Meat: a threat to our planet.

___\0/___

Member
Location
SW Scotland
There were fewer facts than I'd hoped there would be. The methane cycle was not mentioned, and neither was the way that healthy soils under grasslands draw in and store carbon from the air. Basic facts that the presenter should know from her professional background.

Nothing said about inadequate anti-pollution laws in the USA - shocking footage of pollution from slurry. Without regulations, what does the presenter think will happen?

Nothing said about Cerrado destroyed to grow soya for human consumption - shocking how the increase in use of soya in human diets has laid waste to a complex and beautiful environment that was used for pastoral beef production until fairly recently.
Clearly, recent ploughing up of Argentinian Pampas to grow soya for human food, and displacement of pasture grown beef cattle is of no interest, either.

Anyway, it clearly made a handful of gloaty vegans as happy as a box of frogs.
It was filmed just not included
 
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michae...y-about-climate-change-is-wrong/#7e3cd00712d6




128,847 views Nov 25, 2019, 01:06am
Why Apocalyptic Claims About Climate Change Is Wrong


Michael Shellenberger


Michael Shellenberger Contributor

scroll down........



Bill McKibben, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Greta Thunberg, and Zion Lights of Extinction Rebellion


Climate scientists are speaking out against grossly exaggerated claims about global warming.
Getty
Environmental journalists and advocates have in recent weeks made a number of apocalyptic predictions about the impact of climate change. Bill McKibben suggested climate-driven fires in Australia had made koalas “functionally extinct.” Extinction Rebellion said “Billions will die” and “Life on Earth is dying.” Vice claimed the “collapse of civilization may have already begun.”
Few have underscored the threat more than student climate activist Greta Thunberg and Green New Deal sponsor Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The latter said, “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change.” Says Thunberg in her new book, “Around 2030 we will be in a position to set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control that will lead to the end of our civilization as we know it.”
Sometimes, scientists themselves make apocalyptic claims. “It’s difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half of that,” if Earth warms four degrees, said one earlier this year. “The potential for multi-breadbasket failure is increasing,” said another. If sea levels rise as much as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts, another scientist said, “It will be an unmanageable problem.”

Apocalyptic statements like these have real-world impacts. In September, a group of British psychologists said children are increasingly suffering from anxiety from the frightening discourse around climate change. In October, an activist with Extinction Rebellion (”XR”) — an environmental group founded in 2018 to commit civil disobedience to draw awareness to the threat its founders and supporters say climate change poses to human existence — and a videographer, were kicked and beaten in a London Tube station by angry commuters. And last week, an XR co-founder said a genocide like the Holocaust was “happening again, on a far greater scale, and in plain sight” from climate change.
Climate change is an issue I care passionately about and have dedicated a significant portion of my life to addressing. I have been politically active on the issue for over 20 years and have researched and written about it for 17 years. Over the last four years, my organization, Environmental Progress, has worked with some of the world’s leading climate scientists to prevent carbon emissions from rising. So far, we’ve helped prevent emissions increasing the equivalent of adding 24 million cars to the road.

