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 d-usa wrote:
This one?

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/11/more-organizations-speak-out-against-congressmans-noaa-investigation/

Edit:

In case some people just want to read one of the responses to this "investigation" so that they can be totally surprised about what kind of investigation this could possibly be:

http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/lamar_smith_sullivan_response_nov20.pdf

When my eyes glanced this stream of words I got excited and then disappointed quickly.

" Lamar Smith (R-Tex.). "

My eyes basically misread it as t-rex. God I wish I could have that as an official title .

 The Home Nuggeteer wrote:
No the money from government grants.

Mwahaha! Yeah. Good one. Look dude, seriously, this idea that it's easier to get government money for climate change research than it is to get oil and mining money is just bonkers. I know it gets passed around the anti-climate change world a lot, so you might have heard it often enough to think it's sensible, but holy hell come on.

OK buddy, lets start with some science, those records rely on the fact that the things they are measuring CO2. As a Chemical Engineering student I can assure you that as a liquid cools down, its ability to retain dissolved gases in it decreases. This means that as the sea cools the CO2 in the water decreases and as it warms up the concentration of CO2 increases.

This means as the earth's mean temperature fluctuates (climate is too vague and ill defined a term for this discussion) the CO2 dissolves into and out of the ocean, sort of like the earth is breathing.

You should maybe send some of your knowledge to NASA or IPCC. I'm sure they'd love to hear the insight of a chemical engineering student, and would rush to include your hard won knowledge in their models.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Yeah, no. Just no.

Methane isn't even on the radar for causing pollution. Cattle operations do cause a lot of pollution, but that's water runoff and not gaseous. That's one of those total bullgak crackpot theories(pun intended).

The impact from cows has been degraded somewhat in the last few years, but to claim emissions are not a pollutant at all is just completely wrong. Methane from cows is roughly on par with car emissions as a source of global warming.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Grey Templar wrote:
But the whole "cows are causing global warming" argument is all based on the actual methane the cows digestive system creates, which is actually a negligible amount. Its usually pushed by the same pathetic people who pass out those fliers telling people to stop eating meat because pigs and chickens are cute, and somehow meat consumption is the root of all evil, etc...

No. Just not even close. Methane from cows has been studied extensively by large research bodies including NASA and the EPA. The exact amount of emissions is debated (as it varies based on what cows are fed and other factors), but the general impact is known to be about as great a cars.

 sebster wrote:

 The Home Nuggeteer wrote:
No the money from government grants.

Mwahaha! Yeah. Good one. Look dude, seriously, this idea that it's easier to get government money for climate change research than it is to get oil and mining money is just bonkers. I know it gets passed around the anti-climate change world a lot, so you might have heard it often enough to think it's sensible, but holy hell come on.

Sebster, the US Government alone has spent over 4 billion in the last several years on researching climate change, and associated topics. Per the EPA's website, they grant close to 30 million a year on Climate Research.

That is big money.

 djones520 wrote:

Sebster, the US Government alone has spent over 4 billion in the last several years on researching climate change, and associated topics. Per the EPA's website, they grant close to 30 million a year on Climate Research.

That is big money.

No where near the billions that are spent on oil subsidies though.

 Silent Puffin? wrote:

 djones520 wrote:

Sebster, the US Government alone has spent over 4 billion in the last several years on researching climate change, and associated topics. Per the EPA's website, they grant close to 30 million a year on Climate Research.

That is big money.

No where near the billions that are spent on oil subsidies though.

Right, and with my background in meteorology, it's going to be a cake for me to go to the gov and apply for oil subsidy money.

That is a stupid argument. There is still billions of dollars being pumped into this "research". It's about the biggest influx of money our career field has ever seen, of course those who are benefiting from it want it to keep going.

In the last several years, NOAA's budget has increased from 4.5 billion to 5.5 billion. About a 22% increase. In the meantime, things like the DoD have seen budget cuts. So yeah, I say without a doubt in my mind that the massive budget increase they've seen has definitely been impacting some of the research.

Or... stated in another way...

Because of this large pot-o-money, AND the fact that the government funds almost 100% of the research into climate change... you cannot view any results of such research as completely unbiased.

