this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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Here's how much cropland could be freed up if Americans ate half as much meat (grist.org)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Slaughter the majority of exaliating stock over the course of a year and sell the rest as pets.

Not actually serious, but all of the major meat producing animals are slaughtered before their first birthday so phasing it out would take care of the population without needing to release millions of stock.

The real question is whether the species should be reintroduced to nature or not. It isn't like there are wild cattle outside of Africa and maybe Asia other than buffalo anymore*. We would need to take the time to reintroduce feral livestock so they could adapt.

*that I can recall off the top of my head.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Hawaii has wild cattle that you can hunt. Not native, but still quite wild, and very dangerous.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Cattle don't have any of the survival instincts left, and they have been bred to be docile and overproducers of milk and meat. They would die of starvetion or dehydration with swollen udders and any number of horrific diseases.

That's not to say they are better off in factory farms, but if the question is should we reintroduce them to the wild, I would say no.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

There are many breeds of cattle. Some which are on their own for most of the year. I am sure with some carefully selection (and maybe a few generations of crossbreeding) there could be viable breeds for reintroduction to most biomes which historically had wild cows