“Truth? You can't handle the truth!”

[Jim_Campbell]

What was it again, that actually generated more co2 and methane emissions than all transport combined?

I just don't recall.

The World Health Organisation called it out as well.

Damn. What was it again?

I'm on record as saying that we should all eat a LOT less meat. I'm not going round the houses on the relative merits of veganism again, but this issue is a rather clear illustration of a couple of problems with the climate change debate.

First, is the inability of some parts of the climate change lobby to recognise that not all carbon emissions are equal. The climate change impact of livestock is about 18% of the global quantity of CO₂ released into the atmosphere annually, of which 9% is down to fertiliser manufacture, land clearance and deforestation, and transportation of animal products, and 9% is, essentially, respiration. For comparison, the combined effect of all the humans on Earth breathing is about 8% annually.

Considering respiration as part of climate change is idiotic. Plants extract CO₂ from the atmosphere and eventually, that CO₂ gets put back, whether it's by the plants dying and decomposing, or being eaten by creatures with an O₂ -> CO₂ respiratory cycle. As I've noted before, if I grow a tree, then cut it down and burn it, that CO₂ is broadly carbon neutral — I'm only putting back the CO₂ which the tree took out of the atmosphere over its lifetime.

Everything happen in the current carbon cycle is broadly carbon neutral. It's the hundreds of millions of tons of prehistoric carbon we're returning to the atmosphere that are the problem.

Second, is the belief that climate change is going to be solved with a few wind turbines and solar panels. We all need to eat a LOT less meat and yet, when I suggested a while back that a tidy mechanism for that would be to end intensive farming and introduce far higher animal welfare standards, the thought that such a policy might make a pack of mince more expensive had people branding me as some kind of let-them-eat-cake elitist.

We're all going to need to make a LOT of changes to our lifestyles in a LOT of areas if we're going to mitigate climate change to any degree.

Cheers

Jim

[JayzusB.Christ]

You know what? No, I'm not going to read it, because it comes from the Global Warming Policy Foundation — an organisation dedicated to questioning the mainstream scientific opinion on climate change which refuses to disclose its funding but is co-founded by Lord (Nigel) Lawson, a man who takes a lot of money from the coal industry, an organisation whose 'Academic Committee' has no requirement for actual academic qualifications, relevant or otherwise.

Your willingness, as already noted, to embrace the opinions of vested big business interests sits oddly with your seeker-of-the-truth, sticking-it-to-the-man schtick and leads me back to my suspicion of a strong contrarian streak in your motives for posting here.

The problem here is that you can always find outliers on any scientific consensus. As proven this week, you can even find idiots who think the Earth is flat — we get to mock them because literally every available piece of evidence shows us that the Earth is an oblate spheroid and the argument is settled beyond any definition of reasonable doubt.

With the climate debate, the problem is that the only way it's proved beyond doubt is if we follow the pro-climate change argument or we don't. If we do, and the climate science is wrong, then all we've done is transition to a more sustainable, lower carbon economy which would be better able to survive the travails of a changing climate. If we don't, and the climate sceptics are wrong, then we render vast tracts of the planet uninhabitable to humans, still more unfarmable, and bring about the extinction of uncounted thousands of species of plants and animals when this outcome could have been mitigated, even if it couldn't be completely avoided.

There is plainly no point in discussing this further, because we're just going round the exact same houses as the last time.

Jim

The above sums up everything I could possibly say on the matter eloquently and exhaustively. There's no reason to debate this any issue for me either; because it's not a debate - it's facts versus fiction.

[Tiplodocus]

It is vexxing. 

As far as I can see, all of the information is out there to help me take my part in the "transition to a more sustainable, lower carbon economy which would be better able to survive the travails of a changing climate".

Number 1 contribution - giving up meat and dairy (there are other reasons to do this too). But there's the "not using the car for un-necessary journeys", recycling, the re-use, etc. too. 

There are so many people who are just so comfortable/lazy/making huge profits with the status quo that the education and change of habits is spectacularly hard.   They'd rather argue the toss and be deniers than take a few simple steps to benefit everybody*. 

It's convenient for them to not see a tangible answer to "What's in it for me?".  Instead of a "A better world" they just see "Less profit" or "No bacon" or "Public Transport" and think  "Fuck that!".

But in good news, it took a long time and a lot of legislation and education to wear down smokers; hopefully their numbers are still on the decrease.


*Similarly - Teenage children would spend an hour arguing with you and throwing a tantrum about why they shouldn't take their turn to load the dishwasher than actually take the five minutes to load the fecking thing. The logic of their arguments is of the level of climate change denial.