When you're talking about this huge sums of money, it is important to recognize the institutional bias from the climate research community to view virtually all climate change as human-caused.

Once that is acknowledged, then it's really important for the research community to publish their raw data & methods to be independently verified. You know... really basic scientific method/validation gak.

So, instead of taking whichever side's as gospel... encourage the community to justify and prove their findings.

 djones520 wrote:

In the last several years, NOAA's budget has increased from 4.5 billion to 5.5 billion. About a 22% increase.

So why would the US government do this if they didn't think that it was valuable and useful?

 whembly wrote:

Because of this large pot-o-money, AND the fact that the government funds almost 100% of the research into climate change....

....in the US. Its not as if other countries and institutions don't conduct their own work in this field, which coincidentally seem to come up with the same findings.

 Silent Puffin? wrote:

 djones520 wrote:

In the last several years, NOAA's budget has increased from 4.5 billion to 5.5 billion. About a 22% increase.

So why would the US government do this if they didn't think that it was valuable and useful?

Politics.

 whembly wrote:

Because of this large pot-o-money, AND the fact that the government funds almost 100% of the research into climate change....

....in the US. Its not as if other countries and institutions don't conduct their own work in this field, which coincidentally seem to come up with the same findings.

Are there any privately funded climate change research in the UK?

 whembly wrote:

Are there any privately funded climate change research in the UK?

Are you under the impression that privately funded research is unbiased and government grants are driven towards a pre-determined conclusion? Because history generally disagrees with you.

 feeder wrote:

 whembly wrote:

Are there any privately funded climate change research in the UK?

Are you under the impression that privately funded research is unbiased and government grants are driven towards a pre-determined conclusion? Because history generally disagrees with you.

re-read my previous post.

To address the dubious claims about Methane it isn't so much that Methane emissions are as prolific as CO2 it's that Methane is just such a potent greenhouse gas. With Methane emissions a little pollution goes a long way.

I still have yet to see any reputable research showing methane related to cattle specifically to be even a minor contributor to global warming. All the sources I see are from kooks and whackjobs.

Methane is 20 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. It's still not as potent as Water Vapour, which is by far the most significant Greenhouse Gas, but it's very important.

Cattle are terrible for the environment in more ways than just their methane output though. The leading cause of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest is slash and burn agriculture focused on cattle ranching. It's a disaster.

There is a large body of evidence out there on cattle generated methane's impact on climate btw.

https://scholar.google.de/scholar?q=impact+of+methane+from+cattle+on+global+warming&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjd0PTX1rbLAhWC3iwKHb4wDDsQgQMIGjAA

Check out some of these studies. There's very little controversy about it.

I still find the claims to be dubious. Largely because Earth has had huge herds of herbivores for thousands and thousands of years. Our cattle operations aren't even close to overtaking the herds which were around during the last ice age all over the globe, and those would have made just as much methane as our cattle operations.

But I'll give them a read anyway.

Actually, you'd be suprised. There are about 1.4 billion cattle alive today. The amount of animals alive just to feed us all is astounding. For instance there are around 19 billion chickens. It's quite impressive. Now, I'm not sure about a direct comparison, but It'd be closer than you think.

You'd still need to show the methane production of cattle today overall is significantly higher than those herds were creating in the past, which would be pretty tough to prove.

Oh absolutely, but I was referring more to the total creature mass.

Ahh gotcha.

Either way, beef is a bit of a false flag. There are bigger fish to fry, and at this point climate change is inevitable so blaming X or Y is pretty pointless. We need to focus on adapting to the changing climate.

IMO Climate change is a natural process that has been accelerated in some amount by man's activities, how much is entirely unimportant. We'd have to deal with it eventually one way or the other, so we should stop wasting effort and money in assigning blame and focus on adaptation.

 sebster wrote:
The impact from cows has been degraded somewhat in the last few years, but to claim emissions are not a pollutant at all is just completely wrong. Methane from cows is roughly on par with car emissions as a source of global warming.

In fact, methane might be the real killer, it's a far more potent greenhouse gas (I think ~80 times more effective). There is some evidence that destabilization of methane deposits might have wreaked havoc with Earth's climate in the past, if runaway CO2 levels were to trigger runaway methane escapement, it would be like turbocharging the system.

