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Well we know that global warming has a detrimental effect on the planet.

We also know that livestock contribute around 14% of emissions that cause global warming
Reducing live stock consumption would therefore reduce climate change.

Individuals cannot be trusted to do the right thing for the greater good - we've seen again and again that people will do what they want.

Additionally, there is a government body that knows what is good and harmful. It's called the FDA. The FDA has been very effective at stopping food borne illnesses and helping people have safe eating habits.

This has been practiced by vector control authorities for decades in the U.S.

When it's out of the news for so long, a repeat of the past becomes novel for a new generation.

yep. And one of those is the screwworm that has been eradicated from the USA, Mexico, and Central America. (and re-eradicated after being reintroduced)
http://www.fao.org/docrep/U422...
https://www.aphis.usda.gov/aph...

We should tackle the worst offenders first. A global shift to zero emission transportation would be a game changer.

Except, of course, that transportation isn't "the worst offender"; globally it's about 14% of total GHG emissions, and only a fraction of that can reasonably be switched to "zero emission". The "worst offenders" are industry, heating, electricity, and agriculture.

True, (but or and,) guess what contributes to that agriculture section? Cattle have to eat, and they eat a lot, compared to to all our other protein sources. They contribute double all the other animals combined.
http://www.fao.org/docrep/018/...
So, besides just the farts (aka eructation), here's some sources of greenhouse gasses produced through the creation of food used to feed livestock:

Feed production:
Direct and indirect N2O from:
        Application of synthetic N
        Application of manure
        Direct deposition of manure by grazing and scavenging animals
        Crop residue management

Non-feed production:
        Energy use in field operations
        Energy use in feed transport and processing
        Fertilizer manufacture
        Feed blending
        Production of non-crop feedstuff (fishmeal, lime and synthetic amino acids)
        CH4 from flooded rice cultivation
        Land-use change related to soybean cultivation

Err - where did you see the UN retract their report? Their report, Livestock's Long Shadow is still totally relevant and hasn't been "retracted": http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/...

And did you even look at the article? The big chart clearly shows that in the US methane from cows is the second biggest source (25%) after natural gas and petroleum (31%). (And since when is Popular Science 'anti-meat'?)

It's literally right there in the article, yet you're spouting this nonsense..come on.

Time to plant trees. Lots of trees.

You could cover the entire planet surface with trees and it still wouldn't be enough. It's time to start using technology to produce billions of machines that actively and permanently remove carbon from the air.

Okay. But until we have such machines, the most readily available carbon-sink, cost-effective and easily deployed with unskilled labour, is the tree.

OK, let's calculate. Here's a source talking about CO2 absorption by trees: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new... , and here's a source saying "A tree can absorb as much as 48 pounds of carbon dioxide per year and can sequester 1 ton of carbon dioxide by the time it reaches 40 years old.": https://projects.ncsu.edu/proj...

This one says that trees absorb 40% of the 28 billion tons of carbon dioxide emitted per year: World's forests absorb almost 40 per cent of man made CO2

If we take just that last figure, it's easy: we need to increase the number of trees to 250% of the existing number: plant an additional 150% as many trees as already exist on Earth.

Google tells me that 30% of the Earth's land area is covered by trees ( ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/0... ), so the quick estimate is that we need to plant enough trees to change this to 75%.

Because an alarming ecological story comes up, and without evidence or even a rational hypothetical cause, it's immediately blamed on climate change.

Most insects are herbivorous, so rely on plants for food. Global warming (increasing global temperatures, higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations, shorter winters) are conducive to plant growth. So you'd actually expect temperatures increasing by a few degrees to lead to more insects, not fewer.

Loss of continuous habitat is possible, but I'd consider it unlikely. Larger species are more susceptible to that than smaller ones like insects. We would've noticed the loss of biomass there first.

My bet is on pesticides. You state later that Canada and the EU are eco-friendly, therefore speculating that they use less pesticides. But this map (pages 17, 47-49) shows the EU uses more pesticides per hectare than the U.S./Canada, and are only exceeded by China and some South and Central American countries. (The EU uses more pesticides than the U.S. and Canada because it has less arable land but more population. So to feed itself the EU needs to grow more food per hectare.) Pesticide use in kg/ha is down slightly since 1989, but I suspect this is more than offset by development of more effective pesticides.

Who's Balanced diet?
USDA HTML Images All of the USDA postings are from special interests, many by food marketing people.
UK NHS Eating a balanced diet
wikipedia HTML Images
JapanDietary guidelines for Japanese (Japanese: ), Basic Law on Shokuiku
or traditional japan dietJapanese Traditional 5 color diet
Or do you follow the latest fad - seems like a personal choice. I prefer to vary my diet and not over do highly processed foods,

Uh, there's more to that story. Here's what the FAO has to say about it.

When emissions from land use and land use change are included, the livestock sector accounts for 9 percent of CO2 deriving from human-related activities, but produces a much larger share of even more harmful greenhouse gases. It generates 65 percent of human-related nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CO2. Most of this comes from manure. And it accounts for respectively 37 percent of all human-induced methane (23 times as warming as CO2), which is largely produced by the digestive system of ruminants, and 64 percent of ammonia, which contributes significantly to acid rain.

