Climate False Alarms about Agriculture
Javier Vinós @JVinos_Climate Scientist. Molecular neurobiologist and climate researcher
Food and Climate
Danish Fart Tax No Laughing Matter
Paul Schwennesen explains the nefarious intent behind this latest government hostile takeover in his Daily Economy article. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Cow farts are a distraction, and the joke’s on us. The Danish tax is a
significant step toward state ownership of the means of production.
Denmark, according to The New York Times, is going ahead with its livestock “Burp Tax.” Though hotly contested, the Danish government has nevertheless finally settled on levying farmers 300 kroners (~$43) per ton for carbon dioxide emissions, ramping to $106 per ton by 2035. As is the case with many of these farm-targeted green interventions, the action is ludicrously ineffectual at addressing the trumped-up problem, while remarkably effective at further cementing state controls over economic production.
Part of the reason farms (and especially cows) are such fat targets for this kind of statist intervention is that, politically speaking, they are the perfect scapegoat. It all seems so harmless, after all — so silly even — that serious-minded folk risk looking ridiculous if they object. Is it really so very draconian, goes the argument, to ask farmers to reduce their cow flatulence? The ever-so-reasonable request (enforceable by law, to be sure) glides under the radar in a scree of giggle-inducing copy that distracts readers to what is really afoot.
The Times plays its part in this façade, relishing the chance to print “poop, farts, and burps” in the business section so that the regulation seems plucked from an impish children’s story rather than what it is: a deadly serious infringement on economic liberty.
Defenders of the scheme insist it is necessary to address the pressing issue of climate change. But even if we were to accept the lobby’s poorly understood climate science at face value, the claims would be dubious. Cows stand accused of emitting 5.6 metric tons in annual “CO2 equivalent” emissions. All this politically motivated tabulating and assessing completely ignores the other side of the ledger, the growing recognition that grazing livestock have a complex, largely offsetting (and quite probably net-positive) impact on overall carbon emissions. Nature, after all, doesn’t work in simple equations and we are woefully under-informed about the rich and inherently unmodelable world of stochastic ecology.
Give Daisy a Break.
The New York Times, by way of perspective, accounts for 16,979 metric tons of its own, meaning that it, as a single company, has the footprint of ten Danish dairies. What would readers of “All the News That’s Fit to Print” have to say about an annual tax of $730,000 a year, ramping to $1.8 million, being added to the newspaper stand price? Advocates of a free press might well ask why the government was using state power to make the newspaper of record less competitive.
But in any case, climate science and cow farts aren’t really the issue here.
The issue is essentially about control, and who gets to occupy the
commanding heights of a centrally managed economy.
“A tax on pollution has the aim to change behavior,” says Jeppe Bruss, the Danish “green transition” minister in an unguardedly candid moment. Government programs to change behavior are much easier to introduce slowly, and against somewhat laughable minority sectors like farming than against, say, the population at large. They do not seem eager, for instance, to levy additional burdens on average people’s heating and transport emissions, which combined dwarf the agricultural sector’s. The Times says that livestock emissions are “becoming” the largest share of Denmark’s share of climate pollution which is another way of saying that it isn’t the largest share.
If beef and milk production indeed posed such an existential climate risk, then why not simply tax the consumers of beef and milk who, after all, are the real source of the production signal? The answer, of course, is obvious: no politician wants to be pegged as the one who raised the price of butter for average Danish grandmothers. Politically, it is far easier to go after the farmers, knowing full well that any cost burdens on farm production will be passed along to consumers anyway — only then it will be the farmers’ fault, not the government’s.
It’s an old trick, a kind of regulatory-impact laundering scheme.
The success of the Danish strategy remains to be seen. If examples from the Netherlands and New Zealand are any indication, the plan may well backfire, with frustrated farmers taking to the street and even grabbing back the reins of power. It is a useful warning:
allowing government the power to surgically tax and thereby “change behavior”
of producers is the same as granting them economic planning privileges.
The Danish “Burp Tax” is a significant step toward the state ownership of the means of production, and as the history of centrally managed economies shows, it’s not likely to end well.
•
Climatists’ War on Meat updated
Tyler Durden reports at Zerohedge Meat Substitutes Still A Tiny Sliver Of US Meat Market. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Over the past few years, plant-based meat substitutes have come closer and closer to mimicking the real thing, with brands like Beyond Meat having even sussed out how to create fake meat that “bleeds”.
But, as Statista’s Anna Fleck details below, after an initial boom, the company has rapidly come down from its peaks.
There are several reasons for the hype having died down, one of which being that many consumers decided to move away from buying the often more expensive items amid the cost of living crisis.
Another reason cited is that plant-based meats have become a part of the U.S.’s culture war, labeled as a symbol of left-wing politics and a binary to “real” meat.
According to data from Statista’s Market Insights, plant-based meat substitutes accounted for a mere sliver of the U.S. meat market last year.
Not counting insect-based meat alternatives or cultured, i.e. lab-grown meat, meat substitute sales amounted to $1.4 billion in 2023, while sales of fresh and processed meat added up to almost $124 billion.
Outlook
- Revenue in the Meat market amounts to US$131.60bn in 2024. The market is expected to grow annually by 4.22% (CAGR 2024-2029).
- In global comparison, most revenue is generated in China (US$273bn in 2024).
- In relation to total population figures, per person revenues of US$385.00 are generated in 2024.
- In the Meat market, volume is expected to amount to 12.10bn kg by 2029. The Meat market is expected to show a volume growth of 1.9% in 2025.
- The average volume per person in the Meat market is expected to amount to 32.4kg in 2024.
What’s Next?
Background Post: Coming Soon: Menu Climate Warnings
Baylen Linnekin writes at Reason Public Health Researchers Float Idea of Climate-Change Warnings on Menu Items. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Warning diners that red meat is bad for the environment is yet another attempt
to socially engineer food choices.
A study released last week suggests that fast-food menus that feature labels urging diners not to order red meat off those same menus due to the “climate impact” of those food items can help convince customers to swap out red meat for what the researchers argue are more climate-friendly foods—from fruits and vegetables to poultry and seafood. The study, published in Jama Network Open and led by researchers from Johns Hopkins University, concludes that “climate impact menu labels may be an effective strategy to promote more sustainable restaurant food choices and that labels highlighting high-climate impact items may be most effective.”
The study’s data comes from more than 5,000 Americans who took part in a nationwide online survey last year. Study participants were instructed to “imagine they were in a restaurant and about to order dinner” from an accurately priced sample menu containing a variety of choices, including hamburgers, chicken sandwiches, plant-based burgers, and salads.
The study asked participants to “order” different foods after viewing one of three types of sample menus online. Outside of a control group, the study presented web users with choices that either disparaged the sustainability of red-meat dishes or touted the sustainability of dishes not containing red meat. Based on the results, which showed people who were more likely to avoid red meat if it had a red warning label and more likely to order other menu items if they featured a green health halo, the authors conclude that “climate impact menu labels [a]re effective” and “that labeling red meat items with negatively framed, red high-climate impact labels was more effective at increasing sustainable selections than labeling non-red meat items with positively framed, green low-climate impact labels.”