 Grey Templar wrote:
I still find the claims to be dubious. Largely because Earth has had huge herds of herbivores for thousands and thousands of years. Our cattle operations aren't even close to overtaking the herds which were around during the last ice age all over the globe, and those would have made just as much methane as our cattle operations.

But I'll give them a read anyway.

There weren't humans pumping out billions of tons of CO2 at the time of the ice age, etc.

The really bad danger of methane is the amount of it currently locked up in melting permafrost. There is a good chance of a runaway warming effect.

 Co'tor Shas wrote:
Actually, you'd be suprised. There are about 1.4 billion cattle alive today. The amount of animals alive just to feed us all is astounding. For instance there are around 19 billion chickens. It's quite impressive. Now, I'm not sure about a direct comparison, but It'd be closer than you think.

There's about 1 billion cattle, and a little less than half that in [human owned] buffalo. The US directly controls roughly 90 million cattle, or slightly less than 10%. You could eliminate the entire US cattle herd, and Oceania+India+South America could make up that headcount deficit in about 15 years. Which is an illustration of why combating climate change through 'regulating' the US herd is futile.

But here are some uncomfortable truths about the global cattle herd, and cattle ownership:

Meat is very near to the first thing an impoverished (<$3k-$5k USD/year per cap GDP) population buys once they reach a certain income threshold (>$5k USD/year generally). The threshold moves depending on geography, and the protein can be fish, or chicken, or whatever, but in general once a person goes from 'nothing' to 'something' their first investment is in a meat-heavier diet. I've done lots of work in analyzing consumptive trends for differing decades and geographies and income levels and regardless of time slice, we see these nice S-curves develop where consumption goes from flat/zero to hit exponential increases up to about 60 lbs/person/year once income reaches roughly $20k USD/year, and then there's a linear flattening until we reach what looks like 'biological maximum' in the vicinity of 100 lbs/person/year.

The two fastest growing populations globally are Muslim and Hindu. Muslims have a variety of dietary restrictions, but no beef ingredient restriction; Muslim communities tend to go hand in hand with some sort of bovine herd. Hindus do not consume cattle flesh, but they do consume milk and milk byproducts, again requiring a base cattle herd.

One can shout 'cows are bad' all one wants, but it amounts to battling ALL of the major demographic trends. Long-term, the only way you prevent animal herd growth is to prevent wealth growth. These two things are inextricably related. You must control Muslim populations, or keep the rural poor, poor. (The 'most' sustainable thing that could be done from that standpoint is take the rural poor, round them up in ghettos, and let the commercial food production giants feed them off of least-cost calorie formulation. Wrap your head around that one for a moment.)

The second issue is that cow ownership, even here in the US, is badly fragmented. The mode herd size in the US is 30 head. The average herd size globally is 4 head. It is virtually impossible to regulate (much less enforce) cattle ownership due to this extreme fragmentation. The "cattle industrial complex" is only the feedlot level, which is just an intermediate stage in the total supply chain, and it's this step that contains and manages the animals and will have the least amount of environmental impact. This clustering of the herd actually lowers the barrier to implementing environmental-mitigating factors thanks to the economies of scale. This means that large commercial operations (run by Satan, if the enviro-types are to be believed) will have far less per-capita impact and perhaps even less gross impact on the environment and resource scarcity than the average 4-30 head owner that absolutely is not worried about fecal runoff or landscape impact.

So yeah, that's the laughable piece about the Cattle impact on global warming bit; IF cattle are a significant cause, "solutions" would be short-term at best, and only serve to fragment ownership at the most environmentally sustainable segment of the supply chain, putting more cattle in the hands of a 'dirtier' producer base that will be harder to regulate and enforce longer-term.

The cynical person would assume this would be obvious to anyone who even briefly looked into the details of the issue, and the continuation of this meme is to simply extract money from the commercial cattle supply chain.

sourclams: I do not actually disagree with much of what you are saying, but cattle are one of the bigger ecological challenges in the world right now.

We've exported them all over the world and basically terraformed large areas to turn them into cattle habitat, and nevermind the methane emissions, the sheer amount of land use for cattle farming, or the water use, are crazy.