I'm sure you would look at a picture of an arithmetic logic unit and say the proper descriptive term is "microchip thingy", too; you'd also be wrong.

According to your definition, every linux user would have a stake in every single Windows laptop.

Actually, when developing a Windows laptop, one consideration is its impact on your user base of other products. If the laptop would tend to draw Linux users to use it, you have to decide how to handle that. That can be handled by either ignoring them (e.g. if you don't market to them), adjusting the design (to capture the Linux user market by making sure it works with Linux distributions such as Ubuntu), or marketing it differently (e.g. providing a "Linux-Ready" branding on your Linux-ready laptops, and not branding it on the product page for that laptop).

HP actually had a laptop known for its broken ACPI BIOS code for a while--I actually replaced the BIOS firmware with a modified version. Once the problem was identified, Linux users avoided the entire product line. The practical impact of this is HP no longer had the ability to market any media laptop to Linux users, which also influenced casual users who went asking their nerdy friends what media laptop to buy. There's no other market for HP in that space: users prone to do their own research would frequently buy Toshiba; users looking for the best-marketed or shiniest thing were buying Sony Vaio; and users who wanted something cheap and good for that use case but didn't know or care how to evaluate it for their own needs would ask their tech-savvy friends if the laptop they were looking at was "good"--in which case, any Linux user would end up Googling it, find hardware issues, and indicate that it is in fact a broken piece of shit. Oops?

The outcome in this space is usually not that extreme, and usually not that quiet when it is.

A stakeholder is generally thought to be someone actively affected or involved, not people who haven't bought into it and will avoid it like the plague because they checked behind the marketing bs to see the reality.

Is that so?

We consider stakeholders who are indirectly affected and who only think they're affected in some way because they can become loud and annoying. Look at the stakeholders of the oil pipelines of late--protesters standing around near burial grounds complaining about the oil pipeline and its cultural impacts. Many of these are people from far away who aren't impacted by the oil pipeline in any direct manner--they don't rely on and didn't even know about the ancient burial grounds until someone told them about it; then they became angry hippies. They sure have managed to cost the oil companies a shitload of money and bad publicity interfering with the development of their oil pipeline; and their behavior has drawn attention of politicians (high-power stakeholders), who can directly interfere with the project.

I guess you would say those people aren't stakeholders, ignore them, and then get your face raped off and continue to swear that you were in the right to pretend they didn't exist right until you got beat down by people you didn't account for.

Just as a point of reference, look up eradication of the screwworm fly. E.g., http://www.fao.org/docrep/U422...

Asexual reproduction would be one way to avoid being killed. There might be other recessive traits that also might surface.

It is obvious that asexual reproduction would be a way to avoid being killed. What I asked is how that could possibly evolve in Aedes aegypti. Are you suggesting that there already exist some female mosquitos that reproduce parthenogenetically, and that they will take over the species once the sexually reproducing ones die off? This is just impossible. Asexual reproduction is a complex adaptation, it doesn't just happen.

I think there is a widespread misconception that DNA is some kind of magic box that can do anything, and that we have no idea how it works. It is not magic. It cannot do everything. And we do know a lot about it.

And you are failing to take into account that the screwworm has been eradicated from some regions via a sterile male technique without any frankenstein appearing.

It is short-lived. The point is to breed lots of mosquitos, and release in an area. You continue doing this for several cycles, and significantly depress numbers of mosquitos in the area.

The mosquitos in principle are very cheap and easy to raise - you need to grow them in a very low-tech lab, with tetracycline in their food, and then sort by size before releasing them. (the large ones are females which you destroy).
You can actually exterminate species this way.
This has been done before. From http://www.fao.org/docrep/U422...
"USDA scientists next arranged a screwworm eradication experiment against a completely isolated population on the island of Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles. The island covers an area of 440 km and is 65 km from the coast of Venezuela. Screwworms were mass-reared in a facility near Orlando, Florida. Irradiated pupae were shipped by air to Curaçao, and the emerged flies were released by a single-engine plane flying 1.6 km wide swaths over the island. Each week 300 sterile flies were released per square kilometre during the eradication phase. Within less than six months from the initiation of the experiment, screwworms were eradicated from the island of Curaçao, in 1954 (Baumhover et al., 1955). "

The answer is we don't know, and those who say "no way" and those that say "absolutely" have little evidence to support or contradict them, since it's all speculation.

However, according to the EPA humans have been producing between 5 and 6 GT (billion metric tonnes) or CO2 a year form quite some time. Trying to grow meat in a laboratory and make it scalable like this likely produces less than a few tonnes, so less than 0.0000001% increase. Estimates of the animal agriculturla contribution to this seem to average around 5% (World Resources Institute, UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and Pitesky et al. 2009) [NB: I just eyeballed this, didn't actually pull out a spreadsheet].so about 300,000,000T.

If we "spend" 2-6T of CO2 for a mere 1% chance that if adopted widely it will save emissions from meat production by an ultra-paltry 1 in 10,0000 (300,000T/year), even factoring the risk, it's a really smart investment. So do it. Once you're done, then let's talk about how it will save the world from Global Warming.

