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ACS: Eating Less Meat and Dairy Products Won’t Have Major Impact on Global Warming
SAN FRANCISCO, March 22, 2010 — Cutting back on consumption of meat and dairy products will not have a major impact in combating global warming — despite repeated claims that link diets rich in animal products to production of greenhouse gases. That’s the conclusion of a report presented here today at the 239th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society.
Air quality expert Frank Mitloehner, Ph.D., who made the presentation, said that giving cows and pigs a bum rap is not only scientifically inaccurate, but also distracts society from embracing effective solutions to global climate change. He noted that the notion is becoming deeply rooted in efforts to curb global warming, citing campaigns for “meatless Mondays” and a European campaign, called “Less Meat = Less Heat,” launched late last year.
“We certainly can reduce our greenhouse-gas production, but not by consuming less meat and milk,” said Mitloehner, who is with the University of California-Davis. “Producing less meat and milk will only mean more hunger in poor countries.”
The focus of confronting climate change, he said, should be on smarter farming, not less farming. “The developed world should focus on increasing efficient meat production in developing countries where growing populations need more nutritious food. In developing countries, we should adopt more efficient, Western-style farming practices to make more food with less greenhouse gas production,” Mitloehner said.
Developed countries should reduce use of oil and coal for electricity, heating and vehicle fuels. Transportation creates an estimated 26 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., whereas raising cattle and pigs for food accounts for about 3 percent, he said.
Mitloehner says confusion over meat and milk’s role in climate change stems from a small section printed in the executive summary of a 2006 United Nations report, “Livestock’s Long Shadow.” It read: “The livestock sector is a major player, responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions measured in CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalents). This is a higher share than transport.”
Mitloehner says there is no doubt that livestock are major producers of methane, one of the greenhouse gases. But he faults the methodology of “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” contending that numbers for the livestock sector were calculated differently from transportation. In the report, the livestock emissions included gases produced by growing animal feed; animals’ digestive emissions; and processing meat and milk into foods. But the transportation analysis factored in only emissions from fossil fuels burned while driving and not all other transport lifecycle related factors.
“This lopsided analysis is a classical apples-and-oranges analogy that truly confused the issue,” he said.
American Chemical Society (ACS) News Release: Eating less meat and dairy products won’t have major impact on global warming
March 27th, 2010 at 4:54 pm
American Chemical Society (ACS) News Release: Eating less meat and dairy products won’t have major impact on global warming
The link is down.
However, there is another link from there that does work.
The American Chemical Society has stated it’s position on climate change…
ACS Position
Careful and comprehensive scientific assessments have clearly demonstrated that the Earth’s climate system is changing rapidly in response to growing atmospheric burdens of greenhouse gases and absorbing aerosol particles (IPCC, 2007). There is very little room for doubt that observed climate trends are due to human activities. The threats are serious and action is urgently needed to mitigate the risks of climate change.
The reality of global warming, its current serious and potentially disastrous impacts on Earth system properties, and the key role emissions from human activities play in driving these phenomena have been recognized by earlier versions of this ACS policy statement (ACS, 2004), by other major scientific societies, including the American Geophysical Union (AGU, 2003), the American Meteorological Society (AMS, 2007) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, 2007), and by the U. S. National Academies and ten other leading national academies of science (NA, 2005).
ACS link
March 27th, 2010 at 5:35 pm
The ACS position statement on climate change has nothing to do with the now accepted exaggeration of a link between meat and methane:
http://climateresearchnews.com/2010/03/now-its-cowgate-un-admits-flaw-on-meat-and-climate/
March 27th, 2010 at 9:43 pm
The ACS position statement on climate change has nothing to do with the now accepted exaggeration of a link between meat and methane.
It does, however, have a lot to do with understanding the ACS on their position on climate change.
March 28th, 2010 at 12:33 am
Again, an ACS committee statement on their views on climate change consensus has little or nothing to do with the study presented by an ACS member Frank Mitloehner, which has shown that the link between livestock and methane has hitherto been exaggerated. There is much we do understand about climate, but there is also much that we don’t understand. The fact remains that nothing that has happened in the climate system since man started emitting significant amounts of CO2 has fallen outside of the bounds of natural variability.
March 28th, 2010 at 4:56 am
The fact remains that nothing that has happened in the climate system since man started emitting significant amounts of CO2 has fallen outside of the bounds of natural variability.
Says who?
The scientific peer-reviewed literature does not support such conclusions.
March 28th, 2010 at 5:59 am
Oh yes it does! The IPCC, which uses peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed literature, have been unable to link natural disasters, such as floods, hurricanes, etc with CO2/global warming. During the current interglacial we have seen warming and cooling, receding and advancing glaciers, etc, etc, none of which has been exceeded since man emitted significant amounts of CO2. The modern warm period began before significant man-made CO2 emissions, following the coldest episode of the Holocene known as the Little Ice Age. There is evidence supporting both a cooler and a warmer MWP than present, which means an objective representation of the science is ‘uncertainty’ rather than the disingenuous claims of ‘certainty’ by Hockey Stick fraudsters.
March 29th, 2010 at 10:01 pm
Well, a few points here Paul:
First, the correct link to the story (not the actual meeting presentation) is here:
http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=PP_ARTICLEMAIN&node_id=222&content_id=CNBP_024345&use_sec=true&sec_url_var=region1&__uuid=
You will note by reading that blurb, that Frank Mitloehner, like the ACS, fully supports the idea that greenhouse gasses are causing climate change, since he discusses “smarter farming” and reducing fossil fuel burning as ways of cutting emissions, some of which he admits comes from animal agriculture. His beef (pun intended) on the whole topic is with the FAO’s accounting methods and subsequent estimates of cattle’s impact, not with the AGW premise itself.
