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[My Name is Immaterial]

You are a terrible person. Absolutely terrible.

[Helgoland]

You arə a tərriblə pərson. Absolutəly tərriblə.

FTFY.

[martinuzz]

Today's cartoon in my newspaper, about the climate conference, made me giggle:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Helgoland]

'Krautgirl' would be a pretty awesome superheroine name.

[Sheb]

You have the second-worst taste for nicknames ever.

[Helgoland]

I'm just trying to plant it in your subconsciousness so eventually you'll start using it for real

[SirQuiamus]

I remember a carbon calculator some time ago which said that the biggest single action you could take to reduce carbon footprint would be... eating less beef and more chicken. Cows are terrible with emission.

There are at least two options here: Butcher all the cows, or alternatively, do this.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Neonivek]

Yes clearly the solution is to eat more cow! The US knew all along!

[Jopax]

I think the issue is more the whole production chain being incredibly large and not very efficent. Cow farts alone shouldn't account for that much damage honestly.

[Sheb]

I think the issue is more the whole production chain being incredibly large and not very efficent. Cow farts alone shouldn't account for that much damage honestly.

Why not?

[penguinofhonor]

I think a good amount of climate change complacency is "X thing couldn't do that much damage to the environment. Those scientists can't be right."

[Grim Portent]

I think the issue is more the whole production chain being incredibly large and not very efficent. Cow farts alone shouldn't account for that much damage honestly.

I'm afraid cow farts do amount for that much. Ruminant biology is very good at releasing methane and we keep a lot of cattle worldwide. Plants contain large amounts of carbon and hydrogen, so digesting them properly releases huge amounts of waste chemicals (from the cow's perspective) and methane is the most efficient form for them to release it in biologically speaking. It wouldn't be so bad if we didn't have millions of cattle, but beef is a very profitable industry and a staple of a lot of the world's diet.

I think the only animal that's supposed to cause a similar amount of methane release by weight is termites, and that's because they also consume plant matter and thoroughly digest it.

[martinuzz]

Indeed. There's not just millions of cows btw, there's over a billion cows, getting close to 1.5 billion.

And besides them excreting lots of methane, there's also the side effects on ecosystems of raising and feeding that much cattle: A large portion of the deforestation of the south-american jungles can be contributed to cows, either by cutting down rainforest to create open space to raise them on, or by cutting down rainforest to grow soy on, one of the main products used for cattle foods. This has already caused mass wash-out of nutrients by rain, from lands that used to be proteced from wash-out by humus layer and tangled root systems. The nutrients wash out into the ocean eventually, causing dramatic changes and extinction in the coastal ecosystems. Which also adds to CO2 output from decaying, dead ocean life.

We should all stop eating cows, and start eating termites! I hear they're quite tasty.

Pigs are slightly less bad for the environment. Not much. But it helps that pigs can be fed using waste products from agriculture for human consumption that otherwise would rot/be burned as biomass and produce CO2 anyways (and could theoretically solely be fed using that, if we cap our global pig herds to a correlated max).

[SirQuiamus]

I think a good amount of climate change complacency is "X thing couldn't do that much damage to the environment. Those scientists can't be right."

And when the "X couldn't do that much damage" principle is applied to a hundred thousand different instances of X, the result is our current apathetic status quo.

[redwallzyl]

everyone agreed on a first draft if you want to read it its like 40ish pages.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/12/05/458575455/nearly-200-nations-agree-on-climate-change-draft-plan-at-paris-summit