The study has spurred some news outlets to suggest governments around the world
may—or should—operationalize its findings.
“Policymakers have been debating how to get people to make less carbon-heavy food choices,” the Guardian recounted in a recent report on the study, “In April, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report urged world leaders, especially those in developed countries, to support a transition to sustainable, healthy, low-emissions diets.”
“Unfortunately, consumers have been resistant to change and many wish to continue eating meat,” a Phys.org report on the study laments.
Worse still, though the study itself does not suggest that it should be used to form the basis of any government policies, its lead author, Prof. Julia Wolfson of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told CNN last week that “legislation or regulation may be necessary” to force restaurants to add climate warnings to their menus.
Let’s pump the brakes—for a couple of reasons.
Data from the study itself and, more generally, on the effectiveness of government-mandated menu labeling suggests the authors may wish to dial down their perception of the effectiveness of the labels they tested. For example, after completing their respective orders, the survey asked participants if they “notice[d] any labels” on the menu. As the study data reveal, only around 4 out of every 10 participants even noticed any climate-related labeling. While that’s a low percentage, in the real world—in an actual fast-food restaurant setting rather than in an online survey—the percentage would likely be far lower. That’s because, as I’ve explained time and again, study after study has shown that few people pay attention to mandated menu labels (except to choose which food or foods to order), and even fewer use that information.
The premise of the study itself also may rest on shaky ground.
Some critics have pushed back against the notion that some chicken or seafood is more sustainable than all red meat. As the Guardian report on the study notes, “intensively produced chicken has been found to be damaging for the environment, as has some farmed and trawled fish.” Others disagree with the very notion that red meat is an inherently unsustainable food. While it’s become popular in recent years to argue that eating less red meat is better for the environment, that argument has received a good amount of pushback, with critics charging that swapping out meat for plants could be inefficient and ineffective, harm human health, and have unintended consequences for the developing world.
Even if I were to accept arguments that eating less meat is better for the environment, the choice to eat meat (or not) ultimately is and should be an individual’s to make. So it’s not “unfortunate” that consumers “wish to continue eating meat,” as Phys.org posits. And that wish isn’t a cry for government intervention, as Wolfson, the study’s lead author, argues. Rather, it’s a cry for freedom of choice.
If some restaurants competing in the marketplace care to attempt to skew their customers’ choices away from meat and towards vegetarian and/or vegan foods, by all means, they should do so. But the jury is out on whether that would improve the sustainability of those restaurants. What’s more, any restaurant that wants to make such a change should do so on its own accord, without the government’s prompting, backing, or mandate.
Apocalypse Not
Joakim Book shines considerable light into modern doomsday darkness, writing his AIER article Unlimited Growth, Forever. Book exposes how fundamental human positive aspiration, proven by historical progress and innovation, has been perverted by those nowadays claiming to be progressive, when all they preach is hell and damnation. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
It is often said that only a madman — or economist — could believe that we can have infinite growth on a finite planet. Resources are scarce and dwindling, we’re told. Day in and day out, we seem poised to use up some civilization-critical ingredient, or we might overuse materials to the point of our own downfall.
The mindset that makes people believe that we’re perennially on the cusp of some disaster is on display everywhere from the big screen to the big assembly halls. It has been humanity’s plague since we first broke free of the Malthusian constraints that govern every non-human ecology. And never once do we seem to consider that maybe, just maybe, the madmen/economists know something the rest of us don’t.
We’re routinely given hyperbolic predictions about our doom, and no matter whether those predictions come true, they’re renewed in the same or slightly altered form a few years later. In the meantime, individuals, businesses, workers, investors, tinkerers, and all the others that make up the world economy solve much of the “problem.”
Every popular scare of the past has been side-stepped, improved,
or solved, by one or another human effort, usually serendipitously
and rarely at all with well-meaning bureaucrats directing the process.
New York University economist Paul Romer, whose work on economic growth rewarded him the Nobel Prize in 2018, explains that “non-economists have said that [his article] helped them understand why unlimited growth is possible in a world with finite resources.” He credits that conclusion to his work on the proliferation of ideas, which he condenses into the following two statements:
-
- “we can share discoveries with others,” and
- “there are incomprehensibly many discoveries yet to be found.”
The basic rationale is thus simple: “Although we live in a world of a limited number of atoms,” as Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley say in their masterful creation Superabundance, “there are virtually infinite ways to arrange those atoms. The possibilities for creating new value are thus immense.”
Economic growth itself, said University of Mississippi economist Josh Hendrickson in an interchange with The Guardian’s George Monbiot a few years ago, is about “finding more efficient uses of resources.” It’s about observing how market prices and the profit motive urge entrepreneurs and businesses to economize on production while producing more value for consumers. We can visibly see this in the products that technology has merged into one (smartphones displacing a dozen or more physical appliances), or the thinner cans or more efficient engines that innovation routinely delivers.
Economists aren’t just playing word games when they say that growth can keep going forever. We can always make more stuff since the physical atoms under our command right now are far from all the physical atoms on our planet (or solar system). By growth, economists mean value-creation exchanged in the marketplace, a market that can change in the types of value we exchange, and the growing portion of our economies can involve fewer atoms than what came before.
“Resource” which the general public think of as physical collections of elements in the ground, economists define much more broadly. Nothing becomes a resource until the human mind makes it so, i.e., “there are no resources until we find them, identify their possible uses, and develop ways to obtain and process them” to quote Julian Simon, whose pioneering work in resource economics prompted Tupy and Pooley to launch their Superabundance project.
The boundaries between dirt, mineral resource, and mineral reserve can therefore shift with technology, economic circumstances, or legal rules regarding their extraction — subject to the “degree of geological certainty” and “feasibility of economic recovery.”
My Mind is Made Up, Don’t Confuse Me with the Facts. H/T Bjorn Lomborg, WUWT
What’s even more incredible is that material abundance (how economically accessible certain minerals or agricultural products are) has historically speaking increased with population. Instead of individually starving when there are more humans on our supposedly finite planet, we seem to be collectively producing more, having better access to raw materials and the goods and services we produce with them.
Take almost any foodstuff, meat or cereal, fruit or vegetable, for almost any country over any period and the numbers go up and to the right: For eight centuries (probably more), an English laborer has been able to afford more and more foodstuffs for their labor; yet there’s more food production today than at any point in the past.
The counterintuitive conclusion follows naturally from Romer’s work: More humans give us more chances for ideas that exponentially “make material progress possible.” Human society is dynamic, not zero-sum.
Illustration: oil. Thirteen years ago, Camilla Ruz for The Guardian enumerated six natural resource scares to pay attention to, of which oil was one. Dire predictions like these are a dime a dozen in the environmentalist world, and no matter how publicly or unequivocally they are disconfirmed by reality, they pop up with renewed vigor a few years later. At the time we had some 46 years’ worth of oil reserves left; that is, at the prices, consumption rate, and technology of 2011, humanity would run out of oil by the late 2050s.
