Local Food or Less Meat? Data Tells The Real Story | Hacker News Reader

Local Food or Less Meat? Data Tells The Real Story

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139 pointsxbryanx90 comments

Yeah, we don't do the locavore thing for carbon footprint reasons, but just because it's ... nice, I guess, for lack of a better word. Once a week we get to meet the family that we buy fresh peaches from, and we joke with them or ask 'em how the crops are doing and so forth. They tell us if they've had to spray or not. The peaches smell like real peaches, they're fresh, they last for days so we don't have to eat all of them right away before they spoil, they're juicy.

My girlfriend works at a CSA one morning a week and comes home with a week's worth of veggies that she picks. They, too, are fresh and tasty and seem different from what we're used to getting in the supermarket.

We have about 160 square foot garden of our own; I'll have tomatoes ready soon, cantaloupe, watermelon, cucumbers, zucchini, corn, bell peppers, green beans, onions, strawberries ... it's just fun. If we need a little rosemary or thyme or basil for cooking, we can go outside and pick what we need.

I like getting to know the people who grow my food. That somehow makes it taste better.

Right on - my wife and I basically do the same thing: grow some of our own veggies, talk with local farmers at the farmers' market, etc.

I also think that lowering our carbon and environmental footprint by eating less meat is the right thing to do.

Yeah, my friend and I are pretty much unapologetic carnivores -- we half-kid sometimes about buying a 4H cow. But, I've noticed that ever since we started getting fresh veggies, I haven't minded eating the green stuff nearly as much.

I'm skeptical about these food practices being able to feed everyone though. While, personally, I'd like to see dairy farms in California with pasture-fed free-range etc. etc. cattle, that would probably make milk too expensive for poorer families to afford.

I think a lot of tribal meat eaters ate pretty sustainably because their population numbers held pretty steady, didn't explode. So just hunting wasn't enough to require the wild herds to also grow exponentially for survival. Let's face it, the issue is not meat, it's growth of the human population. But nobody wants to advocate eliminating humans (and definitely I don't), so we have to make the hard choices sometimes. I'd say the bigger issue isn't carbon footprint, it's water supply.

http://www.businessinsider.com/water-use-of-foods-2011-4?op=...

But nobody wants to advocate eliminating humans

A way of implementing this, nudging it towards more politically correctness, is birth control. At one extreme is China's One Child policy, which probably led to some economic benefits (yes, and created other social problems).

Here's a thought: which reduces carbon emissions more, population control, or having a few people in a population do more environmental friendly stuff? (not suggesting one or the either, it actually needs some data.... sneaks away before getting stoned...)

Check out Singapore's policy for a middle ground.

There's a cash bonus paid to women who opt for sterilization after two children, coupled with preferred admission into the best state schools for the children of sterilized women and increasing tax penalties for each child beyond the second.

Hmm... Not being able to attend a good school because your youngest sibling was born is a very upsetting concept in many ways...

It pales in comparison to starving because your three youngest siblings were born, in my not-so-humble opinion.

Granting or denying advantages to children is a good way to give a population control program teeth.

False dichotomy

we have plenty of water, it's just that most of it is dirty, or at least, salty, which makes it unsuitable for irrigation. Dirty water plus energy equals clean water. If the political barriers to fission are overcome, we'd have a whole lot more energy.

Solar energy can also be used to clean water.

For me, the main reason for buying locally is economic; circulating money through locally owned businesses helps your neighbors. I would prefer to have the wealth created from my labor change hands a few times before going directly to Walmart HQ and/or some international tax haven.

That's a good reason too. :-)

Isn't this a good argument for protectionism? Why should people trade outside their own borders anyway?

For the same reason that people should have sex outside their own families: other groups often come up with innovative solutions to various problems, and by trading with them, you can benefit from their knowledge and experience and approaches.

Of course, trading too openly can also be detrimental to one or more groups sometimes, too.

Ie don't do the less meat thing for carbon footprint reasons, but just because it's ... nice, I guess, for lack of a better word.

The main reason I buy local fruits is because of quality. If you have to ship fruits from another country they're usually frozen and far too ripe when picked. On the other hand, when fruits are made for local consumers they are picked at the right amount of ripeness and aren't frozen. I can hardly eat a peach at a large grocery store nowadays simply because of the difference in taste.

