Funny Events of the "Woke" world

[Phoenixmgs]

Its called Animal Husbandry, and as far as we can tell only us humans ever achieved it. Industrial production of animals, far beyond the numbers animals can achieve in the wild.
Take pigs for example. There are roughly 6 million wild pigs in the continental US: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/wild-hogs-swine-pigs-feral-us-disease-crops#:~:text=Today, around six million feral,thriving in nearly any environment.

However there are roughly 72 million farm pigs:

United States hog inventory down 2%

USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service Information. NASS publications cover a wide range of subjects, from traditional crops, such as corn and wheat, to specialties, such as mushrooms and flowers; from calves born to hogs slaughtered; from agricultural prices to land in farms. The agency...

www.nass.usda.gov

Now I may just be one of those egg-head liberals that reads and can do math, but I'm fairly sure 72 is higher number than 6. Almost as if the industrial production of an animal creates greater numbers of than animal than you would find in the wild.

As to the cowspiracy that cows contribute to global warming...yeah. Its real. 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emmisons comes from cow burps/farts:

Cow burps are a major contributor to climate change — can scientists change that?

Livestock production—primarily cows—produce 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The majority of that is in the form of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that is a natural byproduct of how some livestock process food. But as Christopher Booker reports, scientists are hoping that small...

www.pbs.org

Cows and Climate Change

Cattle are the No. 1 agricultural source of greenhouse gasses worldwide. One cow belches 220 pounds of methane yearly. Fortunately, UC Davis has solutions.

www.ucdavis.edu

Farmers, scientists seek solutions to global warming caused by cows

The world's one billion+ cows are responsible for about 40% of global methane emissions - a significant contributor to global warming. Some climate-smart farmers and scientists are tackling the problem from, ahem, both ends.

www.edf.org

But again, this is egg-head stuff by scientists and readers. Its not real world stuff, you know?

The issue is specifically ruminants, such as cattle. Most animals only produce a small ammount of methane in their intestines, which they fart out occasionally. Ruminants produce much, much larger quantities of methane in one of their stomachs, which they burp out continuously. Their shit also gives off a lot of methane as it decomposes.

Because of intensive farming, there are far, far more ruminants (especially cattle) in many areas than the ecosystem could naturally support. This also means they can't rely on grazing for food and need to be fed grain, which causes them to produce more methane.

There was an estimated 45 million buffalo in the US before Europeans came over. Also, there are 100,000 elephants today while there was an estimated 26 million 500 years ago. Guess what elephants emit? Methane. To act like there couldn't have been similar amounts of animals producing methane at dangerous levels hundreds/thousands/millions of years back is just not true. If animals emitting methane is so dangerous, we would've had an environmental collapse a long time ago.

Again, that is bad science used as propaganda. The 14.5% number is from GLOBAL numbers. In the US for example, beef accounts for 2% of all US GHG emissions. Also, what does it matter the percent? I'm guessing before human interventions, animals probably contributed like 90% (or something like that) to GHG emissions, thus we've come so far in curbing animal emissions if you wanna use that metric. The question is if it's too much and if it is, how big of a problem it is. Regardless of those answers, it's a rather tiny problem (if it is one) in comparison to other GHG emitting issues there are. We also literally need cattle to survive. Cattle are such an important food source because they can eat all the food we can't eat and turn it into food we can eat plus the eat all that food on land that we can't use to grow food on anyway.

 

[Absent]

Do you not understand what "BUT WITH" means? Do you actually believe Dunning-Kruger is a thing? You always cut out the most important thing.
If animals outputting methane is some massive issue, the earth would already have experienced environmental collapse long before we started burning fossil fuels. I'm guessing you watched Cowspiracy or something filled with very poor science.

Sigh.

We could go slowly with that (kurzgesagt is good at balanced vulgarization).


Or we could go with recent assesments.

More than 800m Amazon trees felled in six years to meet beef demand

Investigation involving Guardian shows systematic and vast forest loss linked to cattle farming in Brazil

www.theguardian.com

But it's pointless, isn't it. It's just a matter of sides, for you. Just like for gun violence, where you and your gang have decided that, by definition, any solution involving gun control would be (absolutely has to be) pointless, it's simply : You like beef, therefore beef is not an issue. Libs criticize beef overproduction, therefore beef is not an issue. From the conclusion up.

But no matter how baffling it is for the conservative mindset, there are people who like meat (who may even prefer meat over other food components), and YET, OMG, have the honesty to face the related issues. Some people accept that sometimes scientific realities don't go the most convenient way. Not everybody filter out realities based on personal comfort or profit.

But yeah, enough people do for this planet to be utterly fucked. And it's all the more pathetic to behold that those who do, those who profit from denial, those who have motives to cheat with reality, seek motives to attribute to others. Profit and short-term comfort is blatantly on the side of pollution and careless consumption, so reservations and scientific warnings must be driven by... hmmm... foreign-driven sabotage, self-loathing, anti-profit spite, agendas-for-the-sake-of-agendas...