With a billion more people on the planet since then, having suitably burned some 386 billion barrels of oil in the intervening years, we now have… drumroll…48 years’ usage in global proven reserves; Humanity will now last until the 2070s before its (supposedly limited) reserves of oil run dry. Disaster avoided.
The price system, profit-hungry entrepreneurs, and optimizing consumers are pretty good at remedying scarcities when they emerge. If there isn’t enough oil, gas, wheat, gold, nickel, or copper for current human processes, the (real) price of those commodities rise; extracting businesses dig deeper or explore further, and consumers substitute away from the expensive commodity, or we recycle the metals that forever remain with us into something new. Higher prices mean that lower-quality ores are now worth mining, more inaccessible sources and geologists’ best guesses for where we could find more worth exploring. The outcome over decades and centuries is that “prices of resources are declining because more people means more ideas, new inventions and innovations,” according to Tupy and Pooley.
That we do not run out is the powerful lesson of both the history of resources and the theory behind their economic uses: Our minds and the black box of nifty ways to improve the world aren’t limited. We don’t run out; We simply find more.
The recurring “we’re running out of X!” outrage therefore seems so peculiar, so out of touch with even a semblance of reality. 194 years ago, before having seen but a tiny fraction of the improvements humanity would make over the following decades and centuries, British historian and poet Thomas Babington (raised to the peerage as Lord Macaulay) wrote
though in every age everybody knows that up to his own time progressive improvement has been taking place, nobody seems to reckon on any improvement during the next generation. We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point […] but so said all who came before us, and with just as much apparent reason.
He then ended his colloquy with the sentence that human progress-types know by heart:
“On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?”
That was a reasonable enough question in 1830,
and a terribly relevant one in 2024.
Green Ideologues Vs. Farmers (and All of Us)
Ben Pile explains the climatists’ war on farming at Daily Sceptic Farmers’ Biggest Problems are Green Ideologues, not Climate Change. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
The recent autumn and winter months have seen Britain beset by more than the usual number of storms, and more than average amount of rainfall. For most of us, this has been merely unpleasant weather, but it has seemingly caused rivers to breach their banks and put much farmland under water. This is a real problem in its own right. Predictably, now the waters are receding, adherents of green ideology are turning the farming drama into the climate crisis, with talk of “failed harvests” and predictions of our imminent hunger. But where is the evidence?
The Guardian, as we would expect, has been leading the alarmist chorus. “The U.K. faces food shortages and price rises as extreme weather linked to climate breakdown causes low yields on farms locally and abroad,” it proclaimed, adding that “scientists have said this is just the beginning of shocks to the food supply chain caused by climate breakdown”. “I wish people understood the urgent climate threat to our near-term food security,” mourned Associate Professor of Environmental Change at Leiden University in the Netherlands to the newspaper.
Citing his experiences as a carrot farmer, Extinction Rebellion (XR) co-founder Roger Hallam declared on X that, “I know what is going to happen – not because of these particularly bad years, but because of the speed at which things are getting worse now.” Only “urgent revolution” can save us. And this in a nutshell is what the entire green movement has long been warning us of – extreme weather that will force us into hunger, which will drive us into political extremism and social breakdown and the end of civilisation. So are these floods a warning from Gaia that she made no covenant with us, unlike that other God, and that clouds stand ready to unleash her revenge on us for our SUV sins?
Are these greens latter-day Noahs, or just a ship of fools?
The problem for Hallam is that carrot production in the U.K. shows very little sign of sensitivity to climate change. Since the 1950s, carrot and turnip production has quadrupled. More significantly, yield per hectare – the indicator which is more sensitive to climate and weather – has more than tripled. If Britain was experiencing a climate-related carrot crisis, we would see this indicator plunge, rather than rise. Consequently, and contrary to fears about price rises, supermarkets are selling a kilo of British-grown carrots for 65p. ‘Wonky’ or ‘imperfect’ carrots are being sold at 45p/Kg. The struggle for carrot farmers may therefore be less high water than low prices for their products.
And the same story is revealed in UN data for nearly all British-grown vegetables. Inspection of the data reveals nothing resembling a pattern of climate change for the yield of wheat, oats, and cereals in general, onions, apples and pears, dry peas and other pulses, plums, potatoes and other roots and tubers, rapeseed, raspberries and strawberries, sugar beet and tomatoes. The only reductions in yield relate to the production of cauliflower and broccoli, and green peas. However, given that these data are significant outliers, we can for the moment assume that other reasons, perhaps economic or regulatory, better account for apparent declines in yield. Meanwhile, there is plenty of evidence in the U.K. and beyond that the era of global warming – or climate crisis – has been an era of bumper harvests.
Caution is required here. The point that sceptics rightly make to alarmists is that weather is not climate. It would be foolish to say that just because there exists no climate signal in agricultural production statistics, there is no evidence of weather affecting farming. There is.
In the 60 years of data about the production of potatoes in the U.K. there have been two unquestionable impacts of weather. The first occurred in the drought and heat years of 1975 and ’76. The second occurred in the washout year of 2012, though not, curiously, in the non-summer of 2008 and the ‘barbecue summer’ of 2009, which left the U.K. Met Office with egg on its face. However, the consequences of these disappointing years for society more broadly is very far from famine. Whereas potato famers produced 100kg of their crop per person in the U.K. in 2011, in 2012 this fell to 72Kg, the difference being made up by imports, mostly the following year. Chips and crisps may have cost slightly more, but nobody went hungry. And imports are perhaps the explanation for the gradual decline of overall production of the crop, too. Despite the ‘crisis’, potatoes are retailing for as little as 75p/kg in supermarkets.
It remains to be seen whether or not, and to what extent, recent weather events have affected agricultural production statistics. Nonetheless, farmers across the U.K. are reporting real problems. A mostly sober article in January’s Farmer’s Guide features the experiences of farmers from Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Essex and Lincolnshire following the deluge delivered by Storm Henk, leaving in some places the “highest flood level in more than 70 years”. Again, these are reports of serious problems that can ruin a farm. But the climate change narrative distracts from this necessary discussion. The article concludes with the words of Dr. Jonathan Clarke from the Institute for Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick, who claims that “there is an urgent need to consider how our society can become more resilient to the worst effects of a changing climate”. But weather conditions the same as we experienced 70 years ago are not evidence of an “urgent need” as much as they are a reminder of weather being a constant problem, and therefore of academics’ and scientists’ recent departure from both reality and historical fact.
So what has been the signal from weather? The Met Office’s data show that, for the country as a whole, March, February, December, October and September of last year brought significantly more than average rainfall. In a series of monthly data spanning 188 years, those months respectively were the 19th, 4th, 11th, 8th, and 63rd wettest of those months for England, and the 31st, 11th, 9th, 7th, and 32nd for the U.K. as a whole. Nasty for all of us, and especially difficult for famers. But does it even stand as evidence of “extreme weather”, as the Guardian claims, let alone man-made climate change-induced “extreme weather”, requiring “urgent” interventions to prevent it getting worse? Isn’t it just… you know… weather?