Tomatoes are a great example of this. Because they have to be shipped, commercial tomatoes are picked before they're ripe and then gassed with ethylene to make them turn red. As a result, home-grown and locally grown tomatoes tend to taste noticeably better than typical store-bought ones since they're properly ripened.

As good as the author's logic is, he's trying to refute a point that locavores haven't even really been emphasising.

See for yourself: http://www.locavores.com/how/why.php

Energy conservation is only one of 12 reasons to buy locally, and saving transportation costs is only a minor subpoint. The main energy conservation argument is to not buy from farms relying heavily on fossil fuels.

The reason locovores no longer make "food miles" a central justification is that it has been thoroughly debunked. Go back a few years and you will see "food miles" being used all over the place in the eat local arguments.

It also depends where you live. I was blown away how much food miles were emphasized as a mark of sustainability on packaging and advertising in the UK two years ago.

The uk is a crowded island and anything we can do to reduce the number of lorries (trucks) on our roads would be good. An example is, why do potatoes from Cornwall get sold in Yorkshire and vice versa since both areas could be self-sufficient in potatoes? Why are we wasting fuel, vehicles, truck drivers time (and their whole lives really) shifting potatoes around depending on the market price? A more extreme example is that New Zealand apples and lamb are sold in the UK, both of which are readily available from this country, not only at different times of year. I've even seen "Organic" New Zealand apples in Sainsburys. Well they might be organically grown but certainly not organically produced overall if they're shipped halfway around the globe. Another bugbear I have is, here in the East Midlands we have freight planes landing and taking off at night. Some people aren't getting a decent night's sleep so that others can get Mange Tout and sugar snap peas from Ghana or wherever. So in summary if you want the planet to be a nicer less stressful place with less lorries and planes, try to buy local!

Huh - they don't list the sole reason I do it.

The author's logic actually offers the fallacy of a false dichotomy. If you're so inclined there's no reason one couldn't eat locally, and shift food content.

For a counter argument to the "Locavore" movement, I recommend reading "Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly" by Jame E McWilliams.[1]

As others more knowledgeable on the subject than me have stated (in various places), eating less red meat greatly improves the environment and your health. An example of eating less red meat would be treat it as a side dish instead of the main dish.

1. http://www.amazon.com/Just-Food-Where-Locavores-Responsibly/...

There was a study released last week that basically stated the same thing. Refined grains, potatoes and meat attribute to greater weight gain vs diets centered around vegetables. It's really looking like the best meal ecologically, economically and for your health is one where the primary calories come from vegetables.

Here's one article that discussed the study:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/potato...

> where the primary calories come from vegetables

A kilogram of spinach has 230 cals. How many kilos do you plan to eat?

Fats are a more practical source of calories.

It is true that fats are among the most calorie dense food in existence but that doesn't make them necessarily 'practical'. If animal fats have lots of external costs (in terms of environmental damage) then they aren't very practical. The costs are just not well understood.

As for the spinach straw man argument...I don't think anyone is suggesting that you eat 10 kilos of spinach, that would be extremely unhealthy. I think the OP was suggesting simply that calories come mostly from plants. This includes nuts (peanut butter is very high calorie), fruits (also high calorie) and vegetables.

If you allow "plants", then yes- starchy staples, nuts, fruits all have you covered on calories. It's up to the OP though to clarify whether he meant plants or celery.

Some sources of plant fats: avocados, olives, coconuts, almost all nuts.

Bonus: 0mg cholesterol.

Dietary cholesterol has not yet been shown to be harmful.

Some well-researched books on the subject include "Fat and Cholesterol are good for you" by Uffe Ravnskov and "The Great Cholesterol con" by Anthony Colpo.

That's right.

High levels are correlated with atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease, but they haven't been shown to cause those conditions. Some cholesterols are also "good" (high density) in that they have positive effects for people with high cholesterols -- they can lower levels.

Here are some great rebuttals to "Just Food:"

http://www.grist.org/article/2009-09-08-mcwilliams-locavore-...

http://sharonastyk.com/2009/09/11/start-by-asking-the-right-...

>and your health

As far as I am aware, the data on this claim is conflicting, and most studies are plagued by confounding variables.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat#Health

See? This article is a freakin' yo-yo. It causes heart disease, it does not cause heart disease, it causes cancer, it does not cause cancer, everyone is jumping on everyone else's methodology, and sometimes it seems as though the conclusions were decided before the study was performed.

