TWO STORIES POINT TO A NEW WAY OF THINKING

TWO INTERESTING STORIES RELATED TO GLOBAL WARMING
I happened on two interesting reports today. The first was that “2008 will be coolest year of the decade” http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/dec/05/climate-change-weather. Yes it did seem cooler this year. More snow, more cold weather even here in Florida, some normally hardy plants are freeze-browned. But one year does not a climate trend make!

The graph of global air temperatures (attributed to Climatic Assessment Inc.) was striking. It showed earth temperatures from 1850 to 2008. The departures from the global average (the zero point of the graph was set from the average temperatures of the years 1961-1990 which is 14C or 57.2F*) shows that the years between 1850 to the late 1880s as fluctuating somewhat but averaged about 0.4 C below the graph zero level. After that period, temperatures cooled reaching a low of nearly 0.6C below average in 1910. But from that cool point in 1910 the global temperatures have climbed steadily to the present time, with the exception of the decade between 1940-1950 when temperature actually fell nearly 0.2 degrees C. After leveling off at a somewhat lower level, from 2000 onward they resumed rising again at approximately the same rate as they had earlier.

Putting some personal history into these numbers, I could see that from the year of my father’s birth in 1909 to the present time, global temperatures have shown a near-steady rise (with the exception of the cooling 1940-50 decade noted above) to about 1 degree Celsius, or almost 2 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale warmer than the 1909 level. That is an average of nearly one degree change over one-hundred years, or 1/100th degree per year. That does not seem like much…one degree Celsius. But when you consider how much volume of matter we are speaking about, i.e. a layer of gases 100 km (or 62 miles) deep which surrounds the earth rising a whole degree! That is a great amount. The oceans and the atmosphere are very conservative; that is they change very little with normal additions or subtractions of heat. The volumes are so enormous…in effect the heat has so much matter to spread out into-- that generally we would expect to see change at all. It’s analogous to spilling a bottle of ink into a big swimming pool. Pour the ink in on one end and the water near-by may looks blue for a short time where it was spilled. But in a matter of minutes, the blue disappears. There is so much water relative to the ink that it would be near impossible to detect ink on the far side of the pool. The same explanation goes for heat absorbed into the atmosphere. So to raise the whole volume of air a whole degree must mean that enormous quantities of heat are being added each year.
This fact of the rising temperature during my father’s life tends to verify the accounts he and his brother’s often related to me, about how cold it was when they were kids. They told harrowing tales of mighty cold winters, rivers froze solid, water pipes bursting and persistent snow cover. They told tales of having to walk to school in chest high winter snow! I often attributed these remembrances to exaggeration…but ---considering these data above--they may have been true. Thus for all of my dad’s life and mine too, in a general way global temperatures have been rising steadily.

The second was from Yahoo News, See: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081205/ap_on_bi_ge/farm_scene_cow_tax_2 which had an interesting story on a “cow tax”. What is a cow tax? Answer: a proposal by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to impose a fee on cow and hog farms. Why? Because belching and flatulent cows and hogs cause air pollution which help to heat the atmosphere! That seemed hard to believe. How much gas could these critters produce?
Ron Sparks, Alabama’s Agricultural Commissioner seemed to agree: “This is one of the most ridiculous things the federal government has tried to do.” But Nick Butterfield of the EPA explained that the proposal would affect only those farms that emit more than 100 tons of carbon emissions per year. Butterfield indicated that level of pollution would trigger provisions of the Clean Air Act.

As an animal lover and former small farmer myself (I once cultivated a three acre farm in east-central LI) with pleasant memories of the earthy smells around a barn, it is difficult for me to believe that farm animals might be causing pollution. Our inner vision is that of the clear, cold water of grandpa’s farm-house well, slipping your hand under the warm breast of a Rhode Island Red hen for a real fresh egg, and taking a furtive sip from the warm foamy milk bucket on a cold spring morning…after milking Bessy, grandpa’s lovely old Guernsey cow. But in my experience sometimes it is our most cherished and most strongly held impressions that color our thoughts so well that we literally can’t see the forest for the trees.

That’s when I came across the NYT piece by Elizabeth Rosenthal, entitled “As more people eat meat, a bid to cut emssions. (See:.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/science/earth/04meat.html?_r=1&hp which tied the two together.) Rosenthal states: “The cows and pigs dotting the landscape in southern Netherlands create a bucolic landscape. But looked at through the lens of green house gas accounting, they are living smokestacks, spewing methane emissions into the air.”
Unlike power production, transportation and cement making all of which are facing tremendous scrutiny and political pressures for regulation, farming is just now beginning to come under scrutiny. “Every step of producing meat creates emissions,” says Rosenthal.

Even grandpa’s cow Bessy, who spent much of her life in a windswept upland pasture as she grazed she removed and consumed the long green grasses which were (conveniently for us), converting CO2 into oxygen. Thus her seemingly innocuous grazing reduced the capacity for that meadow to absorb CO2 from the air. To add insult to injury, Bessy’s digestive system converted a lot of the tough cellulose in the grass she ingested into waste gases such as methane and CO2 (both potent greenhouse gases ) and her natural tendency to flatulence, which no one hardly noticed, adds more CO2 and methane. Finally, the fecal wastes she so nonchalantly, deposited in our meadow (smothering and killing more grass) decayed in the warm sun and added further CO2 and methane.

When Bessy and critters like her are finally slaughtered (let’s assume they are killed humanely on the farm --or else we would have to add the carbon burden of their transport to a distant abattoir) the meat products will require immediate refrigeration (where a leaky tank could add noxious CCl4 and CF4 refrigerant as well as other additional green house gases to the burden in the air). Finally, more energy (with its resultant carbon burden on the atmosphere) must be used to run the refrigeration systems where meat is stored and aged, more for packaging and then add in the carbon burden for meat’s generally long transportation distances to get it to the us the consumers. Then at its final destination meat is prepared by cooking which causes further additions to the atmosphere. That is why for each pound of beef produced, twenty pounds of carbon are added to the atmosphere. Thus there is no “free lunch” in the economy of the earth. Every action has its consequences and on a densely populated earth each action is multiplied by a factor of nearly 7 billion (The earth population is estimated at nearly 6.7 billion in 2008).

Rosenthal’s report includes data that indicates that livestock generate about 18% of the worlds green house gas emissions. Furthermore, a more pressing problem is that that healthful cereals, and root and tuber consumption in developing countries is falling, while milk and meat consumption is growing world-wide by 60% and nearly 200% respectively. Meat production in the developed countries has nearly stabilized at about 140 million tons annually (See Livestock’s long shadow by UN Food and Agricultural Organization, 2006) while the amount produced in undeveloped countries (2006) has topped 150 million tons and is predicted to rise rapidly from that level in the coming decades.

An interesting graph which accompanies her report indicates (as stated above) that to produce one pound of beef 20 pounds of carbon dioxide is generated and accumulates in the atmosphere. While one pound of shrimp produces just 12 pounds of CO2, one pound of salmon six pounds of the gas, one pound pork generates five pounds, one pound of chicken nearly 2 pounds, one pound of milk only one pound of CO2, but one pound of cheese nearly 11 pounds of carbon dioxide! While grains, such as oats and wheat produce less carbon dioxide than their weight i.e.: one pound of oats produces only 0.7 pounds of carbon, wheat only 0.5 pounds and carrots only 0.2 pounds per pound of that by-product. On the other hand, greenhouse tomatoes produce nearly three pounds of carbon for each pound of product produced.

*Figure on global average See: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2008/pr20080103.html