Should you be worried about climate change or is it another fear tactic? How will this affect the food you eat and your health?
Climate change beliefs and how the changes to our food may make you unhealthy
Is Climate Change Something You Should Fear?
Fear is never a good thing, but knowledge is.
Humans could better protect our planet with simple tasks such as producing less waste, not tossing masks and plastic into our oceans and the ground and tossing cigarettes into the ground.
We can stay on trails instead of traipsing off, creating run-off areas, and destroying natural habitats.
This is less about climate change and more about respecting the planet we live on and giving thanks for what the earth provides for us.
But to say that we have to kill off all the cows because of methane/nitrogen production, eat bugs and lab-grown meat, reduce trips by planes, get rid of gas and diesel vehicles, and live in 15-minute cities where you do not own a vehicle but get to use one based on your “green score” probably has more to do with control of the population than it does with protecting our natural environment (IMO).
Fake meat production is not doing so well (thankfully!)
Good news from Dr. Mercola, who stated in a January 10, 2024 post that Upside Foods, which makes fake meat and is allowed to sell it in the US, has not scaled up its fake meat production due to contamination issues, and DNA was found in one of its chicken cell lines. When some Upside fake meat samples were tested for heavy metals, some samples contained 20 times more lead than conventional-grown chicken.
Mercola article PDF:
https://media.mercola.com/ImageServer/Public/2024/January/PDF/lab-grown-chicken-pdf.pdf
Below, I share excerpts from one post and two interviews on climate change. (The highlights are mine.) I also share links to several documentaries on the climate.
Here are my takeaways from these sources and a few other links I added.
Don't look at just a climate change graph; look instead at the data and the numbers since they find that as many stations are cooling as they are warming. The graph showing a considerable rise is due to expanding the graph so that those numbers occupy the entire graph.
There is a greenhouse effect. It is not due to a rise in CO2 but due to water vapor and clouds. CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide have a minor impact, but all you hear about is killing the cows to reduce methane and CO2 levels.
However, two videos appear to focus on the CO2 rise and returning it to the soil via regenerative farming. This sounds like a viable solution rather than destroying cattle. I am unable to watch the first one (https//kissthegroundmovie.com) since I do not have Netflix, and the second film will be available in 2024 at select theatres (https://commongroundfilm.org), so I was only able to view the trailers.
Nitrogen: Watch the Nitrogen 2000: Dutch Farmer’s Struggle https://bigpicture.watch/watch/ and what the Dutch government is doing to the farmers, buying up the farmer’s land using taxpayer money, saying they have to do so to protect nature areas.
CO2 is essential for human and plant life.
A warm climate is preferable over an ice age. Deaths during extreme cold periods are more significant than during warmer periods.
The argument that CO2 budget and balance were in equilibrium before humans started burning fossil fuels is not entirely true-there have been considerable variations in CO2 over geologic history.
Here are some excerpts from Jan Jekielek's interview with Richard Lindzen in an Epoch Times interview.
Mr. Lindzen: We have dozens of climate regimes on the earth right now, not one, and they all behave somewhat differently. The notion that there is one number, a temperature of the earth that they all work in lockstep with, is absurd. But that number itself, people don't understand what it is. I could ask you, “What is the temperature of the earth?” How do you answer that?
Mr. Jekielek: My answer is that people are taking temperatures in different places around the world and pulling an average out of that.
Mr. Lindzen: You average Mount Everest and the Dead Sea, and what do you get? No, they don't do that. They realize that doesn't work. The first thing is they take what's called the temperature anomaly. At each station, they take a 30-year mean, roughly 1950 to 1980 let's say, and they then look at the deviation from that mean and they average the deviations at each station. You're getting the average temperature change and that's what you see in this graph.You see this graph. It has been going up since 1800, and certainly by 1880, it’s going up by one and a fraction degree, which isn't a heck of a lot. But there's something wrong with that diagram. What's wrong with that diagram is you don't see the data points. You should always see the data points. If you plot that and show the data points, this little thing going up a degree or so is surrounded by dense clouds of data that are ranging from minus 10 to 10, 20 degrees.
