Individual and Community

As they are saying… here is the real ‘inconvenient truth’….

Nov 2006:
Rearing cattle produces more greenhouse gases than driving cars, UN report warns

29 November 2006 – Cattle-rearing generates more global warming greenhouse gases, as measured in CO2 equivalent, than transportation, and smarter production methods, including improved animal diets to reduce enteric fermentation and consequent methane emissions, are urgently needed, according to a new United Nations report released today.

“Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems,” senior UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) official Henning Steinfeld said. “Urgent action is required to remedy the situation.”

Cattle-rearing is also a major source of land and water degradation, according to the FAO report, Livestock’s Long Shadow–Environmental Issues and Options, of which Mr. Steinfeld is the senior author.

“The environmental costs per unit of livestock production must be cut by one half, just to avoid the level of damage worsening beyond its present level,” it warns.

When emissions from land use and land use change are included, the livestock sector accounts for 9 per cent of CO2 deriving from human-related activities, but produces a much larger share of even more harmful greenhouse gases. It generates 65 per cent of human-related nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CO2. Most of this comes from manure.

source: http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=20772&Cr=global&Cr1=environment

United Nations: Eat Less Meat
Monday September 8, 2008

To combat global warming, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, head of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, advises, “Give up meat for one day [a week] initially, and decrease it from there.” Pachauri is a vegetarian himself, and points out that greenhouse gas emissions and habitat destruction are associated with animal agriculture. To most animal advocates, this is old news. Even to the United Nations, this is old news.

source: http://animalrights.about.com/b/2008/09/08/united-nations-eat-less-meat.htm

Some links for reasons people are vegetarian

49 REASONS WHY I AM A VEGETARIAN
http://www.britishmeat.com/49.htm

Another:
http://www.ecomall.com/greenshopping/pveg1.htm

Graphic, pointed video, features some slaughterhouse footage:
http://www.goveg.com/feat/chewonthis/

Now the average consumer can participate in the renewable energy revolution. You can power your home with wind energy, biomass, and other renewable energy sources. All without installing any new equipment.

Alliant Energy’s Second Nature Program allows you to buy renewable energy for your home.

When your family participates in Second Nature, you’re helping us buy earth-friendly wind power and bioenergy.

Through Alliant Energy’s innovative Second Nature™ program, your family can support renewable energy equal to 25 percent, 50 percent or even 100 percent of your household electric usage each month.

This additional renewable energy comes from new Second Nature resources, above and beyond Alliant Energy’s standard sources.

As electricity from renewable sources comes into the energy pool, it displaces electricity that would otherwise come from fossil fuel sources like coal and natural gas.

Caveat: You must live in Iowa, Wisconsin, or Minnesota.

Your small monthly contribution covers the added expense of harvesting the wind power and biomass energy used in the program:

* Your electric meter measures the kilowatt-hours you use each month. We use your Second Nature participation level (25%, 50% or 100%) to figure how much green energy you require.
* Next, we combine your requirement with other Second Nature customers to get the month’s total green requirement.
* Then, we bring enough new green power into our energy pool to meet the total green requirement.

Learn more and sign up here. You can even sign up online.

✴ Subsidy payments were received directly from USDA and USDA attributed additional subsidy benefits to this person that were passed through one or more subsidized farm business(es).

✴✴ Subsidies benefits were attributed by USDA only as pass-throughs from one or more subsidized farm business(es).
Entities without ✴ or ✴✴ received all of their money directly from USDA.

source: http://farm.ewg.org/sites/farmbill2007/s1614_addrsearch.php?yr=S1614&s=yup&stab=IA&mailfips=19113&city=Mount+Vernon&c=Search&zip=&last=&first=&fullname=

Stifling summers forecast by Nasa for US east coast
By David Usborne in New York
Published: 11 May 2007

Researchers at Nasa have warned that unless growth in greenhouse gas emissions can be successfully curbed, large areas of the eastern United States, from Washington DC to Florida, can expect to suffer through catastrophically hotter summers within just a couple of generations.

A study released by Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University finds that by 2080 average summer high temperatures in parts of the east will be about 10F higher than now, pushing them from the low to mid-80s to the low to mid-90s.

A study released by Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University finds that by 2080 average summer high temperatures in parts of the east will be about 10F higher than now, pushing them from the low to mid-80s to the low to mid-90s.
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April 6, 2007
Emissions Already Affecting Climate, Report Finds
By JAMES KANTER and ANDREW C. REVKIN

BRUSSELS, April 6 — Earth’s climate and ecosystems are already being affected, for better and mostly for worse, by the atmospheric buildup of smokestack and tailpipe gases that trap heat, top climate experts said today.

And while curbs in emissions can limit risks, they said, vulnerable regions must adapt to shifting weather patterns and rising seas.

The conclusions came in the latest report from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has tracked research on human-caused global warming since being created by the United Nations in 1988. In February, the panel released a report that for the first time concluded with 90-percent certainty that humans were the main cause of warming since 1950. But in this report, focusing on the impact of warming, for the first time the group described how species, water supplies, ice sheets, and regional climate conditions were already responding.

At a news conference capping four days of debate between scientists and representatives from more than 100 governments, Martin Parry, the co-chairman of the team that wrote the new report, said widespread effects were already measurable, with much more to come.