Abstract: the water may have just been treated for bacteria, and that hasn't cut it for urban effluent for at least a decade.

I've read the paper, and I was disappointed to find that the researchers didn't provide any context regarding the type(s) of treatment used on the wastewater before it was dumped into the irrigation systems.

I followed up with one of the footnotes: Wastewater treatment and use in agriculture - FAO irrigation and drainage paper 47, where I find in section 2.3 that for water to be recycled for crops that were likely to be eaten uncooked, the FAO is just talking in terms of stabilization ponds for killing off the microorganisms. That's not enough. It also needs to be filtered, as if they were dealing with brackish or seawater.

I'd been to a couple of American Water Works Association conferences in the aughts, so I know the treatment industry has been aware of and has the techniques for clearing what goes into our toilets out of the waste water at manageable costs. As of the 2007 conference, the main concern was to avoid loading up the critters downstream from the waste water plants with caffeine, birth control hormones, pain relievers, and recreational drugs.

But, given the anticipated growth in water reuse for both irrigation and drinking, water system managers were already anticipating the need to do better. In this case, the Israelis obviously need to do better.

Full disclosure: I served on a water supply board for 5 years.

Don't forget Hemlock!

Who ever modded you down most likely did so in ignorance but your post brings to light the fact that Tsuga heterophylla (the western hemlock) has a cambium layer that is highly nutritious. Here on slashdot there are very few who actually know squat about trees and the fact that the cambium layer of many trees is a viable food source. It is something which we should not dismiss out of hand. It is obvious that the quality of the audience that frequents slashdot is going for a shit if no one else understands the importance of trees as a potential food source for the future.

Western Hemlock, Black Spruce (Picea mariana) and many other species of trees helped sustain and were a very important source of starch for most tribes in North America. In our ignorance and stupidity we dismissed and failed to learn the importance of their food gathering methods and sources. In the future if we continue to ignore how they survived and thrived for thousands of years and continue to think that it was purely by means of eating animals then we will miss what is really possible with what was here in North America in abundance. If we learn to slowly augment and change our food culture and agricultural methods to make them more sustainable in our environment then perhaps we can thrive in the future and do less damage to the environment.

I am posting anon so that I can mod you up to at least try to reveal your original post. Perhaps you did not know the difference between a hemlock tree and a hemlock plant that is in the carrot family but if this is the case the irony of your post is worth the reading at least for those who have some education in North American forest ecology. Here in North America there is no reason why our lumber industry cannot also become a sustainable food industry especially in regards to some species of Hemlock and Spruce which are two of our key lumber tree species. All we have to do is open our minds. We can lead the world in developing ecologically sensitive sustainable food sources if we really learn to look to the past and not dismiss the knowledge of those who came before us.

I'm an occasional writer who's not good enough to go pro, but I have looked at some authoring tools, and haven't found any I like better than several terminal windows running vim.

This book is quite beautiful - produced completely in emacs org mode.

It was even written collaboratively. Export to docx works well enough in emacs org mode using pandoc. There is a discussion here

Europe clearly has undergone massive deforestation at the hands of its inhabitants, and the resulting carbon that was released into the atmosphere,
And since the 1960ths the forests in the industrialized world have been regrowing till today to a level we had around 1600. There are plenty of stories and satellite photos/maps about this.

We have a "high forest level", the highest since centuries.

Actually, forests hold more carbon than the entire atmosphere. ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/0...

Might be, more reason not to burn them :D

They also capture the equivalent of 30% of all man-made emissions (about as much as oceans).
That is wrong in both ways.
The CO2 consumption of woods and oceans are a zero sum game. They release as much as they consume, except for short blossoms of growth as we experience it right now as we are pumping so much CO2 into the atmosphere.

Your idea implies: if mankind would not produce CO2, woods and oceans would suck up all of it, and soon we hat an CO2 free atmosphere: that is wrong.

Europe clearly has undergone massive deforestation at the hands of its inhabitants, and the resulting carbon that was released into the atmosphere,Actually, forests hold more carbon than the entire atmosphere. ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/0...

Might be, more reason not to burn them :D

They also capture the equivalent of 30% of all man-made emissions (about as much as oceans).
That is wrong in both ways.
The CO2 consumption of woods and oceans are a zero sum game. They release as much as they consume, except for short blossoms of growth as we experience it right now as we are pumping so much CO2 into the atmosphere.

Your idea implies: if mankind would not produce CO2, woods and oceans would suck up all of it, and soon we hat an CO2 free atmosphere: that is wrong.

Neither is the puny amount of wood burned any comparison to the amount of oil/coal burned nor are we down to 10% of woods.

Well, I'm glad you at least agree implicitly that countries ought to be held responsible (1) for the carbon released by deforestation relative to natural, prehistoric levels, and (2) need to be charged for the capture deficit resulting for the forest cover that is missing relative to natural, prehistoric levels.

One can quibble about the percentages later, but suffice it to say: no matter how you look at it, Europe clearly has undergone massive deforestation at the hands of its inhabitants, and the resulting carbon that was released into the atmosphere, as well as the missing carbon sequestration capacity should be treated just like emissions.

All wood on earth burned today would add less than a one year CO2 pollution mankind is doing every year.

