Wink said:
Greg, you are talking about pollution, which I think everyone agrees is a bad thing. However, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, it occurs naturally in huge quantities, and is essential for the ecosystems that sustain the earth. The argument from the global warming lobby is that even clean CO2 is bad, because it is causing the increasing temperatures, which the film seems to say is scientifically wrong.
Nice graphs, Madrussian, but they only show that temperatures are increasing, not what the cause is! Nobody is saying that average temperatures haven't increased over the last 100 years.
I think windfarms are ugly and intrusive, and seldom give anywhere like the promised energy production in actual practice. Much better to reduce energy use...
I remember politicians wheeling out experts and their own kids; all claiming that BSE was not that bad and British beef was 100% safe to eat. A year later we learnt that beef was ok, if it had not been fed members of its family (And high doses of aluminium sulphate)
And now years later the new experts are counter claiming that a known event is not happening.
Historical evidence shows a cyclical increase of about 2oC in global temperature is followed by an Ice age; the normal event period for this is about ten thousand years. Over the last 150 years there has been a plus 1.4 to 1.6oC average increase (mean average .8.oC)
The Co2 levels are 1.3 times the pre-industrial levels (measured at the maximum recorded level) It is interesting to know that another warming gas is 2.3 times the pre-industrial level, methane gas given off by cattle. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas twenty three times as powerful as carbon dioxide. Co2 might not be the only thing that we are polluting the air with.
Seven kilograms of grain are required to produce 1 kilogram of beef; the conversion is 4-to-1 for pork and 2-to-1 for poultry. Each kilogram of meat represents several kilograms of grain that could be consumed directly by humans.
To produce 31.2 million tonne of meat in 1993; US farm animals were fed 192.7 million tonne of feed concentrates, mostly corn. Additional feed took the form of roughage and pasture
Animal meat is wasteful, much of the food eaten by cows for example is converted into manure, energy for movement, and the growth of body parts not eaten by people. Very little can appear as direct edible weight gain. For example, cattle excrete 40 kg of manure for every kilogram of edible beef produced
Environment Canada 1995
According to Ohio state university it takes 5 acres of low intensity grazing to produce 50 boneless kilograms of beef. Thats about 100 acres per tonne. And that is a lot of "cattle waste".