It will take a change in attitudes and desires to get away from this, and as you correctly point out, demographics are trending the other way globally. I've personally cut down my beef consumption massively, but this makes little difference to the overall picture.

It's a webcomic, but it's still illustrative:
https://xkcd.com/1338/

Grey Templar: Perhaps you are right, but there is little certainty in anything to do with climate science. The system is too chaotic and interlinked to be sure of what impact human contributions will have. Melting methane bogs in russia, increased water vapour in the the atmosphere, declining sea ice - all could be irrelevant if the sun decides to go into a cooler period.

However our best estimates suggest that human contributions are significant enough to warrant action. This may not turn out to be the case, but that's a pretty big gamble.

It's also irritating that the climate skeptic argument seems to have developed along the lines of:
"Warming is not happening."
"Warming is not caused by humans."
"Human contribution to warming is less than they're saying."
"It's too late to do anything about human contributions to warming."

Not accusing you, but having followed this for a long time that's the development I've seen.

Your argument about herds of large ruminants has several flaws too - modern cattle have been selectively bred for meat and milk production, both of these massively increase their methane output compared to the sort of output their ancestor species would have had. Due to the sort of digestive system ruminants have, they produce more methane anyhow, due to the action of bacteria in their gut.

Ruminants (and particularly cattle) were not actually common over much of the world for a long time until humans moved them there.

And finally, the planet is actually reasonably good at balancing these problems out as long as the ecosystem in general is healthy. But the last 200 years have seen a massive drop in biodiversity and especially in forest cover worldwide that has torpedoed the planet's capability to deal with the increased emissions from human activity.

I don't know what the answer is, but reducing meat intake is surely part of it.

 Da Boss wrote:
Methane is 20 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. It's still not as potent as Water Vapour, which is by far the most significant Greenhouse Gas, but it's very important.

Just some general meteorological gee whiz info. The atmosphere ends becoming saturated with water vapor at about 6%. Once that threshold is hit, precipitation is pretty much a given, which will end up reducing the amount of water vapor. It's a self regulatory system.

Sure, I was just pointing out that there are more greenhouse gases than CO2, which gets all the publicity.

CO2 should also be self regulating, as increased CO2 should ideally increase photosynthesis. The problem is the reduction in photosynthesis from a variety of sources.

 Da Boss wrote:
Sure, I was just pointing out that there are more greenhouse gases than CO2, which gets all the publicity.

CO2 should also be self regulating, as increased CO2 should ideally increase photosynthesis. The problem is the reduction in photosynthesis from a variety of sources.

CO2 is arguable in its self regulation. If that were the case, we wouldn't be at levels drastically higher then during the ice age. All of the CO2 released from the melting glaciers would have eventually been reabsorbed in the 10,000 years or so prior to the formation of industry. What I think can be argued that if it were not for the massive influx of CO2 in the atmosphere, civilization as we know it would not exist, since large scale agriculture would have been impossible.

 Da Boss wrote:

I don't know what the answer is, but reducing meat intake is surely part of it.

No, it's not, because marginal increases in developing world countries will outweigh even drastic decreases in the developed world over any intermediate-timeframe.

The most sustainability would come from the opposite of what you're generally suggesting; the parts of the globe most suited to commercial meat production (North America, Oceania i.e. "new" continents with robust infrastructure) should promote production and export to the developing world nations that are unsuited to it. This would promote meat production, again, necessary to fulfill global consumptive demand, but it would be in the 'cleanest' supply chains capable of highest yield versus the environmental impact.

And this doesn't even touch the 'meat consumption bad' fallacy. What are we supposed to eat more of, as we consume less calorie-dense meat? Vegetables and fruit are the usual answer, but due to irrigation needs these items consume enormous amounts of reservoir water specifically, which is what is becoming most scarce and most rapidly depleted and is in direct competition with potable drinking water. Livestock consumes lots of water as well, but again, livestock produce between 6x and 25x as much food (if measured in calorie output per input unit) as the leafy green vegetables (spinach is more than 95% water and has almost no caloric value, celery even worse) and 'luxury' fruits that we just assume are sustainable because they spring from Gaia, or something.