The mean anomaly on that looks like a horizontal line. Your first estimate is that it's constant. There’s a couple of things to be said about that. You take away the data points and then you expand the scale so that one degree or two degrees occupies your whole graph. Now, it looks big. People don't look at the numbers, and they don't know the data. The data itself is saying that at any given point, almost as many stations are cooling as they are warming.That is saying that it's not telling you about any place, which is consistent with the fact that we have many climates. You're right. Then you smooth it out because you don't want to show the wiggles each year. But if you don't have the wiggles, you don't know what's called the variance, which is about 0.4 degrees, which means anytime the media bloviates about a 0.1 degree increase, they're talking about an insignificant increase.
The whole issue at that level depends on a public that is utterly enumerate and cannot read a graph. Unfortunately, when it comes to most politicians, I think that's correct. I've occasionally watched a Senate hearing and somebody comes, Al Gore was often doing this when he was in the Senate, and shows a graph. I thought, "Maybe he's trying to point something out because the graph didn't look right."
No, he wasn't doing that at all. He was showing his colleagues he had a graph as if to say, “Don't screw around with me.” It wasn't that this was information. Coupled with ad infinitum repetition, a la Goebbels, and coupled with the media repeating this, most people just can't deal with it. They assume this can't happen unless there's really something there, but there isn't.
Mr. Jekielek: There's a general understanding that there has been a temperature increase and there's a general understanding that humans have been involved to some extent. How much do we actually know around that?
Mr. Lindzen: It is true there is a greenhouse effect. It is due primarily to water vapor and clouds. CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide are minor, minor constituents. Roughly speaking, if all other things are kept constant and you double CO2, you would get a little under one degree of warming. Now, underlying that statement is some other material in a sense.
For instance, you said all things kept equal. There is something called Le Châtelier's principle, which says long-lasting natural systems will resist change, which is to say, feedback would be negative. Now, in most models today, water vapor and clouds are positive feedback.
There's the underlying assumption that nature will take whatever we do and make it worse. That is kind of an odd assumption, and there's no basis for it, but it does give the models more than a little under a degree. It may even bring it to as high as three degrees.
The next point is that even three degrees isn't that much. We're dealing with changes for a doubling of CO2 on the order of between breakfast and lunch. The thought that people can't handle that is a little bit strange. Where does it come from that this is an existential threat?
Interestingly, it comes from no place except the propaganda. Even the UN's IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] scientific report doesn't speak about an existential threat. They speak about a reduction of GDP [Gross Domestic Product] by 3 percent by 2100, assuming the GDP has increased several times by then. That doesn't sound existential to most people. So, it's a little bit weird.The other thing they point to is if we went to major changes in the past, the last glacial maximum when you had two kilometers of ice over Illinois or 50 million years ago when you had a warm period with alligator-like critters in Svalbard, north of Norway, the mean temperature change was only five degrees.
They said, “Three degrees could be something serious.” The trouble is with the change in the warming of the last 150 years or so, there's no resemblance to the changes during the major change. What happened during the major changes was that the temperature difference between the tropics and the pole, in the case of the last glacial maximum, increased by 20 degrees centigrade. During the warm period, it decreased by 20 degrees. Today, it's about 40. It was 20 during the warm and was about 60 during the glacial period. Of course, that gave a large change in the mean.
During those periods, the tropics remained almost constant. On the other hand, the greenhouse change and the observed change since 1800 or 1880, it doesn't matter, almost all occurred in the tropics and there was no change in the tropics to pole, which is exactly different. Now, why is that important?
The tropics to pole temperature difference depends on the dynamics of the heat transport by motion. To some extent, the equator depends on the greenhouse effect. The change we are seeing could be due to CO2 about a degree, but it is not changing from the tropics to pole. Three degrees is not something amplified at the pole. It's three degrees or one degree or a half degree every place.