Second, how do you know, as you state, that “Frank Mitloehner…has shown that the link between livestock and methane has hitherto been exaggerated”. The work referred to was a presentation at the annual ACS meeting last week, and has not yet appeared in the literature. Were you therefore at the meeting? Have you talked with Dr Mitloehner about his work? And if the answer to either of these is yes, then have you read the original FAO report he criticizes, such that you are in fact able to evaluate Dr Mitloehner’s arguments/conclusion for yourself instead of just stating that he has in fact actually demonstrated something?
Trotting out the typical litany of deniers’ red herrings about how the IPCC has it all wrong is not an appropriate response, however much you may think so.
Jim Bouldin
UC Davis
March 29th, 2010 at 10:16 pm
I note also this recent publication by Dr. Mitloehner:
Mitloehner, F.M., H. Sun, and J. Karlik. 2009. Environmental chamber studies improve greenhouse gas emission estimates and suggest mitigation strategies for livestock facilities. California Agriculture. 63: 79-83.
Apparently he thinks greenhouse gas emissions are important if he’s lead author on a study attempting to improve the estimation thereof.
March 30th, 2010 at 12:56 am
Thanks for the links Jim.
For reasons best known to yourself, you have set up some straw-man arguments. This post is simply a copy of a Press Release. It’s focus is the livestock-methane link and how Mitloehner’s work suggests that a UN report overestimates the link compared to transport.
This from the BBC News website:
One of the authors of Livestock’s Long Shadow, FAO livestock policy officer Pierre Gerber, told BBC News he accepted Dr Mitloehner’s criticism.
“I must say honestly that he has a point – we factored in everything for meat emissions, and we didn’t do the same thing with transport, we just used the figure from the IPCC,” he said.
“But on the rest of the report, I don’t think it was really challenged.”
FAO is now working on a much more comprehensive analysis of emissions from food production, he said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8583308.stm
March 30th, 2010 at 6:38 am
Well, to be sure Paul, you reprinted and ACS press release…and then responded to comments with very wrong statements about the significance of the current GHG and temperatures in the historical context, making sure to throw in reference to “hockey stick fraudsters”. And Mitloehner’s work was not confined to methane, but to all animal ag GHGs, including CO2, by the way.
Unfortunately these errors are compounded by the ACS, which, as is usual in press releases related to climate change, botched a number of things. The main one is the headline, which is not a proper conclusion from Mitloehner’s talk, which had to do with the relative impacts of animal ag vs other causes, of GHG production, not the extent to which climate change can be affected by changed diets. Further, Mitloehner is not an “air quality expert”, but a livestock researcher. And there are other very questionable statements attributed to him, although it is impossible to know whether the ACS or Mitloehner himself are responsible for these.
If the accounting methods differed between the two sectors analyzed, as Mitloehner claims, then I agree that this is a problem that needs to be fixed. But it sure doesn’t justify the headline, nor the way that, as usual, it’s been latched onto by the climate change denial world and spread ’round as the next “gate”.
March 30th, 2010 at 4:54 pm
I think the headline is appropriate because Mitloehner has identified a significant flaw in the UN’s livestock-methane link. One of the UN report’s authors has accepted the criticism amd points to the fact that the flaw can be traced back to the IPCC – hence the light-hearted description ‘Cowgate.’
If additional greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are a problem outside of computer models, then the problem certainly hasn’t yet manifested itself by natural variability in the climate system being exceeded. ‘Meat-free Mondays’ is just another hymn sung in the church of global warming.
Any meaningful globally co-ordinated attempt to manipulate greenhouse gases is dead in the water. Global warming alarmism is an expensive and dangerous distraction from the task of tackling real problems such as disease, poverty, clean water, energy poverty etc. Let’s forget the crazy notion that we can control the weather/climate and get on with developing affordable, viable alternatives to carbon fuels.
April 29th, 2010 at 8:10 am
I think the global warming deniers are taking this report to mean way more than it actually does. My understanding here is that Mitloehner has made a valid claim that when calculating greenhouse gas emissions by emitter, livestock production has too high a percentage because it is calcuted from farm to table. On the other hand, the fuel we burn in our car is NOT calculated based on how much GHG is caused from earth to tank.
Therefore his %3 number is purely the amount of GHG generated from livestock ONLY. therefore, not only does the transportation of livestock now get shifted to general transportation, the GHG generated by producing food for livestock now gets shifted to regular agriculture emissions. And the transportation of those grains to the livestock are, again, shifted to the GHG caused by transportation.
So while his criticism seems valid, he isn’t really reducing the amount of total greenhouse gasses being emitted. He only appears to be shifting the numbers around. However, even if we take his criticism at face value, his conclusion is wrong. Reducing the amount of meat we eat, would INDEED reduce the amount of livestock produced, which would reduce the amount of grain produed for livestock and transportation involved. So all those areas he says have nothing to do with livestock, actually DO, and therefore reducing the amount of meat we eat would, in fact, lower the emissions caused by the livestock industry.
Further, I would also question his conclusion based on more efficient production. It seems to me that all the modernization and efficiencies currecntly used in the livestock industry have actually INCREASED this problem. Mitloehner’s own studies show that natural, grass fed cattle produce, by far, the lowest emissions of GHG. However, our “modern efficiences” actually take cows out of the fields and put them into feedlots, where they eat unnatural grains which INCREASE the digestive issues and methane produced. So one could argue that the answer isn’t more efficient production. The answer is more NATURAL production.
July 29th, 2010 at 6:37 am
Ryan,
You need to actually read some of Franks research because your interpretation of what it “suggests” is entirely wrong.