The worst of those months for the U.K. – the ninth wettest December – can be seen in its historical context. The Met Office provides a running average, which would seem to stand as an approximation of ‘climate change’. But despite that moving trendline, there were plenty of comparable Decembers in the mid to late 19th Century, and in the early and late 20th Century.
Moreover, the inter-annual variation of December rainfall spans nearly an entire order of magnitude, from 25mm to just under 225mm. The averaging of such noisy data does not and cannot reveal any underlying changing reality because it does not and cannot tell us anything useful – the trend is a phantom. Even if we were to follow on the Guardian’s and scientists’ injunction to eliminate emissions from fossil fuels, farmers would be no better protected from either drought or deluge. Moreover, if those trends were to be interpreted as probabilistic forecasts on which decisions are based, farmers would go bust in short order, because gambling on either more or less rain is guaranteed to produce a busted flush.
Farmers are not automata whose cyclic programming requires the same conditions each year. Farming is not a process with narrow operating thresholds that have been exceeded. Farming is an art, which requires careful judgement based on experience acquired by generations of farmers developing expertise in coping with hostile circumstances, including both different weather and market conditions.
The evidence clearly shows that continuous and increasing supplies of food are produced despite radical interannual monthly, seasonal and yearly shifts in weather, regardless of any semblance of trends in those variations. It has no doubt been a wet winter and spring. And this wetness may well have an effect on this year’s harvests.
But the notion that this has anything to do with climate change,
as per the framing of the Guardian‘s radical activists and equally
ideologically-driven scientists, puts ideology before reality.
Many farmers have taken to social media to show videos of their submerged farms. And this speaks to the absurdity of framing first-order problems like flooding as extremely abstract climate-related phenomena, for which there exist little if any evidence. The extant raw data, which span 188 years, tell us all that we need to know: some months there is very little rain, and these months may coincide; some months there is a great deal more rain, and likewise this can add up to create a backlog that needs to be drained. That is the full extent of the data that policymakers require to develop drought and flood mitigation strategies, and those parameters are completely unchanged by climate change, if any climate metrics can be squeezed out of the data at all.
In other words, we already know how dry it can be, and we already know how wet it can be. Therefore, we know what we need to do to ensure that there is sufficient water in drought and sufficient drainage in times of excess rainfall. We know, therefore, how badly politicians are already failing at their job. Their preferences for saving us with policies that ban cars and domestic gas boilers, tax flights and cover agricultural land with turbines and solar panels will not change these parameters. And by pushing up the prices of energy and feedstocks, it will likely create an agricultural crisis where none needs to exist.
Climate change is a massive distraction from our real and present problems.
Climate Weaponized for War on Meat
Robert Malone writes at Brownstone Institute ‘Science’ in Service of the Agenda. Excerpts in itallics with my bolds. H/T Tyler Durden
We all know what climate change is. The truth is that the UN, most globalists, and a wide range of world leaders” blame human activities for climate change. Whether or not climate change is real or that human activities are enhancing climate change is not important to this discussion. That is a subject for another day. [That subject is pursued here GHG Theory and the Tests It Fails.]
Most climate change scientists receive funding from the government. So they must comply with the government edict and policy position that human activity-caused climate change is an existential threat to both humankind and global ecosystems. When these “scientists” publish studies supporting the thesis that human activities cause climate change, they are more likely to receive more grant monies and therefore more publications and therefore are more likely to be academically promoted (or at least to survive in the dog-eat-dog world of modern academe).
Those who produce a counternarrative from the government-approved one soon find themselves without funding, tenure, without jobs, unable to publish and unable to procure additional grants and contracts. It is a dead-end career wise. The system has been rigged.
And by the way, this is nothing new. Back in the day, during the war on drugs, if a researcher who had funding by the NIH’s NIDA (National Institute of Drug Addiction) published an article or wrote an annual NIH grant report showing benefits to using recreational drugs, that would be a career-ending move, as funding would not be renewed and new funding would never materialize. . . The administrative state at NIH does that! And anything that went against the war on drugs was considered a war on the government. Funding denied.
The new wrinkle in what has now happened with corrupted climate change activism/ propaganda/ ”science” is that the manipulation of research is crossing disciplines. No longer satisfied with oppressing climate change scientists, climate change narrative enforcers have moved into the nutritional sciences. This trend of crossing disciplines portends death for the overall independence of any scientific endeavors. A creeping corruption into adjacent disciplines. Because climate change activists, world leaders, research institutions, universities, and governments are distorting another branch of science outside of climate science. They are using the bio-sciences, specifically nutrition science, to support the climate change agenda. It is another whole-of-government response to the crisis, just like with Covid-19.
They are distorting health research to make the case that eating meat is
dangerous to humans. Normal standards for publication have been set aside.
The propaganda is thick and easily spotted.
As the NIH is now funding researchers to find associations between climate change and health, it is pretty clear that those whose research is set up to find such associations will be funded. Hence, once again, the system is rigged to support the climate change narrative.
Some Recent “Peer Reviewed” Academic Publications on Climate Change and Diet:
Enter climate change regulations, laws, and goals – such as those found in UN Agenda 2030. Enter globalists determined to buy up farmland to control prices, agriculture, and eating trends. Enter politics into our food supplies and even the science of nutrition What a mess.
Below are some of the more outlandish claims being made in the name of climate science and nutrition. The United Nations’s World Food Program writes:
The climate crisis is one of the leading causes of the steep rise in global hunger. Climate shocks destroy lives, crops and livelihoods, and undermine people’s ability to feed themselves. Hunger will spiral out of control if the world fails to take immediate climate action.
Note that “Climate shocks” have always existed and will always exist. The existence of readily observed (and easily propagandized) human tragedies associated with hurricanes, fires, and droughts are embedded throughout the entire archaeological record of human existence. This is nothing new in either written human history or prehistory. This does not equate to a pressing existential human crisis.
In fact, reviewing the evidence of calories and protein available reveals a very different trend. Over time, per capita caloric and protein supplies have increased almost across the board. Despite clear and compelling evidence that climate change is not impacting on food availability or undernutrition, websites, news stories, and research literature all make tenuous assertions about how the climate change “crisis” is causing starvation.
This is not to say that that the poorest nations in the world don’t have issues with famine; they do. It is an issue, but not a climate change issue. It is a gross distortion of available data and any objective scientific analysis of those data to assert otherwise.
The best way to stop famine is to ensure that countries have adequate energy
and resources to grow their own food supply, and have a domestic
manufacturing base. That means independent energy sources.
If the United Nations and the wealthy globalists at the WEF truly want to help nations with high poverty and famine rates and reduce our immigration pressure, they would help them secure stable energy sources. They would help them develop their natural gas and other hydrocarbon projects. Then they could truly feed themselves. They could attain independence.
