Beef, what’s for climate; Is cattle herding the missing link in restoring the balance of nature?
We live in an increasingly complex world where it seems everything is going in the wrong direction leading to an inevitable cataclysmic catastrophe. Unless of course we give all power over to the politicians who will through regulation and targeted taxation lead us right. Carbon Dioxide levels are rising, and everybody knows by now that it is the second most important green-house gas, next only to water vapor. Theory has it, as CO2 increases, so will temperatures, and since air can hold 7% more water vapor for every 1 degree increase Celsius, there is a gain in the system of a factor of 3 or more according to IPCC (UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). So if we double the amount of CO2 we could expect a warming of the earth of between 3 and 6 degrees, warm enough to make large parts of the earth uninhabitable.
This theory seemed to hold true between the years 1970 and 1997. Since then there has been no increase in global temperatures, but CO2 levels have increased a further 8% making the correlation between CO2 levels and temperature more and more implausible.
This does not mean we have no reason for worry. Large land areas are turning into unproductive wilderness, mostly in the 10-40 Corridor which is where the bulk of the world’s population lives. There simply is not enough water to make these areas productive again. When an area is opened up for agriculture from forestation, average temperature rises up to one degree Celsius. When an area is turned from grassland to wasteland, temperatures rise. These are the areas where all recent temperature increases have occurred. The ice is growing in the Antarctica; the snowpack is growing in the Northern hemisphere. The summer ice in the Arctic is diminishing, but that is due to air pollution, nearly all coming from China, which alone uses 45% of all coal mined in the world, most of it low grade Lignite. They do put scrubbers on the power plants, but they cost money to operate, so they are often down for “service” and it is cheaper to pay off the inspectors than to scrub.
We learn from the ice core data of Greenland that we are at the last leg before a new glaciation. Enter CO2. Thanks to increased levels of CO2 we have now postponed the new ice age.
Some days ago I was alerted to a video from a TED talk by Dr. Allan Savory in Los Angeles.Please watch it in its entirety.
He draws some interesting conclusions, and claims the only chance we have to restore nature’s balance is to reintroduce the large herds of beasts that once roamed the savannas and steppes. But you cannot just have a bunch of cattle roam free, they have to be herded in an intelligent way to restore the productivity of the land. Let us again open up the Federal lands for cattle and sheep herding in a way that will restore their potential to host more animals, wild and tame and restore the balance of nature.