AMOC: A possible decline that is unstoppable, if it crosses a pivotal threshold

Wouldn’t they want to say the opposite then?

Do as I say and not as as I do seems to be the mantra of all the Climate finger pointers and virtue signallers Annie.

OGF sorry but it doesn’t make any sense that a large scale polluter would highlight their own pollution. Why would they lie about that???

The stuff we burn is carbon laid down over hundreds of millions of years as plants that were subsequently compressed into oil and coal. What we are doing is creating energy and releasing the carbon as CO2 - but we are doing it over hundreds of years. And doing it intensely over about one hundred years.
The normal cycle is CO2 is produced through respiration (or volcanoes or cows bottom burps, if you like) and then re-converted into carbon and oxygen by plants. But not only is the volume of oil, coal and gas being burnt very high, but we are actively stripping the planet of the primary oxygen production areas - the forests and jungles. Yes the planet is big but each year we are burning through 6 billion tons of oil, 8 billion tons of coal and 4 trillion cubic metres of gas.
On top of that, the rises in average global temperatures (documented fact, not an opinion) means that the permafrost layer across the north of Canada and Russia are melting - and this is also releasing CO2. Another source of CO2 is deforestation.
(Fun fact: 1 ton of coal releases over 2 tons of CO2 when burnt. Fun fact: a tree, on average, can absord 25kg of CO2 a year. Fun fact: to absorb the 8 billion tons of coal burnt a year you will need 400 million trees. Just for the coal we burn. There are 400 million trees in the Amazon. Fun fact: we are cutting down 1.4 billion trees a year in the Amazon.)

https://x.com/WatchChad/status/1818798775726457115

Read on…This bloke knows what it’s all about… :+1:

Weird

There are two messages from that post of an idiot redneck.
First, you’ve given up on trying to claim there is no CO2 issue and decided to post some rubbish about the US elections … on the wrong thread. Its a poor attempt at distraction.
Second, its not the Trump-Vance ticket that is weird. It is Donald Trump that is weird. Just listen to his speeches. Weird. Vance is a nobody that no-one cares about. But let’s save all that for the appropriate thread.

That is already being done - in Brazil. It is only the largest forest in the world, who cares.
And guess what: Germany is (if that info is true) the biggest customer for that soy which grows on former rain forest land. And no, it is not the 7% vegans/vegetarians but the cattle who are being fed that soy.

I think I mentioned this fact earlier here somewhere.

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how much of the feed is being used for the meat industry and how much for dairy?

The statistics which I found (www.bmel-statistik.de) claim that in May 2024 we had 10.6 mil. cattle in Germany of which 3.7 mil. are milk producing cattle. That would be about 35% cattle for milk production.

Congratulations. Nothing worth having. Comes without Effort & Determination. ^5

According to a 2022 WWF report we are a bit different here. Approx 80% of UK cattle and sheep are fed grass. It’s pigs and poultry that are fed on cereals and soy (not sure of the % of each).

I found a site (wwf.de) which states:

“In Germany, almost 60 per cent of the 16.9 million hectares of agricultural land are used for fodder production.”

The text says that only a small part of that 16.9 mil ha is gras land.

Seems to be a different story in the UK. If you want to eat “greener” meat here choose beef and lamb that is labelled as pasture fed. I don’t think most people here would buy cheap chicken cuts if they visited the facility where these birds are intensively farmed.

How much soy does Germany import and how much of that imported soy is used as animal feed for meat production vs dairy?

I’m going to question your claim that 80% of cattle feed is grass in the UK. I could believe that for sheep, and I note you actually stated the figure “for sheep and cattle”. Sheep are well adapted to over-wintering outside in all conditions and in all parts of the UK. However cattle are not and spend most of late autumn, winter and early spring in sheds. Now being in sheds does not directly mean soy or other feeds, it can mean hay that was harvested the previous year. But my instinct, without data, is that the 80% number is only achievable when you lump sheep and cattle together. If you just cite cattle then I’d guess the feed mix is similar to all other northern Europe countries. Why would it not be?

Hey, is no one checking my maths?
If one tree can absrob 25kg of CO2 a year, then to absorb the output of 8 billion tons of coal you would need 640 billion trees. Not 400 million trees.
Now from this I found that there are 3 trillion trees in the world. 400 billion in the Amazon (I wrongly cited 400 million.) So the coal burning is just slightly compensated by the number of trees in the Amazon. All good.
Best info I could find is the other CO2 production is 3 billion tons from cattle, 6 billion tons from burning oil, and 5 trillion tons from gas use. On top of the 640 billion trees needed to absorb the CO2 from burning coal, these add up to needing another …err, quite big numbers here, got stuck but we can safely say it requires lots more than there are trees on the earth.
But its a big place, the earth so that’s all ok. No?

On August first, German media stated that it is the day when humanity has consumed 50% of the earths resources for that year. This means that we need two earths. Moreover if all people would live like us Germans then we needed three earths.
Thank you fellow Germans…

I wished German TV would report on how exactly animals are being treated in slaughterhouses and before they get there. Most would stop eating meat I hope (like I did 13 years ago).

Concerning the amount of imported soy I will try to find relyable data and come back.

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I’ve found that soy bean production was 400 million tons last year and is growing at 4.4% per annum. 80% of soy beans are grown in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and US combined - so chances are that most European countries are importing most of their soy. The majority of rainforest clearance areas end up being used for soy production. Or palm oil. Cutting down billions of trees a year for that.
This environmental stuff always seem to end up with big numbers.

Probably very wise, UK chicken and its by products are still a prohibited import under our biosecurity laws, I forget the original reason but I think it was endemic diseases in the UK flock.

At “de.statista.com” I found that Germany has imported 3,19 Mil tons of soy beans in 2023, mainly from the USA. Wow, that seems a lot.

(edit: forgot the year)

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