A much more rational prioritization would be to work towards eliminating overly intensive agriculture with high fragmentation; decorative flowers, nuts (almonds in particular), and consolidating commercial production of leafy greens into the base levels to fulfill reasonable daily mineral and vitamin rations while eliminating those that provide almost no caloric value (like celery).

But it's fashionable to pick on cattlemen, and unfashionable to tell Bridezilla that her splurge on $5,000 worth of flowers for "her special day" is irresponsible stewardship.

I can appreciate your desire to have positive impact, but you're going after the highest hurdle in a pointless way.

If we didn't cut down the rainforests to grow corn for cattle as well as cattle, CO2 might be self regulating yet still.

As it is, we've removed the world's lungs, and people still think it will breathe.

This argument will be solved in a short time, either with catastrophe or a paradigm shift. I for one would like to be on the right side of history in my lifetime.

People don't need to eat beef, FFS. It is and always was optional. Humanity shouldn't feel it has the right to endlessly expand its population without moving to another planet. We need to be smarter than bacteria in a petri dish.

The fact that this thread contains so many of you who are disregarding this on virtually no grounds is quite honestly depressing to me. You guys aren't helping my children have a secure future. We don't need to let the oil and beef moguls decide how long humanity gets to have a nice home, yet people will actively vote for them to have positions of power in office. If nothing changes, there will come a time when these separate ideologies about an obvious and easy to understand issue will result in conflicts, although humans are notoriously good at getting rid of their denial a moment before it's too late. I would simply like to be more proactive about the problem than wait until it's far more work than it should be. Stopping climate change by changing our actions and paradigm will be so much easier and cleaner than attempting to live with it while the world's species are choking and dying around us. There is no reason we can't engineer ways to fix this problem if we focus on it. I don't want to view you guys as an enemy or a threat to my survival and my children's survival.

If you can name one change in the last 200 years that has changed the world more than the industrial revolution and resulting population explosion, I'm all ears. Replace the work of scientists with a theory of your own that has as much data behind it as anthropogenic climate change does, and then have all the scientists in the world review it and change their minds.

Then we'll talk.

Interestingly, I just heard a story on the radio today that the FBI is looking into whether or not the climate change deniers would be subject to prosecution similar to when the Clinton administration won a civil suit against big tobacco in the 1990s. Evidently a lot of the same names keep popping up between the two groups (climate change denier researchers and big tobacco illness denier researchers).

 Gordon Shumway wrote:
Interestingly, I just heard a story on the radio today that the FBI is looking into whether or not the climate change deniers would be subject to prosecution similar to when the Clinton administration won a civil suit against big tobacco in the 1990s. Evidently a lot of the same names keep popping up between the two groups (climate change denier researchers and big tobacco illness denier researchers).

Not exactly true. The Department of Justice has had "conversations" about taking civil action against "fossil fuel industry" for denying man made global warming. The DoJ forwarded the issue to the FBI but so far nothing has come of it. The anti-tobacco suit also had to do with a whole lot more than denying that cigarettes were harmful.

Still, the fact that the DoJ was willing to do this should frighten people.

 Breotan wrote:

 Gordon Shumway wrote:
Interestingly, I just heard a story on the radio today that the FBI is looking into whether or not the climate change deniers would be subject to prosecution similar to when the Clinton administration won a civil suit against big tobacco in the 1990s. Evidently a lot of the same names keep popping up between the two groups (climate change denier researchers and big tobacco illness denier researchers).

Not exactly true. The Department of Justice has had "conversations" about taking civil action against "fossil fuel industry" for denying man made global warming. The DoJ forwarded the issue to the FBI but so far nothing has come of it. The anti-tobacco suit also had to do with a whole lot more than denying that cigarettes were harmful.

Still, the fact that the DoJ was willing to do this should frighten people.

Thanks for the added information. I just caught a brief blurb. As to whether or not it should frighten people: if anything does come of it and the FBI does take action, and if it does go to court (lots of ifs there), then I really don't see anything wrong with it. If an industry is intentionally spreading false information in order to cook the books, so to speak, that should be something that is litigegated. Frankly, I would be more frightened if they thought something was wrong and they just turned a blind eye towards it.