I think the deforestation of rainforests should be classed as a crime against humanity

What concerns me about the global warming argument is if the scientists dont understand how a cows stomach works how can they really understand something really complicated like an entire planets weather system?

You have a point, but I think the argument is that they shouldn't keep impregnating the cows so they keep producing milk, and then making the cows eat a bunch so they get nice and fat for when they hang them by their feet and slit their throats etc.
Or maybe it's some chemical thing about what they're eating and stuff. I haven't looked into it much, because that's not really the reason I don't eat meat.

I notice that noone is studying how much carbon dioxide the average human breaths out thus contributing to greenhouse gasses

Might be a good reason to not impregnate other humans......

That's because humans are at the top of the food chain and therefore superior to everything.

well cows DO shit a lot and that tends to fuck up the waters, i mean... i havent seen figures about methane though.

oh this is not a discussion im willing or able to have right now (the "office" beckons), but too many cows can fuck up things.

as for global warming-- julian, you tithead, i don't want new york to be underwater.

sure a supervolcano blah blah, but the fact that death is always lurking doesnt make suicide ok. if something wants to kill us, let's fuck it up first, but let's not be so dumb as to kill ourselves.

Eat More Cows!

What they are particularly against is the breeding and raising of herd animals for slaughter in ranch and farm environments.

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I'm not the biggest fan of PETA, but they also espouse grazing animal emissions as a key element of climate change as well, and apparently there is science to back up the claim. Of course, the total climate effect of grazing animals is not just from biological methane emissions, but rather a culmulative effect when one also considers the energy expended to cut down trees, clear away plant and animal wildlife to make the gazing land, as well as the upkeep of the ranch.

And of course as many know, much of the Amazon rainforest has been cleared away to make grazing lands for herd animals. Although, most South American deforestation is actually due to the harvesting of trees that are burnt for charcoal in the process of making steel.

I agree absolutely. It is eco-terrorism plain and simple. And all parties should be required to cease and desist until the issue can be studied further and a solution that makes accomodations for their financial losses can be found. In the end though, I personally couldn't give two shits about their corporate bank accounts on this matter, and this is obviously a measure that should be on the G8 summit priority list. Instead, the G8 are much too busy exploring how they can best continue (in this information age) to politically, economically, and militarily navigate their collaborative plundering of the natural and labor resources of the Third World.


What they've studied through multiple and varied scientific means is the content of the gases in our atmosphere which, in turn, affect the weather, and have noted an unmistakeably increasing percentage of the amounts of the various greenhouse gases radically exponentiating over the last 150 years, thus the cause for global concern. And the science is there. The scientific jury is in, climate change is a reality, and it's not just some eco-scare or, as many politicians with vested interests and the P.R. departments of wealthy multinational corporations would have you believe, some cyclical variant.

http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/sustain...atmosphere.asp

[quote=!@#$%!]well cows DO shit a lot and that tends to fuck up the waters, i mean... i havent seen figures about methane though.

quote]


Well the major problem is not the manure but the other byproducts of digestion. Basically a cow's rumen is a fermenting vat. Wheras our stomachs are acidic (pH of 2-3) in order to denature proteins, sugars, etc to make their absorption possible, ruminants rely solely on bacteria to break down these compounds (with the rumen at a somewhat neutral pH to enable bacterial metabolism). It's similar to what happens when you eat beans, which are made of complex sugars - since they are complex they are not completely broken down, and bacteria in the intestine will break down the remains through fermentation, thus resulting in farts with the release of methane, H2S, etc, some of which are potent greenhouse gases. Then again, this symbiotic relation (ruminant - bacteria) allows them to metabolise cellulose, which we can't.

There must have been some studies done to assess different feed rations to minimize gases - I know that for swines, which are known to release a disproportionate amount of phosphorous in feces in relation to the feed intake, thus leading to water pollution, commercial enzymatic additives are available (known as phytase) to improve its absorption, and lower the P content of slurry/manure. Phosporous being of course one of the major agents of algae blooms, ground water pollution, etc.