The thought that this is existential and requires massive changes is unreasonable. It's absurd. In a way, CO2 is the dream of a regulator. If you control CO2, you control breathing. If you control breathing, you control everything. This always is one temptation.
The other temptation is the energy sector. No matter how much you clean fossil fuels, they will always produce water vapor and CO2. You have the whole energy sector that is one of the few sectors that is in the many trillions of dollars. There is a huge opportunity there, even though it makes no sense.
They forget that CO2 is essential. We're treating it as a poison. Most people believe the narrative, and they also believe CO2 is dangerous. For instance, the concentration of CO2 in your mouth is about 40,000 parts per million, as opposed to 400 outside. 5,000 is permitted on a space station.
It's hardly a poison, but worse than that, it's actually essential. If you could get rid of 60 percent of the CO2, we would all be dead. It is very strange to call it a pollutant. It's essential for plant life, and it's the basis for photosynthesis. Yet, because it is the inevitable product of fossil fuel burning and the energy sector, it is being attacked.In his post, Dr. Sircus writes about climate change and discusses the fear-mongering about the rising CO2 levels.
https://drsircus.com/carbon-dioxide/thank-the-gods-for-more-carbon-dioxide/
Dr. Sircus writes
At the beginning of the 20th Century, atmospheric CO2 levels were low. In 1900, the carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration in Earth’s atmosphere was approximately 295 parts per million (ppm). This estimate is based on data from ice core samples and other historical records.
The minimum level of CO2 necessary for plant life depends on several factors, including the type of plant, environmental conditions, and the growth stage. However, plants typically require CO2 concentrations ranging from 150 to 450 parts per million (ppm) in the surrounding air for healthy growth. So, on average, 200 ppm would be closing in on an extinction-level event where many plants would suffocate.
295 ppm was close enough for comfort. Commercial growers use CO2 enrichment techniques to increase CO2 levels in enclosed environments like greenhouses. Elevated levels, often in the 1,000 to 1,500 ppm range, can significantly enhance photosynthesis and boost plant growth and yield. Higher CO2 levels lead to more efficient carbohydrate production and faster plant growth. At 400 ppm, where we now are, we are talking about a green planet that we should wish was getting warmer. However, as the grand solar minimum bites hard in the decade ahead and sun spots drop to zero, we can expect a deep freeze.
Doctor Malik interviewed Judith Curry on climate change at this link, and below, I share some excerpts from that interview.
https://docmalik.com/105-judith-curry-talks-about-climate-change-and-the-problems-with-science/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email rupa
Dr. Malik’s substack is docmalik@substack.com
The pre-industrial period was in the little ice age, the coldest period of the last millennium. Why are people holding that up as the Goldilocks climate? You know, what’s wrong with warming? People have referred to, you know, warm climate periods as the optimum.You know, the Roman optimum or the mid Holocene optimum, you know, these are the warm periods. These are good for life on the planet. You know, so what exactly are we worried about? You know, since the late 1800s, we’ve warmed by 1.2 degrees centigrade, you know, over that period of time. Population has grown explosively, life span has increased substantially.Global poverty is vastly reduced, agricultural productivity and yields are way up. Even the per capita life loss from extreme weather and climate events is down by two orders of magnitude. So, so far, we’ve been doing really well in the face of this warming that we’ve seen so far. And right now there’s nothing particularly bad about the weather or climate. I mean, people blame extreme weather events on the warming. Well, even the IPCC doesn’t find much in the way of anything that the warming is causing in terms of more extreme weather events. Yes, we’re getting more heat waves, but we’re also getting fewer extreme cold periods.And the deaths in extreme cold periods are an order of magnitude greater than during hot periods. So, you know, overall, this is a good thing. So to me, this issue of whether this is dangerous is the weakest part of the whole argument. Yes, we have the slow creep of sea level rise and glacier melting, but, you know, we can easily adapt to that.So the only way to really alarm someone is to mistakenly blame extreme weather events on the warming or talk about hypothetical tipping points. You know, the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, you know, the collapse of the Gulf Stream, you know, all of these things that have a very low chance of happening in the 21st century.