PROMOTED






I also care about getting the facts and science right and have in recent months corrected inaccurate and apocalyptic news media coverage of fires in the Amazon and fires in California, both of which have been improperly presented as resulting primarily from climate change.
Journalists and activists alike have an obligation to describe environmental problems honestly and accurately, even if they fear doing so will reduce their news value or salience with the public. There is good evidence that the catastrophist framing of climate change is self-defeating because it alienates and polarizes many people. And exaggerating climate change risks distracting us from other important issues including ones we might have more near-term control over.
I feel the need to say this up-front because I want the issues I’m about to raise to be taken seriously and not dismissed by those who label as “climate deniers” or “climate delayers” anyone who pushes back against exaggeration.
With that out of the way, let’s look whether the science supports what’s being said.
First, no credible scientific body has ever said climate change threatens the collapse of civilization much less the extinction of the human species. “‘Our children are going to die in the next 10 to 20 years.’ What’s the scientific basis for these claims?” BBC’s Andrew Neil asked a visibly uncomfortable XR spokesperson last month.
“These claims have been disputed, admittedly,” she said. “There are some scientists who are agreeing and some who are saying it’s not true. But the overall issue is that these deaths are going to happen.”
“But most scientists don’t agree with this,” said Neil. “I looked through IPCC reports and see no reference to billions of people going to die, or children in 20 years. How would they die?”
“Mass migration around the world already taking place due to prolonged drought in countries, particularly in South Asia. There are wildfires in Indonesia, the Amazon rainforest, Siberia, the Arctic,” she said.
But in saying so, the XR spokesperson had grossly misrepresented the science. “There is robust evidence of disasters displacing people worldwide,” notes IPCC, “but limited evidence that climate change or sea-level rise is the direct cause”
What about “mass migration”? “The majority of resultant population movements tend to occur within the borders of affected countries," says IPCC.
It’s not like climate doesn’t matter. It’s that climate change is outweighed by other factors. Earlier this year, researchers found that climate “has affected organized armed conflict within countries. However, other drivers, such as low socioeconomic development and low capabilities of the state, are judged to be substantially more influential.”
Last January, after climate scientists criticized Rep. Ocasio-Cortez for saying the world would end in 12 years, her spokesperson said "We can quibble about the phraseology, whether it's existential or cataclysmic.” He added, “We're seeing lots of [climate change-related] problems that are already impacting lives."
That last part may be true, but it’s also true that economic development has made us less vulnerable, which is why there was a 99.7% decline in the death toll from natural disasters since its peak in 1931.
In 1931, 3.7 million people died from natural disasters. In 2018, just 11,000 did. And that decline occurred over a period when the global population quadrupled.
What about sea level rise? IPCC estimates sea level could rise two feet (0.6 meters) by 2100. Does that sound apocalyptic or even “unmanageable”?
Consider that one-third of the Netherlands is below sea level, and some areas are seven meters below sea level. You might object that Netherlands is rich while Bangladesh is poor. But the Netherlands adapted to living below sea level 400 years ago. Technology has improved a bit since then.
What about claims of crop failure, famine, and mass death? That’s science fiction, not science. Humans today produce enough food for 10 billion people, or 25% more than we need, and scientific bodies predict increases in that share, not declines.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) forecasts crop yields increasing 30% by 2050. And the poorest parts of the world, like sub-Saharan Africa, are expected to see increases of 80 to 90%.
Nobody is suggesting climate change won’t negatively impact crop yields. It could. But such declines should be put in perspective. Wheat yields increased 100 to 300% around the world since the 1960s, while a study of 30 models found that yields would decline by 6% for every one degree Celsius increase in temperature.
Rates of future yield growth depend far more on whether poor nations get access to tractors, irrigation, and fertilizer than on climate change, says FAO.
All of this helps explain why IPCC anticipates climate change will have a modest impact on economic growth. By 2100, IPCC projects the global economy will be 300 to 500% larger than it is today. Both IPCC and the Nobel-winning Yale economist, William Nordhaus, predict that warming of 2.5°C and 4°C would reduce gross domestic product (GDP) by 2% and 5% over that same period.
Does this mean we shouldn’t worry about climate change? Not at all.
One of the reasons I work on climate change is because I worry about the impact it could have on endangered species. Climate change may threaten one million species globally and half of all mammals, reptiles, and amphibians in diverse places like the Albertine Rift in central Africa, home to the endangered mountain gorilla.
But it’s not the case that “we’re putting our own survival in danger” through extinctions, as Elizabeth Kolbert claimed in her book, Sixth Extinction. As tragic as animal extinctions are, they do not threaten human civilization. If we want to save endangered species, we need to do so because we care about wildlife for spiritual, ethical, or aesthetic reasons, not survival ones.
And exaggerating the risk, and suggesting climate change is more important than things like habitat destruction, are counterproductive.
For example, Australia’s fires are not driving koalas extinct, as Bill McKibben suggested. The main scientific body that tracks the species, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, labels the koala “vulnerable,” which is one level less threatened than “endangered,” two levels less than “critically endangered,” and three less than “extinct” in the wild.
Should we worry about koalas? Absolutely! They are amazing animals and their numbers have declined to around 300,000. But they face far bigger threats such as the destruction of habitat, disease, bushfires, and invasive species.
Think of it this way. The climate could change dramatically — and we could still save koalas. Conversely, the climate could change only modestly — and koalas could still go extinct.
The monomaniacal focus on climate distracts our attention from other threats to koalas and opportunities for protecting them, like protecting and expanding their habitat.
As for fire, one of Australia’s leading scientists on the issue says, “Bushfire losses can be explained by the increasing exposure of dwellings to fire-prone bushlands. No other influences need be invoked. So even if climate change had played some small role in modulating recent bushfires, and we cannot rule this out, any such effects on risk to property are clearly swamped by the changes in exposure.”
Nor are the fires solely due to drought, which is common in Australia, and exceptional this year. “Climate change is playing its role here,” said Richard Thornton of the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre in Australia, “but it's not the cause of these fires."
The same is true for fires in the United States. In 2017, scientists modeled 37 different regions and found “humans may not only influence fire regimes but their presence can actually override, or swamp out, the effects of climate.” Of the 10 variables that influence fire, “none were as significant… as the anthropogenic variables,” such as building homes near, and managing fires and wood fuel growth within, forests.
Climate scientists are starting to push back against exaggerations by activists, journalists, and other scientists.
“While many species are threatened with extinction,” said Stanford’s Ken Caldeira, “climate change does not threaten human extinction... I would not like to see us motivating people to do the right thing by making them believe something that is false.”
I asked the Australian climate scientist Tom Wigley what he thought of the claim that climate change threatens civilization. “It really does bother me because it’s wrong,” he said. “All these young people have been misinformed. And partly it’s Greta Thunberg’s fault. Not deliberately. But she’s wrong.”
But don’t scientists and activists need to exaggerate in order to get the public’s attention?
“I’m reminded of what [late Stanford University climate scientist] Steve Schneider used to say,” Wigley replied. “He used to say that as a scientist, we shouldn’t really be concerned about the way we slant things in communicating with people out on the street who might need a little push in a certain direction to realize that this is a serious problem. Steve didn’t have any qualms about speaking in that biased way. I don’t quite agree with that.”
Wigley started working on climate science full-time in 1975 and created one of the first climate models (MAGICC) in 1987. It remains one of the main climate models in use today.
“When I talk to the general public,” he said, “I point out some of the things that might make projections of warming less and the things that might make them more. I always try to present both sides.”
Part of what bothers me about the apocalyptic rhetoric by climate activists is that it is often accompanied by demands that poor nations be denied the cheap sources of energy they need to develop.
“If you want to minimize carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 2070 you might want to accelerate the burning of coal in India today,” MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel said.
“It doesn’t sound like it makes sense. Coal is terrible for carbon. But it’s by burning a lot of coal that they make themselves wealthier, and by making themselves wealthier they have fewer children, and you don’t have as many people burning carbon, you might be better off in 2070.”
Emanuel and Wigley say the extreme rhetoric is making political agreement on climate change harder.
“You’ve got to come up with some kind of middle ground where you do reasonable things to mitigate the risk and try at the same time to lift people out of poverty and make them more resilient,” said Emanuel. “We shouldn’t be forced to choose between lifting people out of poverty and doing something for the climate.”
Happily, there is a plenty of middle ground between climate apocalypse and climate denial.
 