Actually, forests hold more carbon than the entire atmosphere. ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/0...

They also capture the equivalent of 30% of all man-made emissions (about as much as oceans).

Nothing happens for some plant types, and even the authors of this study said may. They had good reason to.

http://www.fao.org/docrep/w518...

To quote from its abstract:

The consensus of many studies of the effects of elevated CO2 on plants is that the CO2 fertilization effect is real (see Kimball, 1983; Acock and Allen, 1985; Cure and Acock, 1986; Allen, 1990; Rozema et al., 1993; Allen, 1994; Allen and Amthor, 1995). However, the CO2 fertilization effect may not be manifested under conditions where some other growth factor is severely limiting, such as low temperature (Long, 1991). Also, plants grown in some conditions, where limitations of rooting volume (Arp, 1991), light, or other factors restrict growth, have not shown a sustained response to elevated CO2 (Kramer, 1981).

Note well that again they use the term may. This is because -- unlike you -- they seem to recognize that even though the effect is real and will have an impact in many locations and conditions, including those that generally hold in agriculture where one generally avoids growing plants in strongly resource constrained environments, one can certainly suppress the effect (or fail to observe it in the wild) in specific environments, and they go even further and note that the effect is differential according to plant type with some plant types more likely to exhibit a stronger response or be resource limited than others.

The bulk of this report simply works through specific food crop species and estimates their likely response to a mix of increased CO2 and the imagined climate changes that are predicted, or projected, or prophecied (as you wish) by the GCMs that so far haven't done a very good job of PP or P-ing the climate.

You would obviously like more papers:

http://iopscience.iop.org/1748...

http://www.nature.com/nclimate...

(Abstract: Satellite observations reveal a greening of the globe over recent decades. The role in this greening of the “CO2 fertilization” effect—the enhancement of photosynthesis due to rising CO2 levels—is yet to be established. The direct CO2 effect on vegetation should be most clearly expressed in warm, arid environments where water is the dominant limit to vegetation growth. Using gas exchange theory, we predict that the 14% increase in atmospheric CO2 (1982–2010) led to a 5 to 10% increase in green foliage cover in warm, arid environments. Satellite observations, analyzed to remove the effect of variations in precipitation, show that cover across these environments has increased by 11%. Our results confirm that the anticipated CO2 fertilization effect is occurring alongside ongoing anthropogenic perturbations to the carbon cycle and that the fertilization effect is now a significant land surface process.)

Probably the best review article on the effect on trees, in particular, is this:

http://www.climateaudit.info/p...

where in laboratory experiments on trees increasing CO2 by 300 ppm increased growth by 50 to 60%. Idso remarks that the problem with laboratory experiments is the opposite of what you assert -- it is difficult to grow trees in the lab without constraining their roots and access to resources and work he cites (in less abundance as it was ongoing in 1993) suggested that the response in the wild is even higher.

In general, in the mean, increasing ONLY CO2 in the environments of most wild plants does, in fact, increase their biomass and the net biomass of the Earth has almost certainly substantially increased on average, allowing for changes in land use over the last century. The effect is pronounced and relatively enormous in trees (and yes, I can cite papers t

I read TFA, and looked as some of the links. I have no idea what the overall situation is, and these sites certainly do not provide the information. Just as an example, I found various maps that document forest losses. Areas of the world where forest cover is increasing (most of Europe, for example) are simply shown as "no losses". In other words, they show forests that were cut down, or that burned, but they do not show newly forested areas, or forests that have recovered from burning.

With this kid of biased data, we have no idea what the overall global balance is.

Finding unbiased data turns out to be really difficult, at least, after 20 minutes or so I hadn't found anything I trusted. There were some national agencies where you could download raw data. But every organization that has put data together into some sort of overview is an organization that has a political point to make. Greenpeace always cooks the numbers to make their point. The same for logging industry sites, only they cook the numbers in the opposite direction.

The best site I found is from the World Bank, but it only goes through 2012, and doesn't provide much detail. According to the summary graph, 31.0% of the total land area of the planet was covered by forest in 2010, 30.9% in 2011, and then back up to 31.0% in 2012. Another presumably neutral site is from the UN, but their data only goes through 2010.

Does anyone have a better source that provides halfway objective information on this stuff?

Your quibbling, missed my point, or are intentionally treating an hypothetical example as an actual example.

It's not quibbling. Your type of claims are ubiquitous across the internet: people who claim they consume less energy than would be required to keep an equivalently-sized, perfectly-metabolizing, immobile rock above ambient temperature, and they still claim they are running an energy surplus sufficient for lipogenesis. I mean, it must be either that or God is sending angels down from heaven to load them up with fat, right?

First- surely you are not suggested that every person who eats the same meal absorbs exactly the same amount of calories into their system, right?

I'll let you carefully reread my last post and decide for yourself. Hint: you really don't have to read between the lines.

The last person could only eat 750 calories worth of food per day and not gain weight.

That person would lose weight due to their energy deficit. Are you somehow alleging that these people can extract more energy from food than can be obtained by fully combusting it in a bomb calorimeter (i.e. the gross energy)? That's the same magical thinking you exhibited before. For reference, I refer you to the difference between gross energy and available energy in macronutrients.