Anyway, there are many forumers in here that are way more patient than me in front of collectively-cemented, self-serving, partisan bad faith. They probably believe that it can be overcome with data and arguments. That's not how it works. As long as there's something to gain in ignorance and denial, the subculture of navel-gazing will dismiss any global perspective. Yeah, go you. All is fine. Don't let the spoilsports rain on your parade(s). They are just meanies who detest freedom and happiness.

 

[Ag3ma]

There was an estimated 45 million buffalo in the US before Europeans came over. Also, there are 100,000 elephants today while there was an estimated 26 million 500 years ago. Guess what elephants emit? Methane. To act like there couldn't have been similar amounts of animals producing methane at dangerous levels hundreds/thousands/millions of years back is just not true. If animals emitting methane is so dangerous, we would've had an environmental collapse a long time ago.

Sure, so there were an estimated 45 million buffalo in North America. Extrapolating out, if the density of cows / buffalo / etc.were the same globally that would be about 250 million. Except of course there would be significantly fewer, because large tracts of the globe were not reasonably habitable by such creatures, or at least at nothing like the same density.

Now to put this into context, there are currently an estimated 1-1.5 billion cows in the world.

The reason that you are wrong to think a similar number of cows (or equivalent) existed in times past is that you have failed to consider modern agriculture, which allows vastly increased production of foodstuffs... for livestock as well as humans. In fact, it's estimated that over a third of all the crops grown by humankind are fed to livestock. Obviously, we grow calorie-intensive plants to a far greater degree than they ever existed in the wild. Secondly, part of agriculture is that we protect them from predation, sickness, etc. These factors mean that they exist in numbers vastly greater than they would have done in an era when our descendants were hunter-gatherers.

 

[Silvanus]

Do you not understand what "BUT WITH" means?

"But with" random numbers means "but without" self-evaluation.

Self evaluation was a core part of the original study.

So without it, the study was not replicated. With me? Saying it was "replicated but with random numbers" is like saying a triathlon was replicated but with trees. The substitution has made it literally impossible.

Do you actually believe Dunning-Kruger is a thing?

I think you are an extremely compelling example.

 

[Hades]

While I hate how the far right has a field day with it I will concede that the ''Cleopatra was secretly black despite coming from a Greek colonial dynasty that almost exclusively procreated by inbreeding'' is indeed a funny event of the woke world.

Its also a self defeating move when you do a series about African queens. Because if you almost immediately resort to depicting Greek colonialists as quintessential black African icons you give the impression you don't have enough African rulers to work with. And that's just not true. The Ethiopian queen who resisted Italian colonialism for instance sounds very fascinating.

 

[Absent]

While I hate how the far right has a field day with it I will concede that the ''Cleopatra was secretly black despite coming from a Greek colonial dynasty that almost exclusively procreated by inbreeding'' is indeed a funny event of the woke world.

But making it such a big deal after almost two thousand years of norwegian jesus is ridiculous.

 

[Hades]

But making it such a big deal after almost two thousand years of norwegian jesus is ridiculous.

True. Or closer to the subject: Cleopatra likely didn't look like Elizabeth Tyler either.

 

[Trunkage]

True. Or closer to the subject: Cleopatra likely didn't look like Elizabeth Tyler either.

I don't know if you know this but facts can only be wrong from one point of view. if they are conservative facts, they have been automatically been proven true by being tradition

 

[Thaluikhain]

Is Phoeniximgs contractually obliged to be totally wrong about everything all the time, or is it a hobby?

While I hate how the far right has a field day with it I will concede that the ''Cleopatra was secretly black despite coming from a Greek colonial dynasty that almost exclusively procreated by inbreeding'' is indeed a funny event of the woke world.

I think there is (some) question about the last Cleopatra's parentage, and that she might have had some local ancestry, maybe. But yeah, if you say she was Greek you are on much safer ground unless you happen to be in Macedon at the time.

 

[Casual Shinji]

But making it such a big deal after almost two thousand years of norwegian jesus is ridiculous.

Is Phoeniximgs contractually obliged to be totally wrong about everything all the time, or is it a hobby?

Maybe it's a Cranked situation, where he needs to keep his wrong meter up otherwise, like, a bomb collar will go off.

 

[Satinavian]

But no matter how baffling it is for the conservative mindset, there are people who like meat (who may even prefer meat over other food components), and YET, OMG, have the honesty to face the related issues. Some people accept that sometimes scientific realities don't go the most convenient way. Not everybody filter out realities based on personal comfort or profit.

Those people i like to remind that porc is better than beef for the climate and chicken is even better than that. Depending on source to a factor of 7. So there are a lot of possible compromises even for people who actually like meat.

 

[Trunkage]

Is Phoeniximgs contractually obliged to be totally wrong about everything all the time, or is it a hobby?

It's normal for a person to be sucked into one conspiracy to fall for a bunch of other conspiracies

 

[Terminal Blue]

There was an estimated 45 million buffalo in the US before Europeans came over. Also, there are 100,000 elephants today while there was an estimated 26 million 500 years ago. Guess what elephants emit? Methane.