Famine is not a climate change issue; it is an energy issue.
Apples and oranges. This is not “scientific.” Rather, it is yet more weaponized fear porn being used as a Trojan horse to advance hidden political and economic objectives and agendas of political movements, large corporations, and non-governmental organizations. Facts matter.
No, NATO Chief, Climates Don’t Start Wars, People do
In his American Thinker article Chris J. Krisinger reports on another distortion proclaimed at COP28 World Leaders’ Terror of Climate Change. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
[During his Air Force career, Colonel Krisinger served as military advisor to the assistant secretary of state for European affairs at the Department of State while working from the NATO Policy Office. He is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy and the Naval War College and was also a National Defense Fellow at Harvard University. ]
Playing to what amounted to a friendly home crowd at the Dubai U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP28), NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg went there to deliver a message touting a relationship between global security and climate change, while emphasizing the necessity of shifting military resources to combat global warming.
In his speech, set against a backdrop of the Ukraine war, he was adamant about the influence of climate change on international security with conflict actually undermining “our capability to combat climate change because resources that we should have used to combat climate change are spent on our protecting our security with our military forces.” He would even become apologetic about the Alliance’s reliance on fossil fuel–intensive military machinery, telling the audience, “If you look at big battle tanks and the big battleships and fighter jets, they are very advanced and great in many ways, but they’re not very environmentally friendly. They pollute a lot, so we need to get down the emissions.”
Stoltenberg’s address at COP28 comes not long after President Biden’s September declaration in Vietnam that “the only existential threat humanity faces even more frightening than a nuclear war is global warming.” Then, just two days after the October 7 attack on Israel, instead of talking about hostages and the U.S. response, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby went in front of TV cameras defending that statement: “the president believes wholeheartedly that climate change is an existential threat to all of human life on the planet.”
But do world events — present or past — justify such inordinate interest by political leaders in climate change shaping the global security environment who go so far as to deem it an “existential threat to humankind”? Does the still uncertain and arguable science of climate change cross a threshold to influence, even justify, Alliance or national decision-making to link defense and security policy, actions, and investments? World events reminds us it does not.
The current century’s major conflicts — Iraq, Afghanistan, Assad’s Syria, Ethiopia’s Tigray war, Yemen’s and South Sudan’s civil wars, and more recently Ukraine and Israel’s war against Hamas — have no compelling environmental or climatological links, just as all other international conflicts in the post-WWII era did not. ISIL, which once controlled large swaths of some of the planet’s most inhospitable desert areas in Syria and Iraq, professed no regard for “climate change” in its worldview, nor has Hamas or Hezbollah today, both of which also inhabit arid, hot desert lands.
Arguably, no conflict in human history, modern or otherwise, has a causal
(or effectual) relationship with climate change, despite the planet
undergoing periods of both warming and cooling.
Today’s foremost security threats — e.g., great power competition, cyber-attacks, piracy, weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, financial crises, dictatorships, nationalism, drug-trafficking, insurgencies, revolutions, Iran, North Korea, etc. — all continue to fester. None can be persuasively linked to climate change, even as a worsening effect. Further, climate change does not appear to drive the agendas or motives of global antagonists like Putin, Xi, Al-Shabaab, the Taliban, Kim, Khomeini, Assad, al-Qaeda, cartels, Hezb’allah, Hamas, the Houthis, Boko Haram, or others.
Instead, consider that environmental factors rarely incite
conflict within or between nations.
In fact, the opposite — international cooperation — is the more likely outcome in concert with the human race’s innate ability to adapt to its environment. The climate-security link Stoltenberg wants us to accept can be greatly overstated and instead aimed to serve political agendas and economics more than addressing real security threats. What climate advocates further ignore or overlook is the slow, gradual process over years, decades, even centuries by which environmental phenomena occur, while ignoring empirical evidence of the pace, causes, and drivers of current events. Climate change is not the catalyst determining whether conflict occurs or its severity.
Of more practical importance is that, should a military response be required,
military forces must be prepared to operate and prevail in
whatever weather extremes are encountered at that moment.
Their equipment and resources must best perform their military function, regardless of environmental sensibilities. In one telling example, if U.S. or NATO forces had been required to operate in Russia in 2012 along similar routes as the Wehrmacht in 1941 and Napoleon in 1812, they would have encountered worse cold and weather than in either of those campaigns, so infamously ravaged by winter.
In fact, Russia endured its harshest winter in over 70 years and had not experienced such a long cold spell since 1938, with temperatures 10–15 degrees below seasonal norms nationwide. Like Russia, China’s 2012 winter temperatures were the lowest in almost three decades, cold enough to freeze coastal waters and trap hundreds of ships in ice. Even today, had the COP28 conference been held at a European location, Stoltenberg may have become snowbound while traveling, with more of the continent under snow cover in December’s first week than in any year for more than a decade.
A Lufthansa aircraft at the snow-covered Munich airport on Saturday, Dec. 2, 2023. Photograph: Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/AP
A NATO alliance currently facing epic regional challenges cannot lose focus on core security and defense priorities or its profound grasp of the true origins, causes, and motives for human conflict. Both military and political leaders cannot be distracted from true security threats — i.e., antagonists and competitors willfully and purposefully directing adversarial, often military, actions against a member nation with malicious intent — or not be prepared to operate and prevail in whatever weather or climatic conditions are encountered at that time.
With such clarity — absent the narrative, politics, uncertainty, and rhetoric of climate change — NATO, its member nations, and their leaders can then best direct its substantial enterprise towards those more numerous, serious, and pressing security threats facing the Alliance.
Background Food, Conflict and Climate
From data versus models department, a recent study contradicts claims linking human conflict to climate change by means of food shortages. From Dartmouth College March 1, 2018 comes Food Abundance and Violent Conflict in Africa. by Ore Koren. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2018; Synopsis is from Science Daily (here) with my bolds.
Food abundance driving conflict in Africa, not food scarcity
The study refutes the notion that climate change will increase the frequency of civil war in Africa as a result of food scarcity triggered by rising temperatures and drought. Most troops in Africa are unable to sustain themselves due to limited access to logistics and state support, and must live off locally sourced food. The findings reveal that the actors are often drawn to areas with abundant food resources, whereby, they aim to exert control over such resources.
To examine how the availability of food may have affected armed conflict in Africa, the study relies on PRIO-Grid data from over 10,600 grid cells in Africa from 1998 to 2008, new agricultural yields data from EarthStat and Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset, which documents incidents of political violence, including those with and without casualties. The data was used to estimate how annual local wheat and maize yields (two staple crops) at a local village/town level may have affected the frequency of conflict. To capture only the effects of agricultural productivity on conflict rather than the opposite, the analysis incorporates the role of droughts using the Standardized Precipitation Index, which aggregates monthly precipitation by cell year.