Once you start claiming that you are gaining weight when you are consuming less than your RMR (which does not vary substantially across studies), or, hell, claiming that you are consuming less gross energy available in the mass of food you have consumed than it takes to keep one of those "magic rocks" above ambient temperature, then your claim is absolutely tantamount to magical thinking.

Try it for yourself: calculate your BMR, calculate that mass equivalent in gross energy available in pure fat (just to make it easy to weigh out). Consume it as your sole caloric input. It is impossible to gain weight, presuming you are not pouring said food into a non-metabolizing corpse. Yes, literally impossible in this universe.

So, when someone has a scenario where they believe they have consumed less than their metabolic expenditure (which is, of course, greater than their RMR) in caloric input and yet they claim they gained fat, which claim do you believe has been falsified: thermodynamics, or the amount of caloric input they believe they have ingested? We already know it's not the metabolic energy expenditure that's incorrect.

Perhaps if your last statement reads

No. My statement stands as written. If you choose to disbelieve thermodynamics then you're welcome to your false religion.

Food production is not a valid argument, IMHO.

We already produce 2700 calories per person per day. That's plenty to feed everyone a healthy diet. The reason so many people don't have enough food has nothing to do with the amount of food available and everything to do with logistics, politics, and inequity: The food simply isn't getting to where it's needed. Growing even more food is not going to solve that problem.

Similarly, biofuel production need not make use of land that is suitable for growing common food crops. Even though I advocate biofuels, even I'm against using food crops to do so.
=Smidge=

CO2 is causing problems, right now. Real problems.

Actually Crop production is at near record highes [fao.org] , in part because the necessary nutrient CO2 is available in increased amounts. Both Arctic [uaf.edu] and Antarctic [uiuc.edu] sea ice is increasing, and there hasn't been any statistically significant Global Warming/Climate Change for 18 years; so please feel free to be more specific. If you'd go outside and actually experience some enviroment, you'd realizes that it's pretty fucking cold outside and we still have 4 weeks to go before winter starts.

I always blame Global Warming for cold weather. PC name may be Climate Change, but the only real 'change' that is ever talked about is how the planet is warming up.

CO2 is causing problems, right now. Real problems.

Actually Crop production is at near record highes, in part because the necessary nutrient CO2 is available in increased amounts. Both Arctic and Antarctic sea ice is increasing, and there hasn't been any statistically significant Global Warming/Climate Change for 18 years; so please feel free to be more specific. If you'd go outside and actually experience some enviroment, you'd realizes that it's pretty fucking cold outside and we still have 4 weeks to go before winter starts.

Interesting. Your reference does seem to claim only 7%. However it does claim that animal agriculture is the most significant fraction of the 7%:

Although the scientific literature points to reduced meat consumption as an effective mitigation strategy in regards to climate change?[25, 30, 31, 38, 39], to date, agricultural production has been largely ignored in climate policy [40, 41]. A study by Wiresenius, Hedenus, and Mohlin concludes that implementing an emissions tax of ?60 per tonne CO2e ($77 per tonne CO2e in 2012 USD) on animal food products would reduce agricultural CO2e emissions in the EU by 32 million metric tons annually, which represents approximately 7% of the EU?s total, annual agricultural GHG emissions?[40]. An emissions price on the downstream consumption of GHG-intensive agricultural goods (i.e. a GHG emission tax or emissions trading scheme) is one means of implementing a CO2e construct using price signals and market forces to implement diet shifts as a climate mitigation strategy.

The UN study (which supports my claim) factors in things like methane emissions not only from cattle grazing but from anaerobic decomposition of livestock "waste pools", livestock processing and refrigerated transport. Also slash and burn of rainforests (60% of which is claimed to be for cattle). The full study is here:
http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/...

How do you think the lumber/paper/tree industry works?

By replanting. But that's not the same thing as net reforestation. Furthermore, the US is not the whole world. World-wide net deforestation has slowed, but it hasn't reversed yet, so where's the global net reforestation to be seen? It is true that even diminishing forests do capture carbon, but the only way I see in which the forests of a net-deforesting Earth could act as a net carbon sink would be if a portion of the lumber larger than the difference between the lumbered and replanted areas were used for long-term sequestration, such as biochar projects. Things like paper or furniture are going to end up as fuel biomass one day, so they don't count for this purpose.

>... it means giving up land that could otherwise be cultivated or developed. And that's something humans have never willingly done...

Perhaps you meant globally, and over many centuries. But in the US and since WWII you are wrong; we are willingly reforesting land that has previously been cultivated

From the linked article:
"Forest growth nationally has exceeded harvest since the 1940s."
"the average standing wood volume per acre in US forests is about one-third greater today than in 1952; in the East, average volume per acre has almost doubled."

The FAO food price index doesn't appear to be especially "up" right now:

http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsi...

So how does this model work again?

In 2006, the food index was only 127. Yet, there were 15 large scale riots, 9 large scale strikes, 6 wars, of which at least 2 new wars in 2006, and countless other conflicts not mentioned on the wikipedia page about conflicts in 2006. And I just picked a random year.

Conflicts (general): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Strikes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Riots: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Food index: http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsi...