And if they did, they’re more likely to be caused by natural climate variability than by CO2-driven warming. So what are we left with?
We’re not left with a lot to worry about. No, we don’t want to keep polluting and endlessly dumping things into the atmosphere and whatever in the ocean. So we should minimize that where we can. But these urgent deadlines that we’re facing and the cow farts situation and screwing with our agriculture and our electric power systems. I mean, it’s just insane that that’s a recipe for human suffering, economic collapse, and trashing of our environment.
I mean, people are going to start burning wood. Electricity is too expensive or it’s not sufficiently available, and all these wind turbines and solar power plants are having very adverse ecosystem impacts. What we’re doing right now is just so beyond stupid, all in the interest of maybe improving, having a better climate in the 22nd century. Even if we’re successful with this net zero by 2050 or whatever the slogan is, we’re not gonna notice that.
So what we’re doing makes absolutely no sense. And I lay this out in great detail in my book with 1500 references and so forth and so on. Oh, there’s so much natural variability. I mean, it was slowing down for a while. And then we had this crazy spike this year that started mid-May, and it looks like it’s turned the corner, but this will probably end up being the warmest year. But, you know, totally nothing related to greenhouse gas emissions. It’s circulation patterns, changing the clouds, changing the radiation balance. And then we also have the…hung a tong of volcanic eruption in there, which is also playing with the stratosphere in terms of the water vapor. So it’s been an unusual year, but it has absolutely nothing to do with CO2 emissions.
The argument is that the CO2 budget and balance was in equilibrium before humans started burning fossil fuels. Well, that’s not entirely true. There have been some pretty large variations in carbon dioxide over geologic history and some orders of magnitude higher of CO2 concentrations earlier in the planet's history.
So there’s plenty of natural fluctuations in CO2. So the argument is that the humans have disturbed the balance, so the excess, the increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide is caused by humans. Well, some of it certainly is. I mean, we don’t have a good enough understanding of the quantitative understanding of the global carbon dynamics and budget, the uptakes by the oceans and releases by the oceans and by plants and geologic processes and all sorts of things.
We have a pretty good qualitative understanding, but again, we don’t have a good quantitative understanding. And new research continues to turn up surprises. So sure, humans have contributed to the increase in the atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Well, we’ve had good satellites up since about 1980, and the planet is definitely greening in like something like 80% of the region that are covered. And the plants, the forests, agriculture, and everything is thriving in a higher CO2 environment. I mean, in a greenhouse, you’re pumping CO2 in there to help the plants grow. So yeah, the plants are thriving, and they’re also as they…grow more, they uptake more CO2 from the atmosphere. So they’re helping keep, you know, CO2 under control. That’s part of the carbon balance and budget and the carbon cycle, how all these things interact. So yeah, now the plants are thriving. And people are talking about.Yeah, species extinction, you know, the species, no, the plant stuff is doing fine. I mean, any problems that we might be causing with species extinction is really related to land use. You know, the fact that we cemented over cities and whatever and cut down for us, but simply burning CO2 at the plants like it.
So we are impacting, but the flip side of that, that we can actually control the climate, that’s where it gets really stupid. Like we can somehow control the climate by eliminating CO2 emissions. That’s where it becomes stupid. Because we’ve, for better or for worse, we’ve set this into a play. There’s all sorts of feedbacks, long time scales.
So thinking that we can, you know, everything’s gonna be fine if we stop emitting CO2. No, we’re still gonna have extreme weather events. The sea levels are gonna continue to arise. You know, the glaciers are gonna continue to shrink until the next big, you know, natural climate variability cycle impact or whatever kicks in. I mean, 4,000 years from now, we’ll probably be in an ice age. That’s gonna be a much bigger challenge for us.A great explanation of the how climate change data can be deceptive
I admit that the climate is not my area of expertise, so I enjoy listening to experts in the area and watching documentaries to understand it better.
But from a nutritionist perspective, I feel this will only push us towards even more illness and disease.