Here it causes heart disease:

>a survey ,conducted in 1960, of 25,153 California Seventh-Day Adventists, found that the risk of heart disease is three times greater for 45-64 year old men who eat meat daily, versus those who did not eat meat.

Here it does not:

>In another study[84] in 2010 involving over one million people who ate meat found that only processed meat had an adverse risk in relation to coronary heart disease. The study suggests that eating 50g (less than 2oz) of processed meat per day increases risk of coronary heart disease by 42%, and diabetes by 19%. Equivalent levels of fat, including saturated fats, in unprocessed meat (even when eating twice as much per day) did not show any deleterious effects, leading the researchers to suggest that "differences in salt and preservatives, rather than fats, might explain the higher risk of heart disease and diabetes seen with processed meats, but not with unprocessed red meats."

The lack of attention given to statistical confounding in the diets of the people studied is concerning. The fact that new studies appear to refute previous studies suggests that one of three things is going on:

-the new studies are wrong

-the old studies are wrong

-the physical laws of the Universe have changed in some fundamental manner

I cannot hope to be convinced on this topic without hopefully a thorough examination of the methodology of the researchers and potential biases. It is not becoming of a scientist to make an assertion of knowledge without a thorough examination of the data and its origins, and I have my doubts about the quality of any of the current data, whether it condemns or acquits meat consumption. The work regarding heterocyclic amines and the recommendation to microwave meat before it is cooked seems now as a tiny ignored candle flame in a dark room full of people claiming to see the light.

I do, however, have the intuition that studying something as broad as "meat consumption" is almost inherently inclined to error and bias, and that it would be better to perform multiple specific analyses and hopefully even experiments involving perhaps directed diets, so that the question can be laid to rest, and people can make a decision based on evidence, fact, and their own relative valuation of health and hedonism.

Not from dogma.

All the more reason to take all health studies with a large grain of salt and simply eat everything in moderation. It's just smart to hedge your bets and not depend on any one food- that's why we are omnivores.

Example:

Every additional serving of potatoes people added to their regular diet each day made them gain about a pound over four years... every added serving of fruits and vegetables prevented between a quarter- and a half-pound gain ... Every extra serving of nuts ... prevented more than a half-pound of weight gain. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/potato...)

If we take these findings at face-value, if you hedged your bets and ate equal parts potato, nuts, fruits, and vegetables, you'd net 0 lbs weight gain.

No kidding it doesn't take a genius to figure this stuff out, also statistically at a 95% confidence interval, of every 20 studies you read 1 is pure chance.

I have a feeling that most of the reason for the weight gain from an extra serving of potatoes is the cola and burger that comes with it, all loaded with salt and sugar, that will spike your blood sugar, make you hungry in 20 minutes, and thirsty for another cola that will pack on more pounds.

Possibly, but potatoes are basically pure starch. I'm open to the possibility that can screw around with your body in great enough amounts- though I don't think I'd ever abandon potatoes completely. Tubers are an ancient food.

No kidding it doesn't take a genius to figure this stuff out, also statistically at a 95% confidence interval, of every 20 studies you read 1 is pure chance.

That would only be true if all studies were published. (And only applies to studies that are testing a specific hypothesis, rather than scouring huge data sets[1] for correlations.)

1. http://xkcd.com/882/

True, but missing the point.

If you prove, convincingly, to a "locavore" that the stated benefits of their choices are in fact better achieved by (say) acquiring all your food from Wal-Mart, will they thank you and be glad that they know this now? Of course not, they'll get angry. And that's because the actual desire for "locavore" eating is not about the stated benefits, it's about being able to feel superior to others.

Now me, I don't see the point of this. But that's probably just because I have plenty of other reasons to feel superior to others. But if I were denied these then, heck, maybe I'd be tempted to engage in this sort of hair-shirt behaviour too.

What I say is: let the baby have his bottle. If someone wants to feel superior to others due to whatever random harmless activity he's engaging in, then give him a pat on the back and try to avoid bringing logic and reason into the conversation. Everybody has a deep-seated psychological need to feel like they're better than others, and if denied this fairly harmless sort of outlet then these folks will start lashing out in other, probably more harmful, ways.

Great article. Scientific analysis is solid.

Understanding of American capitalism is flawed, however.

>> As companies keep discovering, it really helps to run the numbers. As I've written about before, Pepsi discovered...

>> Smart, knowledgeable execs are consistently surprised when good lifecycle data trumps seemingly solid assumptions.