Ah, so everyone who opposes Maduro is a violent fascist, just like everyone who opposes the rule of Kagame in Rwanda is a genocidaire and everyone who opposes Putin turns out to secretly be an agent of anti-Russian overseas powers.

Your "everyone" argument is a strawman as no one suggests that all protests are fascist.

Interesting that 'the Bolivarian Revolution' is taking so long, isn't it? It's almost like the concept of revolution is being used to excuse failures and justify oppressive behaviour on a supposedly 'temporary' but actually permanent basis.

Is it taking long? Poverty has fallen by more than half and extreme poverty by more than two-thirds.
http://venezuelanalysis.com/indicators/2009

Venezuela is also one of 18 countries recognized by the UN for meeting their most stringent anti-hunger targets:
http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/177728/icode/

And for the first time in half a centuary, there is a counter balance to United States hegemony in Latin America. The leaders of Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, and Boliva have all given credit to Chavez and Venezuela for making that possible. In Boliva by the way, there was a US-backed plan to privatize water. To say a counter balance was needed is an understatement.

The legitimacy of a democratic state doesn't just rest on whether elections are held. It also depends on whether there is a genuine space for political debate and opposition. Ruling by edict and refusing to accept that anyone could legitimately oppose 'the Bolivarian Revolution' without being a facist makes any democracy a sham.

Don't kid yourself, the right wing media in Latin America is ruthless and there are media criticisms everyday of the government in Venezuela. And since you think Venezuela is a "sham" democracy, I wonder what you think of the United States? Of course, in the US no one is arrested for protesting and alternatives to the two Wall Street owned politcal parties are given plenty of media coverage.

Good catch, that figure is actually the _gross_ deforestation per year.

Net deforestation is actually 34,000 acres per day, accounting for afforestation and natural expansion.

Of course that figure comes from a fly by night Liberal mouthpiece called the Food and Agriculture Of the United Nations, and I'm sure that they're backed by some sort of militant panda bear extremists so you shouldn't trust anything they say.

Good catch, that figure is actually the _gross_ deforestation per year.

Net deforestation is actually 34,000 acres per day, accounting for afforestation and natural expansion.

Of course that figure comes from a fly by night Liberal mouthpiece called the Food and Agriculture Of the United Nations, and I'm sure that they're backed by some sort of militant panda bear extremists so you shouldn't trust anything they say.

I love how when anti-global warming types point at a big snow storm or what-have-you and say 'look, global warming can't be real!' and the pro-global warming crowd points out, rightly, 'weather isn't climate' ... but then when there is a big wind storm or what-have-you the pro-global warming types start crying 'look what global warming is doing! waaaaa!'

It's called Loading the Dice. Big snowstorms acn actually be evidence for global warming (if it's warmer but still below freezing that means more snow in wet areas and less snow in dry areas). But when we start seeing events which probably could not have occurred under previous climate conditions, those individual extreme events may be actually evidence that the baseline has shifted due to global warming. Hot days aren't evidence for global warming, but record-breaking heatwaves and droughts? They probably are.

That being said, any fantasy about humanity being at risk for significant biological hardship is ludicrous considering that we can eat almost anything, live almost anywhere, are more resistant and adaptive to toxins and pathogens than most other large animals, and we have this thing called "technology" that allows us to move anything anywhere, radically adjust our environments, etc. etc.

Actually, the list of domesticated plants and domesticated animals isn't actually that long. If we had significant reductions in the production of just a few staple crops, we could face famine at a level the modern world has never seen. For example, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, maize and wheat alone make up close to two-thirds of the world’s food energy intake. One of the long term consequences of global warming is expected to be reductions in our crop production. Which may leave us dependent on bio-engineering firms like Monsanto to provide us with newly engineered versions of our crops that are adapated to the new climate. Knowing Monsanto, that could get very expensive.

The $64 trillion question is, "Can anybody trace the origin of the meme?". Yeah, people have been eating insects for thousands of years, and there have probably been much earlier suggestions that Westerners try it. I'm talking about a dramatic recent upswing though. What catalyzed it?

The recent media attention and resulting zeitgeist came about because of a recent report by the U.N.'s Food and Agricultural Organization, Edible insects: Future prospects for food and feed security. As an issue that ties well into concerns about food security & poverty, animal welfare, greenhouse gas reduction, and openness to food options eaten in other parts of the world, the issue has become a bit of a liberal hot topic.

("Elitist" is a bit unfair, though. Most of the buzz, if you'll pardon the pun, is from people who are curious about trying it themselves to see if it is a good idea to popularize to tackle a number of issues that are of mass social concern to them.)

I'll take my $64 trillion now. :-)

Even if you believe the entire Asia farmlands turns into few inch deep pond

That pretty well sums up what happened when hard drives became expensive a couple of years ago - surely you noticed it?

Fish Culture in Rice Fields

Food production for 2013 is up 7% worldwide (current estimations) compared to 2012. http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/csdb/en/ Population growth rate is between 1 and 1,5%, so food production grows 5 to 7 times as fast as the population.

Except food production still isn't high enough to feed everyone, so just comparing growth rates is meaningless. Once the underfed all die off, then your comparison will hold merit.

