Pirate's Cove

So, you’re thinking of a burger for lunch and a steak for dinner? You’re looking forward to spring so you can crack open the grill and cook up some awesome strip steaks? Heck, maybe you’ve said “damn the cold and snow, we’re grilling out!” Well, you’re a murderer. So says Vice’s Matt Smith

Meat Is Murder — On the Climate, Anyway

Beware the cows.

Sure, it looks like we’ve got them where we want them, penned up in farms, easily led to the meat-packing plants. But in an ongoing display of passive resistance, they may be trying to take us with them.

Beyond the fat and cholesterol, they’re also one of the leading sources of methane — a planet-warming greenhouse gas with 25 times the punch of carbon dioxide on a 100-year time scale. And those emissions are expected to go up planet-wide as developing countries urbanize and get richer, putting a Western-style diet within the reach of billions more people.

So, it will allow people starving in 3rd world sh*tholes, er, developing nations, to get enough food? What’s the downside? Why is it that 1st World Warmists are always trying to deny those in 3rd world nations the same benefits the 1st Worlders have?

And when you total up the effect of all the feed, fertilizer, and fuel involved in modern farming, that quarter-pound cheeseburger ends up having the same carbon footprint as a nearly seven-mile (11-kilometer) drive, said Dawn Undurraga, a nutritionist with the nonprofit Environmental Working Group.

So, Warmists shouldn’t have either, in order to save Gaia? Chicken and pork are not quite as bad, but, they’re still EVIL.

Worldwide, livestock account for about 15 percent of global emissions — and reducing consumption “will be critical” to hitting the climate change targets world leaders set in Paris in December, the British think-tank Chatham House estimates. That pact set a goal of limiting climate change to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial times, a mark the world is roughly halfway toward already.

“A shift to healthier patterns of meat-eating could bring a quarter of the emissions reductions we need to keep on track for a two-degree world,” Chatham House reported in November.

The notion here is that millions, many even billions or trillions!!!!!!!!!1!!! will die if the temperature of the earth goes up a wee bit, so, all you people should mostly stop eating meat, otherwise, doom.

Eating too much meat also contributes to the rise of obesity and the spread of chronic diseases like cancer and diabetes. But worldwide consumption is expected to expand more than 75 percent by 2050 — and few people are aware of the connection between climate change and diet, Chatham House noted.

“Few people care about the connection between climate change and diet.” Fixed that.

Read: Global Warming Today: Meat Is Murder Or Something »

Another day, another breathless report on Doom from ‘climate change’

(UK Guardian) Climate change could kill more than 500,000 people a year globally by 2050 by making their diets less healthy, according to new research published in the Lancet.

The research is the first to assess how the impacts of global warming could affect the quality of the diets available to people and found fewer fruit and vegetables would be available as a result of climatic changes. These are vital in curbing heart disease, strokes and diet-related cancers, leading the study to conclude that the health risks of climate change are far greater than thought.

How to stop this?

“The health burden related to climate change is much bigger than we thought,” Scarborough said. But cutting carbon emissions and improving education and the availability of fruit and vegetables would reduce the number of deaths, he said.

So, certainly this would require massive government intervention for the first two. As for the latter, agriculture has massively increased over time. We keep having record crops. But, think about it: it would also require massive government to force companies to give their fruits and veggies to people, possibly on the taxpayer dime. Would they force people to eat their fruits and veggies?

Jo Nova describes it all thusly

The Lancet study in a nutshell: Take climate models that don’t work, and guesstimate what might happen to agriculture because of the climate we probably won’t get. Then use those guesses of food production in 2050 to fantasize what that means for human mortality. After all, we don’t know how many people are killed today by “4% less fruit and vege and 0.7% less meat”, but we can estimate what that dietary change will do in 2050 after a medical revolution, 35 years of plant breeding and agricultural changes. Not to mention a few more rounds of global food fads and phases of Vegan, Paleo, Atkins, and 5:2 Fasting. (But how did they factor in the mortality effect from another 2,000 episodes of MasterChef?)

Boom. As she notes, it’s not like CO2 is bad for plants

Seriously, CO2 has increased crop yields, and will continue to do so until we hit 1000ppm (or maybe 2000). Around the planet, plants grow in warm places, and shrivel up and die in cold ones. So do people. Cold kills 20 times as many people as heat does. It must take a lot of modeling to calculate “more deaths” from two good outcomes.

Of course, we have breathless freakouts from many in the media over this, such as Washington Post, Bloomberg, Phys.org, BusinessGreen,TIME, New Scientist, Carbon Brief, Reuters, Climate Home, Telegraph. Let’s not forget the Lancet’s insane statistical study claiming 650,00 Iraqi deaths at the hands of US forces, which was thoroughly debunked.

Read: ‘Climate Change’ To Cause Up To 500,000 Extra Deaths A Year By 2050 Or Something »