[emphases mine]

That is naive. Pepsi is running a tight ship; they have all the numbers in front of them, all of the time; and they pay a lot of engineers a lot of money to not fall prey to "seemingly solid assumptions". Regardless of when the relevant analyses (like the Tropicana gas-vs-fuel analysis) are performed, companies will announce the "discovery" of such nuances precisely when it becomes good publicity to do so.

In related reading on ignoring surrounding factors when introducing green technology, windmills destroy the environment: http://www.savewesternny.org/environment.html

One of the commenters on the thread says: "If the meat you are eating is organic, local, and grass-fed it's going to have an extremely low carbon footprint."

Is this true? Does anyone know of any data that supports or refute this?

I'm just wondering if a third factor -- how the meat is produced -- has a meaningful impact on its carbon footprint. I wonder how much of the carbon footprint of red meat, for example, comes from all of the petroleum used to produce fertilizer to grow corn for grain-fed cattle.

I don't have hard facts, but if done correctly, pasturing/grass-feeding animals means it is possible raise and feed a herd without adding energy inputs (aside from the sun and rain necessary to grow the grass). This, at least, applies to animals like cows who are equipped to eat only grasses as a food source. Raising other animals (like pigs or chickens) means you may need to supplement pasture grazing with grains. But there's nothing stopping a farmer from growing those on the farm without much additional energy inputs.

It's a matter of scale.

There was a pig (and other animals) farmer who used to have a really good blog. One of the practices he used was to get free discarded milk and by-products from a local dairy to feed his pigs. Instead of the dairy having to pay to discard about-to-spoil whey, for example, he would just accept a few tons of it and feed it to his animals. But that only goes so far, and the supply has to be local or it becomes too expensive to truck in. You can feed your cows on grass, but the animal density has to be much lower, or the grass will be under so much pressure that it will die out from overgrazing.

Likewise, you can pasture-raise chickens and the eggs/meat are tastier for it, but the number of chickens/sq yd of pasture is much less than you can squeeze into an indoors "battery operation."

If you are concerned with animal welfare -- and I firmly believe that you should be -- these things are difficult problems. On the one hand you want to raise animals in a sustainable manner that allows them a good, if short, life, but on the other, your customers need to be able to afford the food you provide. And it's that final point that is stopping many farmers from doing it.

Can you articulate for me your resolution to what appears to me to be an irresolvable conflict: on the one hand, firmly believing in the welfare of animals and, on the other hand, electing to eat them.

No? Okay, let's just downvote the comment then.

Electively killing an animal is fundamentally incompatible with caring for it as a living thing -- as non-property; something which has the right to live it's life independent of any human's design for it. Without forgoing your intent to eat it, the best welfare you can give an animal is the treatment of property, as a valued investment. Given that you opt for these animals to be killed anyway, your call for their improved treatment is, I expect, designed first to benefit yourself and your own mental and emotional state. It has only the secondary effect of improving the animals' lives.

Um, yeah, whatever. It's your conflict; why do you expect me to resolve it for you?

You can go into complicated justifications or simply believe that the animal should, while alive, be humanely treated. And that it should be killed quickly and as painlessly as possible.

And then enjoy its expertly cooked flesh.

It is a matter of scale. I'm of the opinion that the FDA and the department of agriculture, in coordination with the factory farms, have made it very difficult for small farmers to survive (Joel Salatin is an excellent source of information on the sort of regulations that are required). The farmer fro whom we buy our meat, eggs, and milk has stated that he runs at his capacity--he does not believe he could take on more animals (even though there is a great demand for his product) without ultimately making life worse for the animals and producing an inferior product.

The problem is not only the petroleum used within this industrial process, but also the other pollutants such as waste water run off and methane emissions.

"Cattle-rearing generates more global warming greenhouse gases, as measured in CO2 equivalent, than transportation, and smarter production methods, including improved animal diets to reduce enteric fermentation and consequent methane emissions, are urgently needed, according to a new United Nations report released today. ..."[1]

It seems to me that the industrial production of any food is overly hazardous to the environment, but is there a way to meet food demands while being environmentally neutral?

1. http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?newsID=20772&CR1=w...

Don't forget that even organic, local, grass-fed cattle still produce methane [1], which is 25x worse than CO2 [2].

[1] http://www.epa.gov/rlep/faq.html#1

[2] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=methane+100+year+gwp

My memory is rusty and the link doesn't corroborate your figure from what I could see. What I remember is that methane is more potent a greenhouse gas than O2 but it has a significantly shorter half-life in the atmosphere.