Elephants have digestive systems similar to our own, where whatever they eat goes straight into their single stomach, gets digested, and then whatever is left moves into the intestine.

Cattle, again, are ruminants. They have multiple stomach compartments, two of which are used to ferment plant matter before digesting it. This is how they are able to digest grass, which most animals can't. Again, the problem is not animals farting, it is cattle specifically burping out the methane produced in their pre-digestion process.

45 million buffalo is certainly a lot, but it is still less than half the number of cattle in the US today. Those cattle are almost all factory farmed, meaning very few of them are eating grass. Instead they are primarily being fed grain, which produces a lot more methane. Industrial farming also means industrial quantities of shit, which becomes harder to dispose of. A lot of it ends up dumped in artificial lakes, where it continues to give off methane and can poison groundwater.

Ruminants have always produced methane. Many natural processes in the world produce significant quantities of methane. The problem is that human action is producing far more methane at a time when the climate is already warming due to CO2. We can't do very much about the warming from CO2 except wait a few centuries. Methane is far more immediate in its effects, and thus may make a significant difference to the ability to humans to adapt to climate change in the next few decades.

The 14.5% number is from GLOBAL numbers. In the US for example, beef accounts for 2% of all US GHG emissions.

According to the White House Office of domestic climate policy, Enteric Fermentation (the digestive process of ruminants) accounts for 27% of methane emissions in the US. Manure management accounts for another 10%. This makes the total methane emissions from livestock around the same as the total amount released by the fossil fuel industry.

Methane does make up a relatively small proportion of total greenhouse gas emissions in the US by volume, but again. It is vastly, vastly more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2, which makes up the vast majority of emissions by volume. Thus, its impact on the global temperature is proportionally very high (according to the international energy association, 30% of the rise in global temperatures since the industrial revolution is due to increased production of methane).

Again, I really cannot stress this enough. If fusion power was invented tomorrow and everyone completely stopped burning fossil fuels, the climate would continue to deteriorate. We are kind of locked in, at this point, when it comes to carbon. In terms of action we can take to minimize human deaths within the next few decades, cutting methane emissions would be far, far more productive.

 

[tstorm823]

Again, I really cannot stress this enough. If fusion power was invented tomorrow and everyone completely stopped burning fossil fuels, the climate would continue to deteriorate.

The last word in this sentence is entirely subjective. Change is not objectively bad.

 

[Absent]

The last word in this sentence is entirely subjective. Change is not objectively bad.

Fucking hell. This is a new low in climate denialism. After "it's not happening", "it's not man-made", "we can't do anything anyway", the last bastion is "it's all for the best" ?

If only these assholes were on their own planet. We really need to split humanity in two separate global ecosystems, and let the imbeciles destroy themselves in their own.

 

[Silvanus]

The last word in this sentence is entirely subjective. Change is not objectively bad.

"The organs of this dying man aren't 'deteriorating', that's entirely subjective! They're just changing (from a state where they can sustain his life to a state where they can't), and change isn't objectively bad!"

"The foundations of this house aren't deteriorating! They're just changing. Into a state where the house cannot stand and will fall into a sinkhole. But change isn't objectively bad, so you can't call it deterioration!"

 

[Absent]

The irony is that it could come with "it's not so bad, we can make room for the climate refugees fleeing their not so bad sunk cities and not so bad desertified countries". But nope, it comes from the "refugees? shoot, mine the landscape, build the walls, drown them away" crowd. Because of course.

 

[tstorm823]

Fucking hell. This is a new low in climate denialism. After "it's not happening", "it's not man-made", "we can't do anything anyway", the last bastion is "it's all for the best" ?

If only these assholes were on their own planet. We really need to split humanity in two separate global ecosystems, and let the imbeciles destroy themselves in their own.

If you look at things from the geological time scale humanity has existed in an ice age, in what has been seen as an interglacial period. And given consistent climate behavior, time would be taking humanity slowly but inevitably toward the return of the glaciers over most of where people live.

By pure accident, human technology seems to be ending the ice age and taking the earth back to a greener, livelier climate than has existed since before humans came into being. And beyond that, we are developing our technologies to eventually become active stewards of the global climate. This, to me, sounds nothing short of miraculous.

 

[Silvanus]

By pure accident, human technology seems to be ending the ice age and taking the earth back to a greener, livelier climate than has existed since before humans came into being.

This is absolute bullshit. The period of anthropogenic climate change has overseen a gigantic rise in species extinction as a direct result, and the devastation of entire ecosystems that would have otherwise survived. It is scientifically illiterate and delusional to suggest climate change is making the earth "greener and livelier". It is obliterating animal, plant, and fungal life on a monumental scale.

 

[Cicada 5]

This is absolutely categorical bullshit. The period of anthropogenic climate change has overseen a gigantic rise in species extinction as a direct result, and the devastation of entire ecosystems that would have otherwise survived. It is scientifically illiterate delusion to suggest climate change is making the earth "greener and livelier". It is obliterating animal, plant, and fungal life on a monumental scale.

To say nothing of what it's also doing to humans.