Suspect their methane and pungent gas emissions will rise henceforth.
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Both numbers don’t make sense. Can you visualize it? This co2 madness is a bloody shame.
My house is surrounded by evil trees and they exhaust O2. Cut them down, cut them down! Oxigen is bad and speeds up aging!
What CO2 madness?
The fact that clumsy attempts are being made to visualise the impact we have on the planet, or that there is a problem of any sort?
The fact that a Co2 number a such does not make any sense. Using an analogy: what would mean earning a wage of 50000 djingalas if one does not know what djingalas are. How does 50000 djingalas relate to the cost of living in the place where this hypothetical currency is used?
Same applies to Co2. I can’t relate it to anything. It is false statistics.
I mentioned my trees since I never read anything about the process of changing Co2 into O2.
g or kg is the accepted measure for mass / volume of CO2. It’s used for car emissions of CO2 for example. 37,000kg seems quite low to me, bearing in mind that driving an internal combustion engined car will emit, say 200g per km so 1kg every 5km - or 3 miles so driving 10,000 miles a year will be 3,000kg of CO2 emissions. And cos gases are light that’s a pretty large volume…
Right. And now the question is: how does this relate to the O2 production of my trees. I have always learned that trees convert Co2 back into O2.
Is the balance of Co2 and O2 in air different than 30 years ago when we were only concerned about acid rain.
Please.
We are mining and burning many times more hydrocarbon fuels since then.
And have cut down a large proportion Of the trees.
Profoundly Altering the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans.
And the temperature of the planet.
All this is common knowledge.
I believe CO2 has continued to increase. We aren’t planting trees / cutting CO2 emissions fast enough. Not surprising when most people think there is no problem / the problem is too big / the Chinese pollute too much so I can’t do anything meaningful etc. Or just don’t care
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And we are eating a lot more meat per capita and in absolute terms.
Feeding grains and vegetables to gargantuan quantities of cattle and pigs and other livestock animals in industrialised farms adds greatly to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Which is another reason to eat less meat, apart from the eaters personal health, and the way the trapped animals live.
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perhaps that? i am joking but in probably 50 years we will be obliged to eat insects.
yummy!
delicious
can’t wait - I’ll be 105 by then
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We’re fortunate in growing our own cows, sheep and eggs so all organic here for them. We only very rarely buy beef (never lamb)
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Just got this article on this topic by Monbiot: https://www.monbiot.com/2019/08/13/spectre-at-the-feast/
Including this:
" A famous paper in Science shows that a plant-based diet would release 76% of the land currently used for farming. This land could then be used for the mass restoration of ecosystems and wildlife, pulling the living world back from the brink of ecological collapse and a sixth great extinction.
People tend to make two massive mistakes while trying to minimise the environmental impact of the food they eat. The first is that, in considering the carbon costs, they obsess about food miles and forget about the other impacts. For some foods, especially those that travel by plane, the carbon costs of transport are very high. But for most bulk commodities – grain, beans, meat and dairy – the greenhouse gases produced in transporting them are a small fraction of the overall impact. A kilogramme of soya shipped halfway round the world inflicts much less atmospheric harm than a kilogramme of chicken or pork reared on the farm down the lane.
The second great mistake is to imagine that extensive farming is better for the planet than intensive farming. The current model of intensive farming tends to cause massive environmental damage: pollution, soil erosion and the elimination of wildlife. But extensive farming is worse. By definition, extensive farming requires more land to produce the same amount of food. This is land that could otherwise be devoted to ecosystems and wildlife."
If you are able to get hold of just a few staple seasonings used in Japanese cuisine (miso, mirin, dashi, rice vinegar, soy sauce) you can pretty much make most anything in a Japanese cookbook. A feature of Japanese food is that there is very little meat in the dishes, but there is nearly a bit of meat in everything.
This has frustrated and broken every last vegetarian friend (longest holdout was 3 months) including a 40 year old Indian friend who had been vegetarian since birth foe religious reasons. So close, yet so far is how they felt about it.
The point being, if your goal is to reduce meat for health and environmental reasons rather than go vegetarian, Japanese food is a great way of doing it. I hated things like tofu before moving to the far east. Then I learned that I hated so many meat protein substitutes because they were prepared to imitate meat in western food. In the far east, they let a vegetable taste like a vegetable. Let tofu be tofu (usually mixed with pork). Suddenly it’s tasty.
I use meat as almost a garnish. So yes I still get to eat beef regularly but the idea of a T-bone steak… I can’t even imagine how I ever managed to get one down now. It’s like 8 meals worth of beef to me.
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This is an over simplification of extensive farming.
There are well documented examples of extensive farming in Africa and Asia where reducing the density of planting increases yields, yields that are comparable to intensive methods with chemicals. However, the extensive methods are labour intensive.
thanks Huw - as I read it, Monbiot’s not saying that extensive farming is neceesarily bad in terms of yields (or that it’s bad for the quality of meat produced or animal welfare).
I think he’s saying that if we used the land more intensively and ate the plants that we grow (instead of feeding them to animals) then we could massively reduce GHG concentrations in the atmopshere (as well as, for example, rewilding the land that freed up).
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Indeed - what Monbiot does not say is how good extensive farming can be for building up nutrients and carbon in the soil, as it’s natural ecology. This is important for whatever is grown. What is also important is choosing what is right for the land; this is often driven by profit rather than ecology. Rewilding where it is appropriate, and make sound land management decisions for the rest.
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Guineafowl.
I like a roast chicken, but chlorinated supermarket ones post no deal Brexit do not appeal, nor do any reasonable supermarket options.
Butchers free range organic ones are usually very large and super expensive.
If you can find some Guinea fowls around the supermarket area for duck or pigeon you should take one.
Usually only a kilo and £8 per bird, so enough for two or three and super tasty.
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Great advice … Lunch tomorrow… being brined as I write. This specimen was quite gamey so I spatchcocked it, reserving the spine for stock, and the giblets went to the dog.