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Norway's Army Battles Global Warming By Going Vegetarian

cold fjord writes "It looks like no more spam, spam, spam for Norway's warriors... at least on Mondays. The Daily Caller reports, 'Norway's military is taking drastic steps to ramp up its war against global warming. The Scandinavian country announced its soldiers would be put on a vegetarian diet once a week to reduce the military's carbon footprint. "Meatless Monday's" has already been introduced at one of Norway's main military bases and will soon be rolled out to others, including overseas bases. It is estimated that the new vegetarian diet will cut meat consumption by 150 tons per year. "It's a step to protect our climate," military spokesman Eystein Kvarving told AFP. "The idea is to serve food that's respectful of the environment." ... The United Nations says that livestock farming is responsible for 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Cutting meat consumption, environmentalists argue, would help stem global warming and improve the environment." — The Manchester Journal reports, "The meatless Monday campaign launched in 2003 as a global non-profit initiative in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University to promote personal and environmental health by reducing meat consumption.'"

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  1. Re:An example to follow by Dr_Barnowl · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yeah, but most of the soya is fed to animals. 70% of corn grown in the USA is fed to animals. For every kilo of meat you eat, 10 kilos of feedstock went into an animal.

    So you could eat less meat, and devote more land to growing plants, which is the essence of carbon capture. And all those animal farts contribute to global warming as well (methane is a greenhouse gas).

    Regardless of whether vegetarianism / veganism is better for animals or your health, they require less energy and produce less CO2.

  2. Re:Just run around waving your arms in panic by rve · · Score: 5, Informative

    You're outer category delusional.

    The projected sea level rise is up to about a meter by the year 2100. Not in the form of a sudden tidal wave arriving next tuesday, but a few milimeters per decade.
    Think of the world 100 years ago. Think how different agriculture was then, how different cities were. A century is a very long time on the scale of a human life and culture.

    Let's adapt to a potentially global and humankind-annihiliating catastrophy once the methane under ice in Siberia starts to melt and gets released to the atmosphere. It's already bubbling out, you can see it with your eyes.

    Earth will go on, some life possibly will also go on but humans are facing the business end of a shotgun at the moment.

    (...)

    You're harming your cause with such extreme and patently ridiculous alarmism. Did you know that up to the start of the Pleistocene, there were no permanent ice caps on either pole? Was the earth in the Pliocene an uninhabitable wasteland? We are living in the Holocene interglacial stage of an ice age today. Today's climate isn't the norm, it isn't the only climate in which life is possible. In fact, every species alive today, except for perhaps a handful of human domesticated crops, already existed during the last ice age, and lived through the transition. Before you bring up the standard response about the rate of climate change being completely unique in the history of the earth, this too is false. The transition from the last glacial to the Holocene interglacial was just as sudden. Vast subarctic tundras, built up over a period of 100,000 years (the duration of the last glaciation) thawed and became exposed (in fact, some of it is still frozen deep under the surface in central Europe!).

    The environment is facing a number of terrible human induced crises - primarily habitat loss, over-fishing, and pollution. Yes, many species will disappear by the end of the century, even if the climate stops changing today, even if the climate goes back to the way it was before the industrial revolution. If you live long enough, you will find that a slight increase in temperature will have been a minor influence compared to these things.