“We’re no longer arm waving with models,” said Dr. Parry, who identified areas most affected as the Arctic, Sub-Saharan Africa, small islands and Asia’s sprawling, crowded, flood-prone river deltas. “This is empirical information on the ground.”

The report said that climate patterns were shifting in ways that would bring benefits in some places — including more rainfall and longer growing seasons in high latitudes, opening Arctic seaways, and reduced deaths from cold — but significant human hardship and ecological losses in others.

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Global Ecological Collapse?

The UN exaggerates problems, but gets solutions right

Ronald Bailey | March 31, 2005

Most ecosystem services that support life and human society are being degraded and used unsustainably, according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) just released by the United Nations. According to the report, efforts to achieve the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, which include halving the number of people living on less than $1 per day, reducing child and maternal mortality, and establishing universal primary education by 2015, will be significantly impeded if these ecosystem services are allowed to deteriorate further.

One of the chief findings is that “over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history.” And why not? After all, as the report notes, since 1960 human population doubled while the world’s economic output increased six-fold. The report alarmingly asserts that “more land was converted to cropland since 1945 than in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries combined.” This claim evidently depends on the selection of the baseline. If the UN authors had chosen 1961 as the baseline, as U.S. Department of Interior analyst Indur Goklany points out, between 1961 and 1995 cropland increased by only 10 percent (from 1.34 billion hectares to 1.48 billion hectares) and total land area devoted to agriculture also increased only 10 percent (from 4.5 billion hectares to 4.9 billion hectares). That sounds a lot less alarming. In fact, deeper in the report, the UN authors acknowledge, “Most of the increase in food demand of the past 50 years has been met by intensification of crop, livestock, and aquaculture systems rather than expansion of production area.” Land area devoted to cropland is falling in developed countries like the United States and members of the European Union.

Consider the bounty of nature in terms of human services. Ecosystems provide humanity with provisioning services such food, water, timber, and fiber; regulating services that affect climate, floods, disease, wastes, and water supply; cultural services that provide recreational, aesthetic, and spiritual benefits; and supporting services such as soil formation, photosynthesis, and nutrient cycling. The MA, compiled by more than 1300 experts from 95 countries, looked at 24 different ecosystem services and found that 15 of them (see page 41 of the report for a list of some of them) are being degraded or used unsustainably.
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Ecological Collapse refers to a situation where an ecosystem suffers a drastic, if not permanent, reduction in carrying capacity for all organisms, often resulting in mass extinction. Usually, an ecological collapse can be precipitated by a disastrous event occurring on a small time scale, such as the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event which was an ecological collapse widely believed to be caused by an impact event.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_collapse

Besides having the warmest winter in recorded history, UN scientists discovered that global warming also destroys crops, producing damages estimated at $5 billion.

According to scientists at NOAA National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. , the last winter, from December 2006 to February 2007, was the warmest in Earth’s recorded history.

Precipitation in the US was above average in the center, while large sections of the East, Southeast and West were drier than average. The global average temperature was the warmest on record for the December-February period.

The winter temperature for the contiguous United States (based on preliminary data) was 33.6 degrees F (0.9 degrees C). The 20th century average is 33.0 degrees F (0.6 degrees C). Statewide temperatures were warmer than average from Florida to Maine and from Michigan to Montana. Cooler-than-average temperatures occurred in the southern Plains and areas of the Southwest.

The 11th warmest December on record occurred in 2006.

In January, the coldest climate was registered in Southern Plains and in the West, determined by upper-level wind patterns. States like Arizona, Texas and even Southern California experienced snow and ice, with California suffering important losses in orange production.

More typical winter conditions finally arrived in the eastern United States by late January and a period of colder-than-normal temperatures persisted through President’s Day weekend.

February was 1.8 degrees F (0.9 degrees C) below the 20th century average of 34.7 degrees F (1.5 degrees C), placing it in the top third coldest Februarys in the 113-year record for the contiguous U.S. Thirty-six states in the eastern two-thirds of the nation were cooler than average, while Texas and the eleven states of the West were near average to warmer-than-average.

NOAA came up with a positive aspect of global warming: the use of energy in residential areas dropped 3% last winter, compared to average climate conditions for the same period. Had February been warmer, energy consumption would have been even smaller. Overall, February’s Residential Energy Demand Temperature Index (REDTI—an index developed at NOAA to relate energy usage to climate) was approximately six percent higher than what would have occurred under average climate conditions for this interval.
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Scientists have inconvenient news for Gore

William Broad
March 14, 2007

THE environmental campaigner Al Gore may have won over Hollywood with his documentary An Inconvenient Truth. But the scientific world is proving a much tougher audience for his relentless campaign to raise public awareness of climate change.

There is a rising chorus of concern, extending even to “moderate” scientists with no political axe to grind, over the former US vice-president’s tactics and advocacy.

The nub of their concern is a belief that he has over-egged his case. That, in trying to sell to the public the dangers of complacency in combating global warming, he is guilty of a number of convenient untruths or distortions.

The main charges are that he has skated over the Earth’s history of climate change and that his talk of impending doom ignores that change is a slow-motion process.

Even a top adviser to Mr Gore, the environmental scientist James Hansen, admits the former vice-president’s work may hold “imperfections” and “technical flaws”.
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