Vegetarian diets worse for planet, etc.

Vegetarian and ‘healthy’ diets are more harmful to the environment

Carnegie Mellon study finds eating lettuce is more than three times worse in greenhouse gas emissions than eating bacon

Contrary to recent headlines — and a talk by actor Arnold Schwarzenegger at the United Nations Paris Climate Change Conference — eating a vegetarian diet could contribute to climate change.

In fact, according to new research from Carnegie Mellon University, following the USDA recommendations to consume more fruits, vegetables, dairy and seafood is more harmful to the environment because those foods have relatively high resource uses and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per calorie. Published in Environment Systems and Decisions, the study measured the changes in energy use, blue water footprint and GHG emissions associated with U.S. food consumption patterns.

“Eating lettuce is over three times worse in greenhouse gas emissions than eating bacon,” said Paul Fischbeck, professor of social and decisions sciences and engineering and public policy. “Lots of common vegetables require more resources per calorie than you would think. Eggplant, celery and cucumbers look particularly bad when compared to pork or chicken.”

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/12/15/shocker-vegetarian-diets-worse-for-climate-than-eating-bacon/

Original article is here: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10669-015-9577-y

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Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi explains his peer-reviewed papers that show water vapor and clouds adjust to changes in CO2 to keep Earth’s greenhouse effect constant. His predictions match observations. Therefore, CO2 can’t change the greenhouse effect and can’t cause global warming.

Question: Would Earth be an ice-covered planet if it had no CO2?

Miskolczi: The water phase diagram shows ice sublimation would add enough water vapor to produce today’s greenhouse effect, with or without CO2.

http://edberry.com/blog/ed-berry/a-physics-view-of-climate-change/

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What frustrates Ball the most is what he calls the "corruption of climate science, including the statistics on carbon dioxide.

"They talk about the CO2 that humans emit," he said. "They don't put into the formula the amount of CO2 we are currently absorbing. For example, of the total we emit (using IGCC data), we remove 50 percent of it through agriculture."

Ball further noted even the most ardent proponents of the climate agenda have admitted the wealth transfers and carbon standards don't make any difference in the health of the planet.

"One of the key scientists involved in the corruption was a guy by the name of Tom Wigley," Ball said. "He said at the time that if we introduce the Kyoto Protocol in its original form, that is every country reduced to the amounts that we want, nobody would be able to measure the difference.

"In other words, you could take everybody off the planet, leave one scientist behind and say, 'OK, measure and tell us how much the CO2 in the atmosphere's reduced.' He wouldn't be able to do it."

Ball said Secretary Kerry has admitted the same thing.

"He said this is not going to make any significant difference in terms of CO2, but it's important in terms of political policy and sharing the wealth," Ball said. "So it's a scam from top to bottom."

In addition to that admission, Kerry stated over the weekend to Fox News Sunday that there is no way to force any nation to abide by the new deal.

"If there had been a penalty, we wouldn't have been able to get an agreement," Kerry said, confident that mandatory emissions reporting requirements would  keep everyone on target.

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2015/12/climate-expert-obamas-deal-a-scam-from-top-to-bottom/#fBukVTQqZdyFrFCo.99

http://www.wnd.com/2015/12/climate-expert-obamas-deal-a-scam-from-top-to-bottom/

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New members of the climate ‘deniers’ club:  James Hansen, Ken Caldeira, Kerry Emanuel, Tom Wigley . . . and Bill Gates.

The latest bit of idiocy from Naomi Oreskes is this article in the Guardian: There is a new form of climate denialists to look out for – so don’t celebrate yet. Subtitle: At the exact moment in which we need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuel, we are being told that renewable sources can’t meet our energy needs.Excerpts: 

After the signing of a historic climate pact in Paris, we might now hope that the merchants of doubt – who for two decades have denied the science and dismissed the threat – are officially irrelevant.

But not so fast. There is also a new, strange form of denial that has appeared on the landscape of late, one that says that renewable sources can’t meet our energy needs.

Oddly, some of these voices include climate scientists, who insist that we must now turn to wholesale expansion of nuclear power. Just this past week, as negotiators were closing in on the Paris agreement, four climate scientists held an off-site session insisting that the only way we can solve the coupled climate/energy problem is with a massive and immediate expansion of nuclear power. More than that, they are blaming environmentalists, suggesting that the opposition to nuclear power stands between all of us and a two-degree world.

http://judithcurry.com/2015/12/16/the-new-climate-deniers/

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On the self-defeating claims of some clean-energy enthusiasts:

They have this statement that the cost of solar photovoltaic is the same as hydrocarbon’s. And that’s one of those misleadingly meaningless statements. What they mean is that at noon in Arizona, the cost of that kilowatt-hour is the same as a hydrocarbon kilowatt-hour. But it doesn’t come at night, it doesn’t come after the sun hasn’t shone, so the fact that in that one moment you reach parity, so what? The reading public, when they see things like that, they underestimate how hard this thing is. So false solutions like divestment or “Oh, it’s easy to do” hurt our ability to fix the problems. Distinguishing a real solution from a false solution is actually very complicated.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/we-need-an-energy-miracle/407881/
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Historians, write Walter Russell Mead and Jamie Horgan of the American Interest, are likely to say that the Paris agreement ended climate change the way the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact ended war. But as the ink dries on the Paris gesture of right-mindedness, let us praise the solar energy source most responsible for the surge of human betterment that began with the harnessing of fossil fuels around 1800.

The source is, of course, coal, a still abundant and indispensable form in which the sun’s energy has been captured from carbon-based life. Matt Ridley, a member of a British coal-producing family and author of “The Rational Optimist,” notes that the path of mankind’s progress, material as well as moral, has been from reliance on renewable but insufficient energy sources to today’s 85 percent reliance on energy from fossil fuels.

The progression has been from reliance on human (often slaves’) muscles, to animal energy (first oxen, then horses), to burning wood and peat as stores of sunlight, to energy from water and wind, to, at last, fossil fuels. Sustained economic growth, a necessary prerequisite for scientific and technological dynamism, became possible, Ridley writes, when humanity was able to rely on “non-renewable, non-green, non-clean power.” Because “there appeared from underground a near-magical substance,” Britain’s landscape was spared: “Coal gave Britain fuel equivalent to the output of 15 million extra acres of forest to burn, an area nearly the size of Scotland. By 1870, the burning of coal in Britain was generating as many calories as would have been expended by 850 million laborers. . . . The capacity of the country’s steam engines alone was equivalent to 6 million horses or 40 million men.”

And cheap coal produced the iron for new labor-saving machines. The environmental toll from burning coal (it emits carbon dioxide, radioactivity and mercury) has been slight relative to the environmental and other blessings from burning it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/another-false-turning-point-on-the-climate/2015/12/16/e16dbc36-a35b-11e5-9c4e-be37f66848bb_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-b%3Ahomepage%2Fstory