effort we probably won't literally destroy the earth -- we'll just make it uninhabitable by us and, perhaps, a great number of other life forms. ( I bet cockroaches survive, though.) After a while the earth will patch itself up and over the course of millenia will probably resume the cycle Muller describes.
c) I became a vegetarian in 1979 but I had leaned in that direction since my childhood. I didn't meed my wife until the mid-1980's (I can't be exact because we both worked at U.S. Customs and we didn't take much notice of each other for a long time).
I would classify myself as an ovo-lacto-hysterico-nutso vegetarian. I drink milk and eat eggs and I don't eat meat because it makes me gag. I wrote about my vegetarianism in this post.