You are currently browsing the daily archive for July 11th, 2007.
How to stop cows burping is the new field work on climate change
Yes, “field” work indeed. So much for the “solution” to “climate change” consisting of us returning to an agrarian economy. The Times goes on to explain:
…The methane emissions from both ends of cattle and sheep are causing so much concern in government that it has ordered researchers to find ways to cut down on the emissions from livestock, which account for about a quarter of the methane – a greenhouse gas 20 times more powerful at driving global warming than carbon dioxide – pumped into the atmosphere in Britain. Each day every one of Britain’s 10 million cows pumps out an estimated 100-200 litres of methane…
…Scientists attempting to find new foods for cattle have already exploded the myth that most bovine emissions come from the rear. They have found the majority come from belching…
Just in case you never gave that issue the slightest thought until just now, you now have had, shall we say, that myth “burst”. However, it appears that among “the knowledgeable“, it has been known for years that bovine burps constitute a grave threat to the “the existence of the planet”. For example, CH4.org.uk, July 2004:
Rasing (sic) cows and sheep for meat and dairy products is a major source of methane. Cows and other farm animals produce methane in their stomachs when they digest food. The methane is released into the atmosphere when they burp.
Apparently, the issue of the fate of the world is so great . . . that spelling is unimportant.
Worldwide almost a fifth of all methane emissions (human and natural) come from farm animals. If we ate less meat and dairy products then we could reduce this source of methane.
However, don’t think all of us suddenly adopting a wholly rice diet will help:
Rice agriculture is probably the biggest human source of methane. Rice plants are grown in water and just like wetlands, a natural source of methane, this creates ideal conditions for methane to be produced as plant material rots without oxygen.
So one is not supposed to eat meat, or dairy, or rice. And don’t be smug, for even if you go vegan one is always going to be required to do something else . . . “future of the planet” at stake . . . or not:
Waste treament (sic) plants for sewage are another source of methane. With more people living on the planet this source of methane will increase as the demand for waste treatment plants increases.
And whether fewer people . . . might mean that a larger percentage learn how to spell properly is another matter entirely, of course.
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The science is obviously all coming together (remarkably and conveniently) well, for as the BBC reports this morning:
A new scientific study concludes that changes in the Sun’s output cannot be causing modern-day climate change…
Well, that’s that then.
…”This should settle the debate,” said Mike Lockwood from the UK’s Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory, who carried out the new analysis together with Claus Froehlich from the World Radiation Center in Switzerland.
Dr Lockwood initiated the study partially in response to the TV documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, broadcast on Britain’s Channel Four earlier this year, which featured the cosmic ray hypothesis…
So a study initiated “partially in response” to, and hot (if that is the right word) on the heels of, a film released merely months ago should “settle the debate“. Interestingly, on the subject of “settled debate”, as a web site devoted to that documentary reminds us:
…We were assured, you may remember, by a consensus of scientists in Britain, during the BSE ‘Mad Cow Disease’ alarm that, by now, as much as a third of the British population would be dead from eating contaminated hamburgers. The mad cow apocalypse singularly failed to materialise…
Well, just because one apocalyse locally failed to happen doesn’t mean others can’t; there’s always hope. Thus let it be understood absolutely that the incomprehensibly large and powerful fiery celestial body at the heart of our solar system, which makes this planet’s entire life-sustaining existence possible, has utterly no impact on “modern-day climate change“. Just so we are clear on the science – and incidentally, speaking of cows (yet again) — it is actually bovine burps that are of far greater impact.
The Guardian summarizes also:
…Prof Lockwood said the study was “another nail” in the coffin of the notion that solar activity is responsible for global warming…
Such is the state of science reporting today . . . that no one at The Guardian apparently noticed how idiotically that sentence reads.
A holiday camp it plainly will never be but the American officers running the Guantanamo Bay compound in Cuba are taking steps to make the lives of its detainees marginally more tolerable with recreational treats such as once-a-week film nights and limited access to television…
Yes, it’s shocking. When will this obvious reincarnation of Bergen-Belsen be closed for good?
…but it is hardly likely that the new recreational activities will do much to blunt criticism of Guantanamo in the US and around the world. Many inmates have remained for five years without having specific charges brought against them…
That latter statement might actually make for a reasonable argument, save for its being based totally on one rather small misconception which so much media and so many “around the world” have always failed to grasp.
Unfortunately, those men are not there because they had been “arrested” and are awaiting “charges” . . . as if they are mundane criminals of the type sought via “Crimewatch“. Rather, they were locked up more in the manner of French sailors/soldiers captured during the Napoleonic wars: the goal of their detention is military — to hold them and thus keep them well clear of “combat” so they will be of no more help to the enemy cause.
A difference is, though, that those French came from a country that desperately wanted them back, while most of the countries of origin of the current Guantanamo captives don’t want them back. Or those countries will treat them far worse upon return than they are being treated at Guantanamo. So they often can’t just be “handed over”.
However, perhaps The Independent would be happy if the UK government granted political asylum to those unable to be repatriated? Maybe they could be resettled in central London? Or, if they don’t like really big cities, perhaps then, in Cambridge?
Successful returns to a homeland after it was decided a prisoner no longer constituted a direct threat is why, over the years, the numbers held have dropped. Those numbers certainly haven’t fallen owing to another “prisoner reduction” scheme the U.S. was never likely to have adopted. Indeed, compared to that endured for years (if they lived) by many of those French prisoners, the (often calculatedly “stateless”) Guantanamo jihadists are indeed in a “holiday camp”:
…The Depot was a crowded prison with 500 men crammed into each 22ft x 100ft prison building, the men sleeping in hammocks. At its height it held over 7,000 prisoners, mainly French sailors and soldiers. It was said to be very cold in the Depot during the winter, and the French government refused to fund prisoners’ food. Eventually the British gave them uniforms - all yellow but with a red waistcoat to make sure they were easily seen and recognised. More than 1,000 prisoners died from typhoid in 1800 and 1801 and as many as 1,800 prisoners died during the life of the prison…
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UPDATE: The AP:
PHILIPPINE troops recovered the bodies of 14 marines, some of them beheaded, who clashed with Muslim insurgents as they searched for a kidnapped Italian priest…
By the way, it was the Marines, NOT the insurgents, who were searching for the Italian priest. The AP’s typically messy syntax notwithstanding, while we’re on the topic of treatment of captives . . . amazingly, those jihadists didn’t offer those captured Marines a choice of films and cable TV?
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