The study identifies four categories in which conflicts may arise over food resources in Africa, which reflect the interests and motivations of the respective group:
- State and military forces that do not receive regular support from the state are likely to gravitate towards areas, where food resources are abundant in order to feed themselves.
- Rebel groups and non-state actors opposing the government may be drawn to food rich areas, where they can exploit the resources for profit.
- Self-defense militias and civil defense forces representing agricultural communities in rural regions, may protect their communities against raiders and expand their control into other areas with arable land and food resources.
- Militias representing pastoralists communities live in mainly arid regions and are highly mobile, following their cattle or other livestock, rather than relying on crops. To replenish herds or obtain food crops, they may raid other agriculturalist communities.
These actors may resort to violence to seek access to food, as the communities that they represent may not have enough food resources or the economic means to purchase livestock or drought-resistant seeds. Although droughts can lead to violence, such as in urban areas; this was found not to be the case for rural areas, where the majority of armed conflicts occurred where food crops were abundant.
Food scarcity can actually have a pacifying effect.“Examining food availability and the competition over such resources, especially where food is abundant, is essential to understanding the frequency of civil war in Africa,” says Ore Koren, a U.S. foreign policy and international security fellow at Dartmouth College and Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Minnesota. “Understanding how climate change will affect food productivity and access is vital; yet, predictions of how drought may affect conflict may be overstated in Africa and do not get to the root of the problem. Instead, we should focus on reducing inequality and improving local infrastructure, alongside traditional conflict resolution and peace building initiatives,” explains Koren.
Summary:
In Africa, food abundance may be driving violent conflict rather than food scarcity, according to a new study. The study refutes the notion that climate change will increase the frequency of civil war in Africa as a result of food scarcity triggered by rising temperatures and drought.
Reading the study itself shows considerable rigor in sorting out dependent and independent variables. It is certain that armed conflicts destroy food resources, while it is claimed that food shortages from climate events like drought cause the conflicts in the first place. From Koren:
Moreover, in addition to illustrating the validity of this mechanism by the process of elimination—that is, by empirically accounting for a variety of alternative mechanisms— figure 2 further highlights the interactions between economic inequality, food resources, and conflict. Here, nonparametric regression plots—which do not enforce a modeling structure on the data and hence provide a more flexible method of visualizing relationships between different factors—show the correlations of local yields and conflict with respect to economic development as approximated using nighttime light levels. As shown, conflict occurs more frequently in cells with more crop productivity, but relatively low levels of economic development, where—based on anecdotal evidence at least—limitations on food access are more likely (Roncoli, Ingram, and Kirshen 2001).
In Addition
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2017/07/14/updated-climates-dont-start-wars-people-do/
Lab Meat: A Pharma Product with Huge Carbon Footprint
Tyler Durden reports at zerohedge Lab-Grown Meat Gets Green Light On US Menus. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
The World Economic Forum’s dietary blueprint for the masses is becoming a reality as lab-grown meat, bugs, and plant-based foods are quickly being adopted under the guise of solving ‘climate change.’ The latest move by elites and governments to reset the global food supply chain is US regulators approving the sale of meat cultivated from Chicken cells. This makes the US the second country worldwide, besides Singapore, to approve the sale of lab-grown fake meat.
The Agriculture Department approved Upside Foods and Good Meat to begin selling “cell-cultivated” or “cultured” chicken meat from labs in supermarkets and restaurants.
“Today’s watershed moment for the burgeoning cultivated meat, poultry and seafood sector, and for the global food industry,” Good Meat said in a statement.
Researchers conducted a life-cycle assessment of the energy needed and greenhouse gases emitted in all stages of production and compared that with beef. One of the current challenges with lab-grown meat is the use of highly refined or purified growth media, the ingredients needed to help animal cells multiply. Currently, this method is similar to the biotechnology used to make pharmaceuticals. This sets up a critical question for cultured meat production: Is it a pharmaceutical product or a food product? -UC Davis
“If companies are having to purify growth media to pharmaceutical levels, it uses more resources, which then increases global warming potential,” according to lead author and doctoral graduate Derrick Risner, of the US Davis Department of Food Science and Technology. “If this product continues to be produced using the “pharma” approach, it’s going to be worse for the environment and more expensive than conventional beef production.”
Cultured Beef Burger grown from stem cells of cattle made by Professor Mark Post of Netherland’s Maastricht University.
The scientists considered the ‘global warming potential’ to be the carbon dioxide equivalents emitted for each kilogram of meat produced – and found that the global warming potential (GWP) of lab-based meat using these purified media is up to 25 times greater than the average for retail beef.
The study is Environmental impacts of cultured meat: A cradle-to-gate life cycle assessment Derrick Risner et al. (UC Davis) 2023. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Abstract
Interest in animal cell-based meat (ACBM) or cultured meat as a viable environmentally conscious replacement for livestock production has been increasing, however a life cycle assessment for the current production methods of ACBM has not been conducted.
Currently, ACBM products are being produced at a small scale and at an economic loss, however ACBM companies are intending to industrialize and scale-up production. This study assesses the potential environmental impact of near term ACBM production.
Updated findings from recent technoeconomic assessments (TEAs) of ACBM and a life cycle assessment of Essential 8™ were utilized to perform a life cycle assessment of near-term ACBM production. A scenario analysis was conducted utilizing the metabolic requirements examined in the TEAs of ACBM and a purification factor from the Essential 8™ life cycle assessment was utilized to account for growth medium component processing.
The results indicate that the environmental impact of near-term ACBM production
is likely to be orders of magnitude higher than median beef production
if a highly refined growth medium is utilized for ACBM production.
Figure 1 is a process flow diagram of a fed-batch ACBM production system with associated energy requirements.
Lifecycle Impact assessment (LCIA)
After all the inputs were identified and consolidated, a life cycle impact assessment was completed utilizing data and methods from the E8 LCA, OpenLCA v.1.10 software and OpenLCA LCIA v2.1.2 methods software. The tool for reduction and assessment of chemicals and other environmental impacts (TRACI) 2.1 was the LCIA methods utilized in the OpenLCA LCIA software, and these results were combined with the facility power data to determine the potential environmental impact of the production of 1 kg ACBM (wet basis).
Scenario analysis
All scenarios utilize a fed-batch system as described in the Humbird (2021) TEA. Energy estimates from the Humbird TEA are utilized in all scenarios. Growth medium components were assumed to be delivered to the animal cells as needed and the build-up of growth inhibiting metabolites such as lactate or ammonia are not accounted for unless specifically stated in the scenario. The growth medium substrates are also assumed to be supplied via fed batch to achieve the highest possible specific growth rate in the production bioreactor. The three minimum/base scenarios were defined utilizing data from the Risner et al. and Humbird TEAs then a purification factor was applied based on the results from a LCA which examined the environmental impact of fine chemical and pharmaceutical production (Wernet et al., 2010).
Each of the three base scenarios were examined independently and then
with the purification factor applied for a total of six scenarios in the assessment.