Lets just say the most of the world's industry food industry was done by robots. Then either stockholders in food held the world hostage to do work in other labors, there would be a style of welfare so everyone at least had enough food to survive, or a combination of the two. Sure, a man's job might be taken by a robot, but what was produced doesn't go away. If the owner of the robot wants to be nice, suddenly this man is free to study or work elsewhere and still have enough to eat. If the robot owner wants to be a prick, this man needs to work elsewhere asap or he won't have enough food to eat.

That is just how things are set up in today's society. We generally place a lot of demand on getting work accomplished in order to maximize producing stuff. In the first world countries, even the poor can generally manage to find a place to get food and a shelter. This is a sign that the system works to a degree.

Where things really break down is in the third world countries. In third world countries, people are starving to death! Really, 30 cents a day is the difference between growing up healthy and dying without a chance in third world countries. FAO did a study that says world hunger would for a large part go away if 30 billion a year could be donated. 30 billion a year adds up to about 5$/yr per person on Earth. Since some people can't give 5$/yr, it is the responsibility of us in civilized worlds to give the best we can. There's no justice in the world when millions of kids are starving to death.

So to conclude: Agricultural automation allows the world to produce more by freeing someone to do other work. There is no less food made. The problem lies in how to distribute the food at that point.

The best plants are convert 1.5% of incoming sunlight

That's not true...algae is between 3-6%.

It is a good gimmick and an awesome stunt.

The real issue with livestock is however that it is becoming physically and economically unsustainable: Soil is getting scarce and crops for livestock food already use up to 1/3 of the arable soil (source: FAO. Any increase of this would mean taking a part of the soil used for vegetable production. And despite what some may say this is not feasible because there are people depending on for their own food that and because despite all, vegetables, energy and utility crops and fruit are still a bigger economical player than livestock (face it: even the vegetarians need bread, jeans and beer). And the Frankemat would still need to hog on the resources that are used nowedays directly for meat production or use a part of the other ones making that it would remain expensive.

I have seen a few interview already here in the Dutch TV and for what I recall the stuff is grown on a substrate made of animal bones and there was some other animal products involved, so that the whole point of "slaughterless meat" is not met either.

Back to the economical aspect. It is important to note that meat has no special magical properties and it is 'per se' not strictly necessary, in fact the only thing that meat has in a certain abundance are essential aminoacids. Proteins are not strictly needed for us to survive: We take them form whatever source and divide them into aminoacids, that's all and it doesn't really matter where we get these from or if we get them directly as aminoacids or as proteins. There are also a few vitamins and non-essential aminoacids such as beta-alanine and glutamine and vitamin B12 that can be found in "natural" red meat (not so in common supermarket meat), but both are also available from artificial sources. Regarding the texture there are also cheaper alternatives available such as Quorn, textured soy or to some extent tofu. Note that I am not trying to advocate for vegetarianism but only to point that there are already cheaper alternatives in the market so that I don't even see that this stuff will ever reach mass production...

Unless, of course, they get the basic material from completely different sources such as micro algae grown in bio-reactors or something like that.... but this seems as far flung as the fision reactors.
 

Michael Pollan makes a similar claim in "In Defense of Food" on page 115:

Since the widespread adoption of chemical fertilizers in the 1950s, the nutritional quality of produce in America has declined substantially, according to figures gathered by the USDA, which has tracked the nutrient content of various crops since then. Some researchers blame this decline on the condition of the soil; others cite the tendency of modern plant breeding, which has consistently selected for industrial characteristics such as yield rather than nutritional quality.

More detail is given on page 118.

As mentioned earlier, USDA figures show a decline in the nutrient content of the forty-three crops it has tracked since the 1950s. In one recent analysis, vitamin C declined by 20 percent, iron by 15 percent, riboflavin by 38 percent, calcium by 16 percent. Government figures from England tell a similar story: declines since the fifties of 10 percent or more in levels of iron, zinc, calcium, and selenium across a range of food crops. To put this in more concrete terms, you now have to eat three apples to get the same amount of iron as you would have gotten from a single 1940 apple, and you’d have to eat several more slices of bread to get your recommended daily allowance of zinc than you would have a century ago.

Here are some sources cited for that chapter that sound like they might be relevant to those particular claims:

• Davis, Donald R., et al. “Changes in USDA Food Composition Data for 43 Garden Crops, 1950 to 1999.” Journal of the American College of Nutrition. 23.6 (2004): 669–82.
• Mayer, Anne-Marie. “Historical Changes in the Mineral Content of Fruits and Vegetables.” British Food Journal. 99.6 (1997): 207–11.
• U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). FAOSTAT Statistical Database: “Agriculture/Production/Core Production Data.” Accessed online at http://faostat.fao.org./ USDA Economic Research Service. “Major Trends in U.S. Food Supply, 1909–99.” FoodReview. 23.1 (2000).
• White, P.J., and M. R. Broadley. “Historical Variation in the Mineral Composition of Edible Horticultural Products.” Journal of Horticultural Science & Biotechnology. 80.6 (2005): 660–67.