Methane has a half-life of < 10 years (7, I think) but a GWP of 25. The primary concern of atmospheric methane is, then, the possibility of a quick build-up that increases CO2 emission from natural sources; there is quite a bit of CO2 stored in bogs that only a bit of methane will release. It's the long-term side-effects of atmospheric methane that become long-term concerns, rather than the methane itself.

Sorry, the link was just to corroborate the fact that cattle produce a lot of methane. For the GWP of Methane: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=methane+100+year+gwp

[1] doesn't really discuss whether grass-fed cattle produce more, less, or about the same amount of methane as those eating conventional feed.

I'd really question the "extremely low" part.

Animals are at least an order of magnitude more expensive in pure energy inputs to successfully grow than veggies (this becomes apparent if you compare land usage between the two purely in solar wattage).

If it is organic, all that energy input is carbon neutral.

there is a lot more energy that goes into food production than just the fertilizer.

They're able to provide much more energy as a food source, too. That means we'd have to eat several pounds of veggies to replace the energy we get from one pound of meat. If you're going to compare the cost of growing animals vs veggies, you've got to account for needing more veggies.

It's a complex equation because there are a lot of factors that have to come into play to do a fair comparison. It's probably as complex to model, and as sensitive to input-variable selection, as predicting global weather patterns.

It's not really that complex. Due to the 2nd law of thermodynamics (entropy), you will never get more back than you put in (in fact, you'll never even break even).

Larger investments of energy for less food = higher energy cost for food. update: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EROEI

How many pounds of veggies do you think that pound of meat ate?

Meat is only more efficient when you can't grow crops on that land, e.g. sheep and goats on mountains.

I thought this article would be about which one of the two (local food or less meat) is better for you health wise, with data. It talks about carbon footprint of each source.

That's what I thought too. The only certain thing is that doing both (local and less meat) is the way to go.

Slightly meta/off-topic:

By just looking at the comments I have seen about five controversial statements like Parent: Red meat is bad, because $study Child: No, it isn't see $counter-study

What is up with the science in foodscience?

All the camps (paleo, vegetarian, vegan, locavore, raw foodists, ...) are citing studies which support their point of view and disregard the others.

Or another good example is the Weston A. Price Foundation [1] and Dr. Fuhrman [2]. They are "battling" each other with study after study.

Why are there so many contradicting and controversial studies and opinions in a field which calls itself a science?

[1] http://www.westonaprice.org/

[2] http://www.diseaseproof.com/

It is virtually impossible to design a convincing study on the effect of FoodstuffA on human health. The ideal study would look something like that: - Enlist people into study, divide them randomly into two groups - Design a diet, where everything will be exactly the same, except FoodstuffA for group 1 will be replaced with some FoodstuffB for group 2. - Keep all subjects under supervision 24/7 to eliminate possible cheating - Continue the study long enough to determine long term effects (years? decades?)

Even in this case, there will be opportunity for speculation. Maybe the FoodstuffA is not bad, but the FoodstuffB is just beneficial, maybe we should have used FoodstuffC.

So, there's two alternatives that are realistic:

1. Observational study. Ask 1000000 people about how much red meat they eat, compare health, do conclusions. Lots of confounding variables - smoking, physical activity, alcohol consumption etc etc. 2. Randomised controlled study. Will be fairly short due to funding and subject to criticism due to design of the diets of participants (no, group 1 had too much fat! no, group 2 had too little carbs!).

Both options are not ideal and subject to controversy.

I saw this TED talk a while back in which the speaker argues we should lower our meat consumption by increasing our insect consumption. He says insect meat is just as nutritious as mammal meat (if not more), and it also takes a lot fewer resources to produce it commercially.

http://www.ted.com/talks/marcel_dicke_why_not_eat_insects.ht...

I believe he said it takes 10 kg of feed and other resources to produce 1 kg of cow meat, while it takes 1 kg of inputs to produce 1 kg of grasshopper meat.

I ordered some canned mealworms off of Amazon the other day just to try them, and they actually weren't that bad with some butter and spices.

Grasshoppers may be more efficient to produce than cows, but science tells us that for the 1:1 input:output claim to be true grasshoppers must expend 0 energy and produce 0 excretions. Doubtful!

