Dr James Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, states that the focus on CO2 is fueled in part by misconceptions. “It's true that human activity produces vastly more CO2 than other greenhouse gases. However, many other greenhouse gases trap heat far more powerfully than CO2, some of them tens of thousands of times more powerfully.”
Hansen mentions that the major source of CO2 emissions (cars and power plants) also produce aerosols. Aerosols actually have a cooling effect on global temperatures, to a degree that approximately cancels out the warming effect of CO2, at least in the near term.
This result is not widely known in the environmental community, due to a fear that “polluting industries will use it to excuse their greenhouse gas emissions.” Moreover, we cannot assume that aerosol emissions will keep pace with increases in CO2 emissions.
By far the most important non-CO2 greenhouse gas is methane, and the number one source of methane worldwide is animal agriculture. Animal agriculture produces more than 100 million tons of methane a year, and is on the rise. Global meat consumption has increased five-fold in the last 50 years.
Non-CO2 greenhouse gases are responsible for all the greenhouse gases we are seeing, and all the global warming we are going to see for the next 50 years. The strategy with the most potential to curb the rise in global warming is vegetarianism.
According to Henning Steinfeld, senior author of a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) “Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today's most serious environmental problems. They are responsible for 9- percent of all CO2 emissions, 37 percent of methane, and 65 percent of nitrous oxide.
“To put it in perspective, that is more damaging emissions than that caused by all transportation worldwide. The latter two gases are particularly troubling, even though they represent far smaller concentrations in the atmosphere than CO2. Methane has 23 times the global warming potential (GWP) of CO2 and nitrous oxide has 296 times the warming potential.”
The billions of chickens, turkeys, pigs, and cows who are crammed into factory farms each year produce enormous amounts of methane. This occurs both during digestion and from the acres of cesspools filled with feces that they excrete.
We are beginning to understand that the Earth is a limited resource, or in simple terms, the future of the world economy is tied up with the future of the environment. Producing one calorie of animal protein requires more than 10 times as much fossil fuel input than does a calorie of plant protein. Feeding massive amounts of grain and water to farmed animals and then killing them, and processing, transporting, and storing their flesh is extremely energy intensive.
In addition, enormous amounts of carbon dioxide stored in trees is released during destruction of vast acres of forest to provide pastureland and grow crops for farmed animals. Every minute of every day, huge areas of rainforest are destroyed in order to produce an ever-increasing demand for meat products.
Every time you destroy rainforest land, you destroy rich animal and plant life. Rainforests supply us with oxygen and moderate our climate. When rainforests are destroyed, it is only a matter of time before land becomes desertified.
There has been much hype recently about the new era of the automobile, with biofuels replacing CO2 producing petroleum. Have you thought about where these plant oils and extracts for biofuel will be grown? Just listen out for the sound of more rainforest falling, and you will be on the right track.
The pristine rainforests of tropical Indonesia have been earmarked as suitable location, with one expert saying that the “controls and regulatory certificates will not be worth the paper they are written on.” After all, immense illegal logging is already rife in South East Asia, so who will notice a few more million acres cleared?
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, consisting of some of the best scientists in the world, says, “Global warming, if left unchecked, will cause ecosystem collapses, crop failures, weather disasters, coastal flooding, the spreading of disease, and the death of coral reefs.”
The driving force behind all extinctions of fundamental life forms, is the destruction of wildlife habitat, caused by livestock grazing or livestock feed, accounting for over 70 percent of agricultural land worldwide.
Global warming is not an isolated problem. It is an ecosystem imbalance caused by humans. Nor is it removed from other environmental factors. Let's take water for example.
Every pound of meat not eaten will save around 5,000 gallons of water. To put it into context; by using a low flow showerhead, 100 gallons of water are used per week. That's around 5,000 gallons per year. In other words, by giving up one pound of beef you will save as much water as you use showering for an entire year.
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