farmerm

Member
Location
Shropshire
I watched the show with an open mind but even I was close to throwing a brick at the telly.

It really was an unbalanced piece of journalism, hypocritical and simply misleading. I fully accept that what is happening in Brazil is shocking but the Brazilian government is supporting it so I’d suggest it is a political problem not a vegan one.

I happen to watch a food unwrapped program last week on similar topics and it was certainly more balanced than this.

Complain direct to the BBC. It is a public organisation and we all pay a fee.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/contact/complaints

I didn't see all of this program, like many at times I wanted to throw a brick at the TV!

One bit that annoyed me regards the expansion of farms into the Amazon.... "its such a large area it is too hard to police" No it isn't hard to police it really isn't! It would be very easy to police if the Brazilian government had the will to do so. The government could draw a line in the sand and say no more. These farmers are not ghosts, they can not sneak in to the rainforest, fell an area, grow a crop of grass, graze it off and slip back out over the course of a couple of days... The government could simply seize cattle and property on illegally occupied land, rip up paddocks and demolish illegal infrastructure. Of course they won't do this because Brazil needs to grow its economy, any Brazilian government that attempt to enforce environmental protection would soon be unelected. I suspect some in the Brazilian government also realise that the more forest they clear now, the more the rest of the world will be willing to invest in Brazil though carbon credits and re-forrestation schemes, hence the current rapid rate of felling.

