Bad news for Butchers

Rajendra Pachauri is the Chairman of the IPCC — the deeply compromised UN climate change body that is presented as a scientific consensus, but is starting to look more and more like a political campaign.  Mr. Pachauri is a vegetarian.  And he has just suggested that we should all eat less meat, in an attempt to limit climate change.  It seems that global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the agriculture sector exceed those from the transport sector, and much of these emissions come from cattle.  Both ends, apparently.
 
One starts to wonder if there is any limit to the hubris and moral superiority of these high priests of the new global warming religion, or any limit to the right they arrogate to themselves to tell the rest of us how to live.  Mr. Pachauri seems to lack any historical context.  The oceans have been teeming with life for three billion years, and the land for hundreds of millions of years.  Zillions of animals producing all kinds of emissions.  A hundred million years ago we had a world of dinosaurs.  Most were herbivorous, and you can bet that one large herbivorous dinosaur would emit more GHGs than a truckload of cattle.  More recently, when the first Europeans found their way to the Great Plains of North America, the landscape was described as “black with bison”.  Ditto the plains of Africa before fire-arms arrived.  The world has coped very well over millennia with large numbers of animals.
 
We need to get CO2 emissions in proportion.  Yes, CO2 is a GHG, but a relatively minor one compared with water vapour — about which we can do nothing at all.  And man-made CO2 emissions are a tiny fraction — a few percent — of the vast exchange of CO2 between volcanoes, oceans, atmosphere and the bio-sphere.  In any case, the “climate forcing” (greenhouse) effect of CO2 is governed by a logarithmic relationship.  It is a law of diminishing returns.  At current atmospheric CO2 levels (about 380 parts per million), CO2 is doing just about all the warming it is capable of, and further CO2 increases will have a trivial effect.
 
The IPCC knows this, so it tries to sustain the alarmist scenario by postulating positive feed-back effects between CO2 and water vapour.  But it impossible to demonstrate these feed-back effects, and some scientists argue that any feedback that exists could be negative.  In any case, the relationships between CO2, ocean currents and oscillations, water vapour, clouds at various levels, cloud formation, the earth’s albedo (reflectivity), and the effects of solar radiation in the upper atmosphere are so complex and little understood that the computer model projections on which climate alarmism is based are not worth the paper they are written on.
 
We plan to waste crippling sums of money on policies designed to reduce CO2 emissions, but we are barking up the wrong tree.  And Rajendra Pachauri is just plain barking.  Meantime I am planning to have locally-made butcher’s sausages for my dinner, and nothing the IPCC says will change my mind.