Results
The LCIA was conducted on both the base scenarios and scenarios with purified growth medium components. The GWP for all ACBM scenarios (19.2 to 1,508 kg of CO2e per kilogram of ACBM) was greater than the minimum reported GWP for retail beef (9.6 kg of CO2e per kg of FBFMO) (Poore & Nemecek, 2018). The GWP of all purified scenarios ranged from 246 to 1,508 kg of CO2e per kilogram of ACBM which is 4 to 25 times greater than the median GWP of retail beef (∼60 kg CO2e per kg of FFBMO). Without purification of the growth medium components, the GWP of the GCR scenario is approximately 25% greater than reported median of GWP of retail beef (Poore & Nemecek, 2018).
It should be noted that the system boundary of this LCA stops at the ACBM production facility gate and does not include product losses, cold storage, transportation, and other environmental impacts associated with the retail sale of beef. Inclusion of these post-production processes would increase the GWP of ACBM products.
Figure 3 illustrates the difference in the GWP of retail beef and cradle to upstream ACBM production gate.
Discussion
Our results indicate that ACBM is likely to be more resource intensive than most meat production systems according to this analysis. In this evaluation, our primary focus has been on the resource intensity of the growth mediums. We have largely focused on the quantity of growth medium components (e.g. glucose, amino acids, vitamins, growth factors, salts, and minerals) and attempted to account for purification requirement of those components for animal cell culture. We also acknowledge that our analysis may be viewed as minimum environmental impacts due to several factors including incomplete datasets, the exclusion of energy and materials required to scale the ACBM industry and exclusion of the energy and materials needed to scale industries which would support ACBM production.
Animal cell culture is inherently different than culturing bacteria or yeast cells due to their enhanced sensitivity to environmental factors, chemical and microbial contamination. This can be illustrated by the industrial shift to single use bioreactors for monoclonal antibody production to reduce costs associated with contamination (Jacquemart et al., 2016). Animal cell growth mediums have historically utilized fetal bovine serum (FBS) which contains a variety of hormones and growth factors (Jochems et al., 2002). Serum is blood with the cells, platelets and clotting factors removed. Processing of FBS to be utilized for animal cell culture is an 18-step process that is resource intensive due to the level of refinement required for animal cell culture.
Thus, the authors believe that commercial production of an ACBM product utilizing
FBS or any other animal product to be highly unlikely given this high level of refinement.
Conclusion
Critical assessment of the environmental impact of emerging technologies is a relatively new concept, but it is highly important when changes to societal-level production systems are being proposed (Bergerson et al., 2020). Agricultural and food production systems are central to feeding a growing global population and the development of technology which enhances food production is important for societal progress. Evaluation of these potentially disruptive technologies from a systems-level perspective is essential for those seeking to transform our food system. Ideally, systems-level evaluations of proposed novel food technologies will allow policymakers to make informed decisions on the allocation of government capital. Proponents of ACBM have hailed it as an environmental solution that addresses many of the environmental impacts associated with traditional meat production.
Upon examination of this highly engineered system, ACBM production appears
to be resource intensive when examined from the cradle to production gate
perspective for the scenarios and assumptions utilized in our analyses.
Our environmental assessment is grounded in the most detailed process systems available that represent current state-of-the-art in this emerging food technology sector. Our model generally contradicts previous studies by suggesting that the environmental impact of cultured meat is likely to be higher than conventional beef systems, as opposed to more environmentally friendly. This is an important conclusion given that investment dollars have specifically been allocated to this sector with the thesis that this product will be more environmentally friendly than beef.
In sum, understanding the minimum environmental impact of near term ACBM is highly important for governments and businesses seeking to allocate capital that can generate both economic and environmental benefits (Zimberoff, 2022). We acknowledge that our findings would likely be the minimum environmental impact due to the preliminary nature of our LCA. This LCA aims to be as transparent as possible to allow the interested parties to understand our logic and why we have developed these conclusions. We also hope that our LCA will provide evidence of the need for additional critical environmental examination of new food and agriculture technologies.
Bottom Line:
“Our findings suggest that cultured meat is not inherently better for the environment than conventional beef. It’s not a panacea,” said corresponding author Edward Spang, an associate professor in the Department of Food Science and Technology. “It’s possible we could reduce its environmental impact in the future, but it will require significant technical advancement to simultaneously increase the performance and decrease the cost of the cell culture media.”
Even the most efficient beef production systems reviewed in the study outperform
cultured meat across all scenarios (both food and pharma), suggesting that
investments to advance more climate-friendly beef production may yield
greater reductions in emissions more quickly than investments in cultured meat.
Climate Refugees Imagined Statistics
Any talk about climate (change, crisis, emergency, whatever) will include large numbers, scary enough to raise concern and support for the carbon crusade, Of course, the implements of mass delusion are math models running on computers. This is true of the ever-increasing range of climate sensitivity (how much warming from doubling atmospheric CO2), as well as the arbitrary choice of 1.5C warming as the tipping point into damnation. And as this post explains, there are plenty of bogus numbers regarding climate “refugees.”
Disha Shetty challenges one common claim in her Undark article: Do Women Really Make Up 80 Percent of All Climate Migrants? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
The figure is frequently cited by activists, policymakers, and the media,
but it is a dubious statistic of murky origin.
Although climate change affects all people, women often bear the brunt in places where the impacts of climate change are already being felt. Christiana Figueres CNN
It is an alarming and evocative statistic: An estimated 80 percent of climate migrants are women. The figure has been used by the United Nations in its official communication. It has been repeated in the media and by human rights groups. But it stands on shaky scientific ground — and most likely is wildly off the mark.
To begin with, the 80 percent figure fails the basic smell test. As someone who has reported on climate change and migration across India, it is clear to me that men are typically the first to move in the face of environmental pressures, often in search of seasonal income or jobs in cities. Women and children tend to be the last to go, if they leave at all.
Perhaps more importantly, there are currently no comprehensive datasets that can tell us how climate migrant populations break down along gender lines. In fact, experts say there isn’t even a consensus on the definition of who counts as a climate migrant. When people migrate, it is often due to a combination of factors. Environment, when it comes into play, is just one of them.
Where, then, does the 80 percent figure come from?
Lawrence Huang, an analyst at Washington, D.C.-based Migration Policy Institute, has fielded questions from the media on this number, and he says the earliest reference he can find to it is in a 2010 report by a nonprofit called Women’s Environmental Network. The report — which has been cited by the World Trade Organization, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and numerous other groups — states that “it has been estimated that women constitute up to 80% of global refugee and displaced populations.” It then infers, based in part on that figure, “that of the current 26 million climate refugees, up to 20 million are female.”
But the estimate seems to contain two big mistakes. First, it assumes that the gender breakdown of climate migrants mirrors that of populations displaced for other reasons, such as political unrest, economic collapse, and other disasters. In actuality, the demographics of a migrant group can depend on what’s driving their displacement. Studies suggest, for example, that refugees fleeing from armed conflict are especially likely to be women and children, with men often staying behind as combatants. By contrast, women made up the vast majority of people who remained in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, mainly because they didn’t have the means to flee.