Ah, sorry I misquoted him. He said that given 10kg of inputs, you can get 1kg of cow meat, or you can get 9kg of locust meat. My bad.

     red meat being particularly egregious, requiring 150%
     more energy than even chicken

It is true, but that's only because currently chickens are fed aggressively with growth hormones and other such shit. In 10 days a farm can produce chickens weighting 4.5 pounds (and this is for the cases where the farmer shows some restraint). As an observable result, small children are getting increasingly more hairy.

Red meat cannot be grown so aggressively, especially when discussing pork. It's ironic that the most unhealthy red meat of all may end up being the best for your children's health.

There's no reason to quibble carbon when there are other clear resource differences between food sources.

It takes a very large quantity of grain to produce the same mass of beef, as so much energy goes to powering the cow itself while it's alive. Same for water usage. Large animal farms are also reponsible for a great deal of run off pollution now not just from sewage and nitrates, but also antibiotic residue.

There's no question that raising animals for food is inefficient compared to agriculture.

Wow, didn't realize this many people were concerned about carbon footprints. I'm curious how this breaks down, at least in the US, in the east vs the west.

I'm a vegetarian, so I obviously can't eat less meat, but I do enjoy buying locally when I can, mostly because I can be assured to have fresh ingredients, and I can see where the food came from.

You could eat negative meat, by raising cattle and not letting anybody eat them. ;-)

Better yet, raising cattle and feeding them people :)

There are good lifecycle analysis studies that back up organically grown vegetables have a smaller carbon footprint than conventional:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArTN5sf...

So while you are eating less meat, may as well eat more organic vegetables, locally grown all else being equal.

And if you want to find food where you can trace it back to its farm, http://realtimefarms.com is the place to go! (disclaimer, that's my startup, feedback welcome :)

article makes an interesting point, but "both" would be better than either alone (something certainly possible here in santiago, chile - fresh, local food is one of the best things about this place. y no hay nada mas chileno que un poroto ;o)

Local food or less meat is a false dichotomy, for one. What is really important is an understanding that personal consumption choices are no substitute for political change and that political change does not necessarily, and often does not, follow personal change.

Derrick Jensen has written extensively on this issue, and has a fantastic and short essay, "Forget Shorter Showers" [1]. It could easily have been called "Forget Local Food or Less Meat".

[1] http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4801...

The average American eats twice as many kilograms of meat than the next nationality (last time I checked it was the British). As the article states, beef is by far the most environmentally draining; it turns out in terms of protein and calories, pork is nearly the same as beef with a much smaller amount of energy required to produce that meat. If the US had a better food culture [I'm not counting fast food here], we might be able to actually change the mindsets of the public that they dont need a meat entre with every meal.

Is that really true? More than twice as much meat as, say, the Australians, Germans and Argentinians?

update: According to http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/datablog/2009/sep/02/m... your implausible-sounding numbers are wrong. In fact US meat consumption (at least as of 2002) is in line with the other agriculturally-rich Western countries, and well behind Denmark and New Zealand. (Australia is missing from the statistics.)

I've been a vegetarian for a few years after hearing more about the cruelty, environmental impact, etc. We get local food fairly often but I should really make more of an effort.

I try to only eat mini-cows. No seriously. Mini/micro/teacup cows produce a fraction of the methane emissions and eat a third less food per pound of meat.

Do grass fed cattle produce more methane?

I think the carbon crisis is political rubbish that spawned a new industry I mean who the hell thought of carbon trading - sounds like something school children came up with.

The earth's atmosphere and environment is more changeable than we realise - we've only been looking at it for a blink of an eye in the scale of things so we can't claim to understand it. Not only that, they've worked out based on various factors that the CO2 levels were higher in the Cambrian, Ordovician and Jurassic periods. It's like trying to work out who farted in a lift full of people.

As for the locavore thing, it's only better because it's not usually mass produced crap so it has health benefits. Chickens, goats etc are a counterpoint to the OP's "theory" as they live off waste and are highly efficient meat generators. Not only that, anyone can manage them.

I grow huge amounts of edible things myself (because it tastes better and is cost, health and psycologically beneficial). I'm not labelling myself with Carbon Crusader, Green warrior, Locavore or whatever terms they think up next etc though - that's just silly.

You're ultimately trading your health for carbon guilt.

I'm always really curious about people who deny human causation of global warming, which is what it seems like you're doing. I mean this as a legitimate question: How do you justify this belief?