Some antibiotics also act as a growth enhancer, and they are dosed at sub-thereputic rates for just this reason. http://www.fao.org/docrep/ARTICLE/AGRIPPA/555_EN.HTM

http://www.fao.org/docrep/018/i3253e/i3253e00.htm

Actually, the suffering makes the meat taste worse :

Here the animal is subjected to severe anxiety and fright caused by manhandling, fighting in the pens and bad stunning techniques. All this may result in biochemical processes in the muscle in particular in rapid breakdown of muscle glycogen and the meat becoming very pale with pronounced acidity (pH values of 5.4-5.6 immediately after slaughter) and poor flavour.

You can't even get the basic terms correct. It is so bad I am wondering if I am feeding a troll...

Hmmm... from the Food and Agriculture Organization's International Code of Conduct on the Distribution and Use of Pesticides:

"Pesticide means any substance or mixture of substances intended for preventing, destroying or controlling any pest, including vectors of human or animal disease, unwanted species of plants or animals causing harm during or otherwise interfering with the production, processing, storage, transport or marketing of food, agricultural commodities, wood and wood products or animal feedstuffs, or substances which may be administered to animals for the control of insects, arachnids or other pests in or on their bodies. The term includes substances intended for use as a plant growth regulator, defoliant, desiccant or agent for thinning fruit or preventing the premature fall of fruit, and substances applied to crops either before or after harvest to protect the commodity from deterioration during storage and transport."

10 times for what, beef? Assuming beef, it can actually vary heavily depending on a number of factors such as dry or wet feed (usually 5-20 times).
Of course, not all livestock was created equal. Pork is about 3-4, poultry is around 2, and varying fish are 1-2.

ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/010/a0701e/a0701e02.pdf

Or cows?
http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/2006/1000448/index.html

Even the pyramids won't last that long.

Monuments are the wrong clue to look for. Food production is where it's at -- agriculture already takes up about 40% of our land surface.

The effect of fishing trawlers, to name one example, is such that it currently overshadows all natural processes in determining the distribution of new sedimentary layers on the ocean floor. A civilisation at our level of ecological impact would be geologically significant; a few goat herders not so much.

A biosphere, however, leaves its mark on a world.

I must respectfully disagree. While an advanced macroscopic surface biosphere would indeed be easily detectable, these types of organisms would not. I would nevertheless argue that they are almost certainly extant on both our neighbouring planets.

If you want to discuss net food exports, here's a link to help: http://faostat.fao.org/Portals/_Faostat/documents/pdf/map05.pdf

Not the countries in dark green are highest, and the red countries are lowest. I think the pretty pictures should explain it all to you so you can understand.

You know what is the far most biggest problem to the environment? It is not AGW, it is the exponential population growth. There are already several billion too many of us.

There is no global overpopulation. Some places (such as Japan) are already experiencing population aging and decline, which is bad in many ways. Other places (such as the USA and specially Europe) already have sub-replacement fertility rates, and their population only grows because of demographic lag and immigration. It is predicted the the European Union population (now at 503M) will reach zero natural population increase by 2015 and zero total population increase in 2035 (at 520M), then start declining.

The USA will grow from 310M in 2010 to 403M in 2050. [1]
Asia will increase from 4.2B in 2010 to 5.1B in 2050, then start declining. [2]

The only region that is really growing is Africa. It will increase from 1B in 2010 to 2.2B in 2050. [2] Then its population density will be 73/km2. [3] Compare that to the current population density in Portugal (115/km2), in South Korea (487/km2) and in Taiwan (641/km2). [4]

Global population is predicted to grow from 7B in 2011 to 9B in 2050 and 10B in 2100 [5] and start falling soon after [6].

And according to [7], 40-50% of America-produced food is thrown away. According to [8], 1/3 of the world food is thrown away.
And this does not take into account that people eat, just for pleasure, excessive quantities of resource-intensive food (such as meat). If Americans/Europeans want to help the poor, an easy way would be to decrease (say, by 30%) their diet of meat. This will immediately reduce food demand and, for double bonus, the saved money can be donated to charity. And much arable land is wasted on subsidized inefficient corn-based ethanol. You can lobby your government to stop that.

Plus, there does not seem to be a negative correlation between population density and GDP per capita. [9]

African hunger is not caused by overpopulation. It is caused by corrupt and authoritarian governments, and by guerrillas/terrorists motivated by Marxism, Islamism, ethnic hate or simply greed.

Overpopulation fear-mongering is very old - at least as old as Malthus. One of its more recent incarnations was the 1968 book "The Population Bomb", which predicted mass starvation to occur in the 1970s.

Anyway, for better or for worse, there is already strong action taken by individuals, foundations, and Western governments, to restrict fertility in Africa.

1 : http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Analytical-Figures/htm/fig_11.htm
2 : http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Analytical-Figures/htm/fig_2.htm
3 : According to [2], Africa will have 2.2B people in 2050, and according to Google[10] and Wikipedia [11], the area of Africa is 30,221,532 km2
4 : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_population_density
5 : http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Analytical-Figures/htm/fig_1.htm
6 : http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Analytical-Figures/htm/fig_6.htm
7 : http://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/news/ng.asp?id=56376-us-wastes-half
8 : http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/74192/icode/
9 : http://sanamagan.wordpress.com/2011/03/10/population-population-density-gdp-per-capita-ppp/
10 : https://www.google.co