That brings us to the report’s second big mistake. Its claim that women constitute up to 80 percent of refugee and displaced populations is attributed to a 2004 fact sheet on climate change and disaster mitigation, produced by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. That fact sheet doesn’t clearly specify a source, but its phrasing of the statistic bears resemblance to an often-repeated assertion, published in a 1999 report by the U.N.’s Inter-Agency Standing Committee, that “up to eighty percent of the internally displaced persons and refugees around the world are women and children.”
When people migrate, it is often due to a combination of factors.
Environment, when it comes into play, is just one of them.
Crucially, the 2004 fact sheet omitted “and children” from its phrasing of the statistic — as did the Women’s Environmental Network report that first applied the number in the context of climate change. It’s unclear whether the omission was intentional. (I was unable to reach the fact sheet’s author, Lorena Aguilar, despite multiple email attempts.) But what is clear, according to Huang, at least, is that the 80 percent figure “does not have a scientific basis” — especially not in the context of climate change.
“People just ran with the number,” Huang told me, noting that the statistic is used by some but not all U.N. organizations. On its website, UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency, says that “[w]omen and girls make up around 50 per cent of any refugee, internally displaced or stateless population,” a classification that includes people migrating for reasons other than climate. Likewise, data from the U.S. Census Bureau indicate that women represent around 51 percent of people displaced by natural disasters. And yet the 80 percent figure has gained traction in the media and among policymakers and activists.
The potential consequences of this misinformation are many. First, by steering attention and resources toward women climate migrants, it could distract from the needs of women who haven’t been displaced but are impacted by climate change nonetheless. These women are affected in small and big ways. They often must take over agricultural and head-of-household duties from men who have moved in search of work, which places increased demand on their time and labor. Understanding the needs of these women is critical to crafting an effective response to climate change, but their narratives are often missing from media coverage.
Global warming could create 150 million ‘climate refugees’ by 2050. The Guardian (2009)
Comment:
The author is not skeptical enough to dig into the underlying claim that as of 2010 there are 26 million “cimate refugees.”
From NewScientist
When diplomats and military strategists gathered for a meeting of the council in July 2011 they asked a simple question: how many refugees can we expect as regions and countries become uninhabitable due to climate change? A clear-cut answer could spur politicians to do something about this problem. If only one could be found.
The first stab at an answer came in 1995 when British academic Norman Myers calculated there were 25 million environmental refugees, mostly in drought-hit parts of Africa. He predicted that numbers would swell to 50 million by 2010 and 200 million by mid-century. However, he did warn that his figures were “a first-cut assessment… to ‘get a handle’, however preliminary and exploratory, on an emergent problem of exceptional significance”. That was either foolhardy or heroic, according to your point of view.
The scandal is that those old figures still turn up in IPCC reports, the UK’s Stern review of the economics of climate change, and statements from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). They do so because, as far as New Scientist can establish, nobody has attempted to improve on Myers’s “first cut” calculations.
Important Finding, Nature Communications (2021) Climatic conditions are weak predictors of asylum migration
Recent research suggests that climate variability and change significantly affect forced migration, within and across borders. Yet, migration is also informed by a range of non-climatic factors, and current assessments are impeded by a poor understanding of the relative importance of these determinants.
Here, we evaluate the eligibility of climatic conditions relative to economic, political, and contextual factors for predicting bilateral asylum migration to the European Union—a form of forced migration that has been causally linked to climate variability.
Results from a machine-learning prediction framework reveal that drought and temperature anomalies are weak predictors of asylum migration, challenging simplistic notions of climate-driven refugee flows. Instead, core contextual characteristics shape latent migration potential whereas political violence and repression are the most powerful predictors of time-varying migration flows.
Future asylum migration flows are likely to respond much more
to political changes in vulnerable societies than to climate change.
Note: This is consistent with previous studies claiming climate causing displacement in Africa. See
Waste Not, Want Not, Still True About Food
Jack Hubbard reports at Real Clear Markets Eat What You Want While Questioning ‘Food Sustainability’ Claims. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Earth Day started 50 years ago, and if you judge the event by society’s environmental conscientiousness, it’s been a success. Today, people are increasingly considering the environmental impact of products they buy. That’s true not just of cars and clothing, but also what we eat.
A survey last year found that 37% of consumers look for sustainability claims on food. Food marketers have taken note, increasing the number of food products with eco claims.
But buyers should beware: Not all food sustainability claims are true.
Where is the Beef?
Perhaps the single most common claim you’ll hear today about food is that meat is bad for the environment. Ads for plant-based fake meat commonly assert this. These claims are parroted by animal rights activists who–naturally–don’t like people eating meat. You can even find a few documentaries that try to paint meat as eco-unfriendly.
But is eating meat actually bad for the environment? No.
A frequently cited statistic is that 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions are from animal agriculture. But what you may not know is that this figure doesn’t apply to the US, where we have the most advanced modern agricultural technology in the world.
American agriculture has become economically and environmentally more efficient over time. For instance, we need 60% fewer cows yet produce twice as much milk as we did in the 1930s.
The EPA tracks greenhouse gas emissions and reports them by sector. According to the EPA, all of our agriculture only accounts for about 9% of total US greenhouse gas emissions, while animal agriculture accounts for only about 4%. That’s why researchers estimate that if the entire U.S. population went vegan tomorrow, it would only reduce greenhouse gas emissions by less than 3%. That also means, as an individual, giving up meat will have zero impact on curbing climate change.
Fake Meat Doesn’t Lower Emissions
It turns out that producing plant-based fake meats actually produces the same amount of emissions as producing chicken. And cell-cultured meat–that is, grown from cells in a lab setting–has five times the emissions of regular chicken.
Why? Because while making fake meat may use less land than raising chickens, it uses much more electricity to power all those factories that make fake meat.
“Organic” Feels Good
“Organic” is another term that many consumers look for, thinking organic food is better for the environment and their health. Once again, reality is different from perception.
A recent study of organic vs. modern agriculture on different factors such as land use, climate, over-fertilization, and energy use. Modern farming was superior on land use while organic farming was better on chemicals. Overall, the two compared equally on most factors.
(Most consumers also believe that organic food is more nutritious. But once again, scientific research has found there’s no real difference.)
Food Waste Is Important
The biggest environmental impact associated with food isn’t about the food we eat. It is actually about food we don’t eat.
The USDA estimates that up to one-third of food produced in the country is thrown away. Whether that’s meat or fake meat, or organic produce or non-organic produce, that food took resources to grow and fuel to transport. And all of those resources go to waste when you don’t finish your meal or throw out the leftovers.
What’s the lesson?
Eat what you want and ignore the marketing claims. In the big picture,
anyone’s diet has a small footprint. But whatever you choose to eat,
make sure you don’t let it go to waste.
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Science Matters 