[quote=ThePits]I think the deforestation of rainforests should be classed as a crime against humanity
quote]

Deforestation of forests for raising beef will probably increase in the next years thanks to biofuels. Since ethanol has been a hot topic with commitments from at least the US and Canada, grain prices have been increasing a lot (corn first, then the other substitutes in animal feed, which all have an impact on the cost of meat), which makes the beef raised in other regions (e.g. Brazil and Argentina) more attractive and cheaper - production there will thus likely increase and require land, at the expense of the rainforests. I guess that politically there'll be some nice statements but with only a little done in reality to prevent this.

(Edit - the FAO has tons of stuff on deforestation, http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/...385/index.html being an example:

(...)Delegates of the 46 developing countries present at the Rome workshop signalled their readiness to act on deforestation, 80 percent of which is due to increased farmland to feed growing populations. (...))

Pretty much like the worklings of a cows stomach then! With the gasses on the inside

Fruitloop

Thank you for the technical info, I dont have a clue about the subject techy side so it was enlightening. I agree with you that, regretably, more forests will be cleared

We should stop breeding for a while and get a study going on how many humna beings this planet can sustain

Hah.

"He's like the proverbial nut that grew into a giant oak by standing his ground," Patrick Michaels, a scholar with the free market Cato Institute, said in a statement. "We can only hope that he can parlay his prize into a run for the U. S. presidency, where he will be unable to hide from debate on his extreme and one-sided view of global warming."

MSNBC.com

I don't give a shit.

and in doing so you're saving the world!

Saving what world?

It's weird that the Nobel Prize for science is pretty meaningful within the scientific community, and the Nobel Prize for literature at least generally goes to a major author of some sort, while the Nobel Peace Prize is slightly less meaningful than Miss America. Though of course we should be happy that Al wasn't in the swimsuit competition.

Here this guy was the Clinton Administration's salesperson for NAFTA and he's still being touted as Mr. Environmentalist. But then Henry Kissinger won one for losing the Viet Nam War, so it's hard to take this award as anything that should be taken seriously.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_warm_period

Some information on the validity of global cooling and the cyclic nature of global warming. Warning...
Warning...

Might involve reading...

Global Warming needs to be tackled, but I'm worried that too many people are placing too high an emphasis on it and forgetting the issues that are killing people right now: unemployment, poverty, war, healthcare, famine, poor education, crime, urban decline, et al.

It's an easy-out for politicians and business, who get to look good on a global scale through their posturing. Like I said, things need to be done, but a lot of other things need tackling first. Unfortunately, while it's relatively easy to get big business to adopt greener practices, to get the middle-classes to be more responsible with their rubbish disposal, etc. Issues like poverty, crime, healthcare and education call for more difficult, and far less glamorous, solutions.

People will rightly say that if the predictions relating to climate change are right, then we won't have a planet to save from poverty, etc, in the first place. But these are at the end of the day predictions, while deaths are actually occuring now as a result of the other issues.

It's more that in the forseeable future rising sea levels combined with severe drought in many regions and increased storms in others are likely to increase exactly the problems you, er, rail against:

unemployment, poverty, war, healthcare, famine, poor education, crime, urban decline, et al.

Seriously, we count so heavily on crops flourishing in a few places on our planet to then truck them to another, that climate change is likely to have devastating effects in a relatively short term. Which doesn't mean we shouldn't be attacking those problems from both ends.

And of course you don't hear Al Gore, or sadly much of anyone else, talking much about the fundamental root cause of that problem and all of those others: over-population. Hard enough to get Americans, and increasingly China and the rest of the world, to admit that our consumer culture has obvious impacts on the environment - try to get anybody to admit that birth control is a viable solution.

I'm sure that Inconvenient Truth probably makes some valid points about global warming, but it just doesn't take away from the fact that the guy who made it shoved NAFTA down the throat of the American people so that our corporations can go to other countries to skirt what few environmental regulations we have!

If New York goes underwater you can come live in Pittsburgh :cool: