If you read my other reply two posts up, it's clear that I'm not left leaning.

Your linked slaughter statistics are for the USA alone, and as far as I know GLOBAL warming affects the whole globe....so we should count the global amount of farmed animals.

Your statistics also only count slaughtered animals, and not farmed animals like dairy cows, which there are more of at any one time. Around 9 billion dairy cows in the USA. So already in the US alone we have 13.9 billion farmed animals(4.9b slaughtered + 9b dairy cows). It's not hard to see worldwide that figure reaching 50 billion.
And that's still not counting a bunch of animals (read the small print of your link).

The thing with methane too, it traps over 29 times more heat that co2....and most trees don't absorb methane. So even if we had enough trees to absorb co2 (which we don't) then all of methane from farmed animals would remain up there anyway.


80% of tree's aren't gone, 80 % of forests are gone:
https://www.google.com.au/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=how%20much%20of%20the%20world%27s%20forests%20have%20been%20destroyed


How much renewable energy tax do you pay BTW? Where I live I pay $0. But the government does give some $4 billion of our tax money to the coal industry. So if anything the big tax scheme is from non-renewable.


EDIT:
Oh I forgot the most important bit. Scientists can tell between natural co2 and man-made co2. They have differing amounts of carbon. So it's actually really easy to tell between how much carbon dioxide humans have put into the atmosphere vs naturally occurring carbon dioxide.


Also lions and bears are going to live in nature regardless of human activity - we've added 50 billion large, methane producing animals to the world that wouldn't be there otherwise. Granted the destruction of habitats might have reduced the lion and bear populations, but not by 50 billion. Perhaps a few million at most.

Are you sure that 50 billion farm animals releasing methane would have no affect on the planet?

Are you sure that cutting down 80% of forests (trees absorb co2) would not have an effect?

You don't need know anything about maths or science to see that these huge numbers are significant regardless of what the sun is doing.

Just to make sure you can appreciate how much 50 billion is - it would take you 31 years to count 50 billion.

Human activity in the last 100 years (especially in the last 50) has drastically changed the earth.

Save forests and lives. Sounds like a win-win to me!

The simplest counter argument to your catastrophic prediction is the stability of the paleo-temperature record. If there has been a methane 'time-bomb' just sitting there waiting to be set off anytime the temperature got an extra degree warmer then temperatures wouldn't be stable as they have been over the last millenia. The gradual shifts from ice-age to global rain forests wouldn't have been gradual at all, and likely wouldn't have been reversible either.

The more likely answer is our understanding of climate functions and things like just how much methane is likely to escape in a certain time frame is incomplete.

They are such pains in the arse... I used to live in an area that was in the city, but basically forested, the coons one time, open the door, ran across the kitchen and pulled a huge bag of cat food outside. These were some big coons; the possums were assholes too.

I haven't seen a coon in years across the Bay, until a couple of nights ago I heard some weird snarling in front of me in my backyard, I thought one of the cats had gone mental, put on my phone light and there was coon snarling at me two feet away - as it had it's ET fingers on some old nachos that used to be in the trash.

Good point.

I don't dispute racism exists, and its effects are amplified by power and reach. There is a difference between quality and quantity when it comes to racism. Western racism seems of a low quality, but it generates a high quantity due to pragmatic reasons. Strangely, perhaps, I find this less reprehensible than high quality of racism that is mitigated by distance or political clout. That's definitely a bias I have.

EDIT:
I think the above video and my response to it demonstrate some of the problems in that stance. Akala confidently lists a collection of events that he clearly considers egregious. A subset of those I've addressed in my criticism, to varying extents. If detecting racism in our culture is disagreeing about how effective a foreign navy should be in it's coast guard duties on a foreign shore, perhaps we're disappearing down the rabbit hole. If detecting racism in our culture means finding a sub 1% discrepancy in prison death rates in a small sample size, then it could be we're missing the forest for the trees.
It isn't to say that there aren't still problems in western culture, but we are teaching ourselves to cry wolf constantly, and we know where that leads.

Set fire to one probably half that size on the farm once. Smaller sized nests are really common and quite well camouflaged, so you don't really notice them until you look carefully. They are often under grass at the top of banks, or under eaves, just in odd spots that you wouldn't normally look.

The big one we destroyed was just out in the open in the middle of the forest, I wonder how long something of this size takes to develop.

I'm impressed you have been there. Fraser Island is an incredible natural wonder, worlds largest sand island, has accessible fresh water, lovely white beaches, very tall sand dunes, even rain forests. I hope it gets preserved forever.

Check out some photos:
https://www.google.com/search?q=fraser+island&tbm=isch&tbo=u

Keiki Naia. Your kid had some spunk, didn't she?

Thank you for sharing her with us.

I hope you have the comfort of a fairy forest for her somewhere.

Your video, Insane Forest Fire Footage Fort McMurray, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

I was drunk in the forest once and fought one of these. They are not to be trifled with. When they switch to knives; run.

There are some schools like this in Germany as well. Usually children that have issues like attention deficit disorder or do not fit into a normal school (problem child) will attend to such a "Forest school" (Waldschule). There are studies that it benefits development as the change in scenery from the busy city life helps the children adjust. It is definitely not very common and children still need to attend regular classes.

To say it has a flair of "anti science" is a bit far fetched as these schools often teach a lot about the local flora and fauna, do stuff like looking at water samples under a microscope or take earth probes. Sure it is not super scientific, it probably compares to what most kids would do as boy scouts - except it's part of the school's education program. For some kids this approach is better at fueling their scientific curiosity than in a regular school environment where they have many other issues to deal with.

*promote some good points.
It's a bit sad to me that he doesn't seem to know or care that overpopulation is the root cause of all these 'problems', because the earth can survive through all the different damages people have done to it if there was only less damage done. We can cut forests without damage, if we only cut as much as we replant AND grow, we can burn fossil fuels if we only burn as much as the forests can filter, etc. If we had <1/10 the number of people doing <1/10 the amount of damage, the planet would likely be fine.
Also...*commercial (since it's an advertisement for standfortrees.org)

Beware of missing the forest for the trees!

Humans are quite capable of thriving on an entirely meat based diet - https://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2015nl/apr/eskimos.htm

I personally wouldn't enjoy it much, but am willing to acknowledge that it's physically possible.

Can you think of a herbivore with that ability? Most herbivores are quite willing to eat a bit of meat occasionally, but by definition don't only eat meat. Here's a deer eating a bird for example, which is really not unnusual, but deer really are herbivores: