The mounting problems of failed computer models and an 18-year old “pause” in global warming hasn’t stopped climate alarmists from proposing radical changes for the sake of the planet.
One of those calls came from Moby, a singer songwriter and electronic music legend who is vegan for ethical reasons. He argued at The Huffington Post [1] on Sept. 29 that people need to stop consuming animals and animal products because of their impact on climate change. He cited a USA Today article [2] that said it takes fifteen pounds of grain to produce a pound of beef and then Moby said that same amount of grain could be used to feed more people than the meat it could produce.
He went on to argue that meat and animal products are bad for the planet and that not feeding “human food” to animals to then consume ourselves was a “painfully simple” idea that could solve crises like famine, drought and more.
“We can do this. We have to. Our reliance on animal agriculture is literally killing us and ruining our climate and our planet,” he opined.
But Steven Koonin, a former undersecretary for science in President Barack Obama’s Energy Department, recently pointed out that “Whereas human CO2 emissions have risen 25 percent over the past 16 years, temperature has remained largely flat, a result none of the models predicts.” Koonin was writing in The Wall Street Journal.
Although Moby didn’t directly link it to climate change or animal agriculture, Moby brought up the drought California has been experiencing. The very same day Moby wrote his anti-meat call to action, the Los Angeles Times [3] reported that “Last year's exceedingly dry winter in California was largely the result of a stubborn high pressure system parked over the northeastern Pacific Ocean.” In what must have been a painful admission, the Times cited recent scientific studies that concluded global warming “Cannot be definitively linked to the California drought.”
Moby lamented the amount of water necessary for the production of meat, but massive quantities of water would also be necessary to grow the grain and other non-meat products for the vegan lifestyle that Moby advocated. Government regulations already make that difficult for some. Farmers in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta region have been in court for years to release more water from the Delta for their farming needs, but have been stopped by concerns over protecting the Delta smelt, a three inch fish that lives in the region [4], Reuters said.
The central claim of Moby’s diatribe against meat was that it is a huge contributor to climate change. But the climate hasn’t been changing the way global warming alarmists warned it would. According to Patrick Michaels [5] of the Cato Institute, who was an editor on the United Nations’ second Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, Oct. 1, marks the 18th year there was “no significant warming trend in surface average temperature.”