The uncomfortable truth is production of any goods, be it meat or otherwise has an impact on natural resources and the environment. Clearly I believe British produce is much better in that regard that production in other territories and we should use this to drive consumer behaviour towards consuming domestically produced meat…. Ultimately I can not see how human population and economies can continue to grow indefinitely. At some point we will fundamentally exceed the planets ability to provide sufficient resources and exceed its ability to absorb the environmental impact.

World population is growing at over 1%, that means during the next 50 years (ie during my lifetime if I make it a little over the average UK lifespan) would population is set to increase by another 50%, if my children have children the world population in their lifetime will be double what it is today. Without some fundamental changes to have we all live and eat that seems like a pretty bleak prospect.


845807
 
We are just ordinary people who try to eat local and UK produced food wherever possible. We are back garden "hobby farmers" who are delighted when our spuds are bigger than a golf ball, and our 3 hens lay more than 1 egg a day! We really appreciate our farmers in the uk. This dismissal of meat recently seems really weird to us. We don't believe this media crap and will continue to eat our bacon butties (with real buttered toast) our Sunday dinner with lamb or chicken, shepherd's pie with beef mince and all the local fruit and veg that we can get our mitts on!
Only logged on to say that! Kind regards all from us! :)
Many thanks to everyone for commenting or liking our post. Didn't expect that! :)
 

Shep

Member
So what do our resident vegans and vegan lurkers suggest?
Apart from condemnation and demonisation, what are they doing in a positive manner to further their aims? Have you came up with any viable alternatives for livestock producers on marginal land? We have seen an onslaught of abuse and bad science in the last few years which has received a lot of funding from dubious sources, but why has this money not been used in a positive manner to create an alternative industry? Why is there no demand for oats to make oat water? Why is there not adverts in the press asking for suppliers of such products? Do you think you are going to get support from the people you need to get the support from by demonising them and trying to bankrupt them? If you want to end animal farming then you need to get livestock farmers on side, not alienate them or they will carry on in spite of you, same with consumers.
My notion is that you don't have any answers, and you are driven purely by feelings and emotions which are thrashed out on keyboards! You can't demand change without providing an alternative. Have you ever looked at a satellite image of the UK as an example? Have you noticed how green it is? That is what you are up against, the scale is immense, you need to be more positive and adopt a can do attitude, roll your sleeves up and get your hands dirty if you want to turn that grass into something you can eat, because if you don't, the people who live in those areas will never forgive you for taking away their existence.
Vegans always remind me of the IRA! If they had used the carrot instead of the stick, they would have achieved their aims long ago.
 
Lets also dont forget that children are being drawn into this too. I have seen issues on FB where mothers are complaining that their children have been verbally attacked as climate change causers and damaging the environment. By Christ this is OK for the NFU to allow that children from farms can be insulted from a young age. How long until some snowflake attacks a child in the playground or endless bullying by some child extremist. Best this gets nipped in the bud now.
 

Clive

Staff Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Lichfield
Many thanks to everyone for commenting or liking our post. Didn't expect that! :)


I think it's important that farmers remind themselves that there is support for what they do. Frankly, this is a bloody depressing industry right now as the high suicide rates concur - If things don't change the big problem the human race will face is a lack of people that want to be involved in producing food at all !!!

The constant "bullying" of farmers by media and agenda groups surely can not be legal? imagine the outcry if we had weekly documentaries about high crime rates amongst black people? or how disabled people burden the NHS etc? no way that would be acceptable


The BBC need to understand they are bankrupting families and in worst case responsible for suicides through this bulling

I'm not saying that UK ag doesn't have some work to do cleaning up its act (along with just about every other industry) but the way this is being gone about right now is wrong and the victims are real people
 
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JP1

Member
Livestock Farmer
We are just ordinary people who try to eat local and UK produced food wherever possible. We are back garden "hobby farmers" who are delighted when our spuds are bigger than a golf ball, and our 3 hens lay more than 1 egg a day! We really appreciate our farmers in the uk. This dismissal of meat recently seems really weird to us. We don't believe this media crap and will continue to eat our bacon butties (with real buttered toast) our Sunday dinner with lamb or chicken, shepherd's pie with beef mince and all the local fruit and veg that we can get our mitts on!
Only logged on to say that! Kind regards all from us! :)
You may not realise it but with all this vegan propaganda , the onset of terrible rain conditions and the current prices achieved for beef cattle, a post like that on a forum where it's largely farmers talking to farmers goes an incredibly long way to boost flagging morale

