Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Ali Dark.
Carbon is an important greenhouse gas in terms of the long term effect on our climate.
But did you know that the warming we have seen to date, the change that fuels unprecedented, repeated extreme and destructive weather, is primarily the result of other greenhouse gases, like methane, black carbon, and nitrous oxide?
The tipping point is when we experience an irreversible shift to a new climate. If the tipping point is close, which many leaders in climate science warn it is (some will depressingly tell us we are far beyond that), we need to pay immediate attention to these short lived greenhouse gases (GHGs).
A focus on short-term gases that are active in the atmosphere today will buy us time. If we reverse the rise of short-term greenhouse gases, we can avoid reaching that impending tipping point, and we will have more time to structure carbon neutral energy systems.
Overwhelmingly, these short-term gases relate to one aspect of our lives, and one industry: meat eating and livestock raising.
State of the Climate and the Effect of Food
These foods are extremely destructive because of the large environmental inputs required plus the damaging effects of their outputs. It’s not just beef, it’s also pigs, chickens and fish. In goes land, forest, food and water, out comes methane, black carbon, nitrous oxide, polluted water, desertification, biodiversity loss, chronic disease and between 50 and 10% of the original nutrition.
What we are doing is filtering out energy and nutrition using living beings, and using 30% of the ice free land surface to do it. Animals take in far more energy and nutrition than can be recovered from their flesh.
The Short Term Trick
Animal foods are avoidable, so the problem can be eliminated within years, if we choose. This is far more realistic than eliminating emissions entirely from energy and transport.
We could mitigate climate change more significantly through reducing livestock emissions. They are greater than transport emissions even by conservative estimates, because they are mostly powerful short-term gases.
Short term gases are methane, black carbon, (soot) and nitrous oxide. As opposed to carbon dioxide, which warms the Earth slowly over a longer time, these GHGs heat intensively for their short-lived atmospheric lifespans. Each year the effect of non-C02, short-term GHGs is greater than the effect of C02 (it’s in the last link).
Reducing the sources of short lived GHGs will thus bring positive atmospheric effects within years. We need them to happen to avoid passing that tipping point and entering faster, dangerous, exponential, runaway global warming.
We also gain incredible long-term boons through afforestation and revegetation on land currently locked into grazing or feed-cropping for livestock.
Buy Time with Trees
If you’re in Lynn’s and my generation, you didn’t see the geographic changes that came with the population growth and increased per-capita meat consumption starting in the 50s, 60s and 70s. In Australia then, as in Brasil, indonesia and Argentina now, the best land for forests were also the richest lands for agriculture. Down came the trees leading not only to a ruptured climate system, but to extreme local weather.
Globally, livestock agriculture uses 70% of all agricultural land and 30% of the ice-free land-surface of the earth. Imagine handing that up to nature to do with what it does best – create balance. This is so much land we are talking about that we can buy decades or centuries in our effort to become sustainable by allowing it to revegetate (or actively foresting on it).
There will be work to do, but our chances of pulling through have just been greatly increased in ways that are hard to quantify.
Listen and Learn
To get the low down on this, I spoke with Gerry Bisshop from the World Preservation Foundation, a new organization that has already released a few telling reports into the topic. You can listen to the half hour conversation here.
Ali Dark is passionate about solving humane and environmental crisis. He invented Notzarella to ease both.
Resources
Reducing Shorter-Lived Climate Forcers Through Dietary Change
World Preservation Foundation
Livestock and Climate Change
World Watch Institute
Skillful Means: the Challenges of China’s Encounter with Factory Farming
Brigher Green
Crisis 2 Peace
A collection of talks Spiritual Leader, Humanitarian and Environmental Activist, Supreme Master Ching Hai
Deforestation, land-use change and REDD
FAO
Amazon Cattle Footprint
Greenpeace
Articles
- UN urges global move to meat and dairy-free diet, Guardian, 2010
- Into the Meat of the Issue, Sydney Morning Herlad, 2007
- Target ‘black carbon’ to tackle climate change, recommends UN, Guardian, 2011
Great post. It’s incredible how few people realize the impact cattle farming has on GHG emissions. And I’m sure you’d agree: it’s easier for most people to eat meat less often than to drive less often. So we need to spread the word!
Exactly the main point. No matter how silly restructuring out food habits sounds, it’s far more possible than other solutiOns, more effective, with no negative side effects unless you’re really emotional about your food addictions! Of course the more cOnservative you are the harder it will be
Ali, Thanks so much for researching this information. I didn’t know those other GHG’s were even more potent than CO2!
The truth of it is obfuscated by extremely inefficient GHG accounting that is officially adopted by the IPCC. They look at warming effects averaged over much longer timespans than most gasses are up there wreaking havoc. So it’s hard to have informed policy that will avert the short term catastrophe that is upon us.
Ali,
This is incredible. Thank you for educating us so simply and so clearly.
Thanks Sandra. You’re very welcome. There are so many topics I want to write about!
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