Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

There is no evidence of a fresh water shortage. We had the wettest year in 125 years in the U.S. this year. Where is this coming from? Water usage is a local issue, not a global one. Certain local communities have to watch water usage depending on rainfall. Certain ones do not. Either way, cows drink water and pee water. Water goes through the same cycle it has for billions of years. The U.S. used to have a wild bison population as great as the present cattle population. Same digestive system. Beef is one of the healthiest foods on the planet, and we evolved to eat meat, and have been eating it for 2.5 million years. I'm all about sustainable agriculture. I'm not all about faddish diets and eco-fascism.

View on HN

> There is no evidence of a fresh water shortage.

The UN disagrees. [1]

> We had the wettest year in 125 years in the U.S. this year.

Surely you're not using a one time event to argue against the scientific consensus of climate change?

> Beef is one of the healthiest foods on the planet, and we evolved to eat meat, and have been eating it for 2.5 million years.

What does this have to do with the water consumption used in raising cows?

[1] - https://www.unwater.org/water-facts/climate-change/

Surely you're not arguing that the amount of water on the planet has decreased? Or that global annual rainfall has reduced?

EPA shows that annual precipitation has consistently increased over the past century, so the water scare is a bad play:

https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...

The overall amount of water on the planet and the annual rainfall isn't the same thing as water availability.

> Surely you're not arguing that the amount of water on the planet has decreased? Or that global annual rainfall has reduced?

No, I'm arguing that you are conflating precipitation with water accessibility.

Are you saying there's a different baseline metric we could be using? If we're going to be making climate-change related arguments about water, we need a climate-based metric to show that it's climate change causing water accessibility issues.

Without such a metric, then it's easier to show that local political issues are what's causing these issues.

> Surely you're not using a one time event to argue against the scientific consensus of climate change?

"But it's cold in my office, global warming debunked!"

But free roaming bison drinking water is different than cows in CAFOs where large amounts of waters are heavily polluted. Which sounds also like a local problem to me but still is a big problem to some comunities.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com