[IndigoPrime]

A lot of the time, strong direction from government is needed, and we just don't have that now. Having cynically transformed its logo into a tree, the Conservative Party is ripping the heart out of the British solar industry (to the point many companies are going to the wall), while continuing to heavily subsidise nuclear (including effectively paying the Chinese to build a French plant, and guaranteeing insanely high rates) and go nuts of fracking.

I'm not yet convinced by the Green Party line that we could ditch fossil fuels and nuclear any time soon, but arguments we should head to a more sustainable mixed future seem entirely sensible. More solar, tidal and wind power. Less meat. Better housing construction. Retrofitting where possible. Why is it not yet law that all new builds have solar, for example? Baffling.

[Hawkmumbler]

Problem is, Tips and though I agree with you whole heartedly, pretty much everyone see's "a better world" differently. And that's the beef of the matter and why educating the next generation is so important.

[The Legendary Shark]

Still peddling that document, eh, Shark?

I've mentioned it twice, and then in only the last three days. Your question, framed in such a way as to imply I've been trying to foist it on people forever, is a prime example of your snide and misrepresenting style of "argument."

You know what? No, I'm not going to read it, because it comes from the Global Warming Policy Foundation ...

Right. Well. Would you refuse to read Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica because its author was an alchemist, On the Origin of Species because its author was a heretic or On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies because its author was a level-III patent clerk?* I have no way of dealing with such bloody minded and willful ignorance.

It seems there is simply no way to engage with you in any meaningful or even reasonable way because, Jim, you're not even wrong.

The only thing I can agree with is that there is plainly no point in discussing this further with you.


*And no, before you bring one of your silly responses to bear, I don't consider the document I linked to as being on a par with these three - they were just the first examples that came to mind.

[Tiplodocus]

Surely the argument is that the authors of the document have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and denying climate change. The same can't be said of your heretic and patent clerk etc.

I don't think your response fits the point made.

[Jim_Campbell]

I have no way of dealing with such bloody minded and willful ignorance.

And I note that you snip out the part of my paragraph where I explain in some detail why your 'source' is extremely dubious and tied to vested interests whose anti-climate-change arguments are straight out of the    Vested Interest Playbook*.

Were you not so terribly prone to posting the first set of half-arsed links Google spits out in response to a search on your crackpot theory du jour, I might be more inclined to read them, but half the time they don't actually support the position you're defending, and a lot of the rest of the time they appear to be commissioned, as this one is, by precisely the sort of military-industrial cluster of capitalist vested interests you would normally be found railing against.

Your 'source' has no credibility for reasons I have both outlined and linked to.

Try again. Try harder.

Bah.

Jim


*No, seriously... how many times to do we have to put up with vested interests deploying the 'muddying the waters' tactic before we tell them to fuck right off? We've seen this exact same set of tactics deployed by the tobacco industry and again right now by the food industry over the health implications of stuffing sugar into everything... I'm sure back in the first half of the 19th century there were big cotton, sugar and tobacco companies commissioning reports whose executive summaries said "And so we can conclude that your average negro lives 18% longer and is at least 41% happier working on a tobacco plantation in Virginia than he would have been in a mud hut on the edge of the Serengeti..."

[The Legendary Shark]

Okay, so follow the money/vested interests. Here's another paper for you not to read: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/climate_money.pdf

[Jim_Campbell]

Okay, so follow the money/vested interests. Here's another paper for you not to read: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/climate_money.pdf

Christopher Monckton vanity project? Really?

More pathetically sloppy first-hit-googling, Shark. You really ought to read more of these links before you post them.

Jim

[The Legendary Shark]

Another well reasoned counter-argument of the quality I've come to expect. "I don't like him/her, so he/she must be wrong." "I don't believe this, so it can't possibly be true."

[Hawkmumbler]

I don't tink anyone like's Nigel Lawson, because he's a monumental hypocrite and a nob.

[JayzusB.Christ]

I don't tink anyone like's Nigel Lawson, because he's a monumental hypocrite and a nob.

He makes a nice cake and has a top rack, all the same.

[Hawkmumbler]

I don't tink anyone like's Nigel Lawson, because he's a monumental hypocrite and a nob.

He makes a nice cake and has a top rack, all the same.

I once made the mistake of google imaging Nigel Lawson* instead of Nigela. Boy was I conffused!!!


*For scientific reasons!

[Jim_Campbell]

Another well reasoned counter-argument of the quality I've come to expect. "I don't like him/her, so he/she must be wrong." "I don't believe this, so it can't possibly be true."

Conversely: "He agrees with my contrarian adoption of a fringe viewpoint, so I will accept his assertions over better-qualified REAL SCIENTISTS without actually considering his actual credibility, which is zero."

Jim