A thank you from me for taking the trouble to post
 

DaveGrohl

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
Cumbria
Now I've had a few hours to digest what was really a bad piece of TV, I'm struck by just how dopey the whole thing was. The bit about the insect traps was pathetic. Look how there's lots of insects in this forest then look how many insects there are in this field of maize, maize that will go for animal feed. What about the maize that goes for human feed Liz?!? Same bl00dy thing!! It was littered with dopey moments such as that. I was left wondering if she actually knew what point she was trying to make by the end of it, rather than just cobbled together some clips because she'd spent so much time making it.

Oh and here's all the info you need Liz from the absolute goldmine that is the Rogan/Kresser podcast:

If all animal production was ended overnight all over the globe the grand total of greenhouse gas emissions would be..........
2.6%

Just have a little think about that Liz.
And that's before you start to factor in exactly how damaging having to massively increase vegan production would be to all sorts of areas from emissions to biodiversity to soil erosion and depletion etc,etc,etc.
 

lloyd

Member
Location
Herefordshire
What about crop failures?
If you reduce the options down to a few crops mankind
would rely on to survive then you wouldn't want some kind
of disease to wipe your only source of food.
Some of the Irish still haven't forgiven the English over the potato famine.
Vegan man lives in a world with plenty if we all said f**k it there would
be one large scramble for the limited amount available.
And I bet he'd trample over the women and children to get there.
 
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delilah

Member
What about crop failures?
If you reduce the options down to a few crops mankind
would rely on to survive then you wouldn't want some kind
of disease to wipe your only source of food.
Some of the Irish still haven't forgiven the English over the potato famine.

If, extreme weather due to climate change is to be upon us as quickly as some are predicting.
and
If, laboratory produced food isn't proven safe, sustainable and plentiful quickly enough.
then
There will be an awful lot of people glad of some meat to eat.
 

renewablejohn

Member
Location
lancs
What about crop failures?
If you reduce the options down to a few crops mankind
would rely on to survive then you wouldn't want some kind
of disease to wipe your only source of food.
Some of the Irish still haven't forgiven the English over the potato famine.
Vegan man lives in a world with plenty if we all said f**k it there would
be one large scramble for the limited amount available.
And I bet he'd trample over the women and children to get there.

To be honest I am not sure how much vegetables actually go into a vegan diet. To me it looks like factory chemical farming. Whenever you see mass produced factory products exposed on programmes like ITV's Unwrapped theres always a "secret" product. Like the other night at the Robinson orange juice factory they had already traced the product from the source of actual oranges but the concentrate they started from was tasteless. Suddenly add the "secret" ingredient and hey presto it suddenly becomes drinkable.
 

lloyd

Member
Location
Herefordshire
To be honest I am not sure how much vegetables actually go into a vegan diet. To me it looks like factory chemical farming. Whenever you see mass produced factory products exposed on programmes like ITV's Unwrapped theres always a "secret" product. Like the other night at the Robinson orange juice factory they had already traced the product from the source of actual oranges but the concentrate they started from was tasteless. Suddenly add the "secret" ingredient and hey presto it suddenly becomes drinkable.

Soya in a vegan burger.
I was using the potato famine as an example of what happens when
your main source of food gets eradicated.
The English had plenty of wheat at the time they could have sent them .
170 years ago so not long in the history of mankind.
One million deaths out of a population of 8 million .
And here we are defending ourselves about being too successful
at food production.
 
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SFI - What % were you taking out of production?

  • 0 %

    Votes: 77 43.5%
  • Up to 25%

    Votes: 62 35.0%
  • 25-50%

    Votes: 28 15.8%
  • 50-75%

    Votes: 3 1.7%
  • 75-100%

    Votes: 3 1.7%
  • 100% I’ve had enough of farming!

    Votes: 4 2.3%

Red Tractor drops launch of green farming scheme amid anger from farmers

  • 1,286
  • 1
As reported in Independent


quote: “Red Tractor has confirmed it is dropping plans to launch its green farming assurance standard in April“

read the TFF thread here: https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/gfc-was-to-go-ahead-now-not-going-ahead.405234/
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