The overwhelming majority of climate scientists believe in human-caused global warming. I'm assuming that you don't have specific training in these issues, or data that no one else possesses, so under what criteria do you choose to follow your own reasoning, or gut instinct, over such a mountain of educated opinion?

A corollary, for me, could be drawn to atoms. I have never seen an atom, nor have I ever really dug deep into the data that people say proves atoms exist. I have no more first-hand knowledge of atoms than I have of God. Yet, I simply choose to believe in atoms because people who are supposed to know about these things say atoms exist, and I'm told that if I really wanted to prove it to myself, I could go back to college or to a laboratory and do so.

We have to do this for all kinds of things, every day. We're surrounded by things that operate on principles that no single person will ever have the time or energy to investigate and validate by themselves. We have to delegate authority over most technical matters to specialists, simply because we don't have any other choice.

Why draw the line at global warming? Do you believe in internal combustion? Do you believe in black holes? Do you believe in evolution?

Really, I do not mean this to sound like an attack. I want to know.

Being skeptical of political crusades and trendy beliefs is very different from being a "denier". We can scarcely predict the weather one day in advance. Being skeptical of global climate predictions spanning decades is hardly on the same level as denying the internal combustion engine. And even if you accept the premise of global warming, as I do, it's a big stretch to make lifestyle recommendations based on that, and an even bigger stretch to start regulating personal eating habits.

Thank you for articulating my point better than me.

We can scarcely predict the average of three dice rolls, but over a series the average becomes trivial.

Unless you roll a thousand 6's.

> We can scarcely predict the weather one day in advance. Being skeptical of global climate predictions spanning decades is hardly on the same level as denying the internal combustion engine.

Your analogy disregards the difference in degrees of wrongness involved here. We cannot predict the temperature of the air above your house at 3:28pm tomorrow. We can predict within N degrees the average temperature for the next 30 days, for some N.

We can definitely predict the average temperature for next summer -- we can't say with any certainty how hot it will be on August 8, 2012. However, this failure doesn't negate our ability to identify trends and patterns on a macro-scale.

Global warming is a macro-scale event. It's always possible that black swans will upturn our knowledge and ruin our predictions. Climate change deniers essentially appeal to this aspect of human nature -- that we cannot plan for random events with very large consequences.

But we don't plan for the black swans, we plan for our predictions and, with a healthy dose of skepticism, we remember that the map is not the territory.

And by the way, deniers bet it all that the black swan will be a leveling off or even drop in temperatures. That earthmoving event could also be that temperature increase is actually exponential, not linear as it seems now.

> Climate change deniers essentially appeal to this aspect of human nature -- that we cannot plan for random events with very large consequences.

It's one thing to plan for a random event. It's another thing to propose trillions of dollars in taxes (both monetary and regulatory), wealth that could be used to further the human race by pursuing causes such as education, poverty, hunger, disease, standards of living, and advancing technology.

I think for skeptics of anthropogenic warming, the main problem is that proponents appear to be interested in politics as much as or more than in science. This just isn't the case for internal combustion, black holes, or even evolution.

Also, it's easy to fully agree that warming has been happening (over hundreds of years, at least), and still be skeptical that humans are driving the change, what with the Medieval Warm, the Little Ice Age, etc.

It's all down to climate science being more akin to religion that science.

Science is based on building a hypothesis, building a supporting model that produces a reliable theory, then wrinse and repeat.

Climate science is based on building a hypothesis, marketing it, claiming that a theory is going to kill us all, fucking up the numbers when asked to prove it and then sticking your fingers in your ears and ridiculing your peers when a competing hypothesis appears.

There are models for the weather systems on this planet. They simply don't work. We can't predict the weather very well and never have been able to. That is the same for just about everything that climate science has come up with. Back in the 70s and 80s we were facing an ice age. Now it's back to global warming.

We just don't understand why the planet works like it does. We like to pretend we do and make a big kerfaffle about how advanced we are as a species and how we can control our fate, yet it's a thing much larger than the lifespan of the entire human race and it has no respect for us.

I don't believe in god - why would I? It's not observable. Atoms, internal combusion engines and evolution are all observable and we have models which are recreatable.

How would you prove to yourself that Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming exists to the same degree of certainty that you could have that atoms exist? I'd like to know so that I can independently run the same experiment.

Also, the history of environmental scientists making false apocalyptic predictions is lamentable. It should take some extraordinary evidence for a rational person to believe a fresh one.

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