Climate Change Could Cross Key Threshold in a Decade, Scientists Say (reuters.com)

The planet could pass a key target on world temperature rise in about a decade, prompting accelerating loss of glaciers, steep declines in water availability, worsening land conflicts and deepening poverty, scientists said this week. But the planet is already two-thirds of the way to that lower and safer goal, and could begin to pass it in about a decade, according to Richard Betts, head of climate impacts research at the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre. Reuters reports: With world emissions unlikely to slow quickly enough to hit that target, it will probably be necessary to remove some carbon pollution from the atmosphere to stabilize the planet, scientists said. That could happen by planting forests or by capturing and then pumping underground emissions from power plants. But other changes -- such as reducing food waste and creating more sustainable diets, with less beef and fewer imported greenhouse vegetables -- could also play a big role in meeting the goal, without so many risks, he said.

Comments

Fruits and vegetables

[bluefoxlucid]

Is this another attempt to push a fruits-and-vegetables diet based on old superstition and ignorant observation? 400 years ago, nobody knew what micronutrients were; they knew if you didn't eat your fruits and vegetables, you got pellagra and scurvy--and you got pellagra by eating too much corn, too, so you needed to eat something else.

Today, somehow, people who eat diets with a lot of meat and don't overeat have few health problems. It's pretty simple: eat beef, eat chicken, eat fish, be healthy. There are a few micronutrients that are hard to get unless you're eating organ meats, certain fruits, or high-calorie shit like Hi-C fruit drinks--notably Vitamin C--but meat has a surprising amount of stuff like potassium and magnesium, so much so that you have to get into esoteric vegetables nobody eats to substantially beat the micronutrient profile of meat per calorie. There are only a few things an all-meat diet would leave you short on, and they're generally the things vegetables are actually pretty high in.

Has anyone noticed that meat-diets never produce deficiency diseases, yet someone is waiting in the wings to tell you you're doing vegan and vegetarian diets wrong because a lot of people get sick really fast on those diets? That's only counting malnutrition; things get weird when researchers do studies on constipated people and find out that a high- and moderate-fiber diet makes it worse, while a low-fiber diet improves things dramatically, and a no-fiber diet completely eliminates the issue--exactly what fiber isn't supposed to do.

So yeah, vegetarian diets are healthy--if you eat the right things, eat enough of them, eat massive amounts of them, and maybe take some supplements. Mainly-meat diets are healthy, if you don't eat too god damn much--honestly, Taco Bell and Burger King try to sell you 75% of a day's food as a so-called meal, so you're eating for two or three people by the end of the day, hence fast food making everyone fat (how did you think it happened?). They want us to go from the "you get fat if you eat too much" diet to the "you get pellagra and rickets if you don't diversify your nutrition correctly" diets (nobody gets scurvy; Vitamin C deficiency isn't a real thing anymore unless you try really, really hard).

Amateurs.

Re:Population control

[BlueStrat]

So, that's it: how to save the world: bring people out of poverty, give them education, and give them access to birth control.

You don't need the totalitarian bullshit.

But that's hard to do, and besides, it doesn't give TPTB ever more control over people's lives and yet another excuse to pick their pockets at gunpoint while not doing anything that actually addresses the 'problem' but merely transfers wealth to those they favor.

You expect any politician worthy of the name to work to empower and lift people out of poverty? Maybe if we had some statesmen instead of politicians, but Trump!/Clinton!

We're SO hosed!

Strat

Re:Ten years, you say?

[Pinky's Brain]

All this discussion of global warming and water resources is just preparation for white genocide.

This is all just laying the ground work for the argument that Europe (and Russia) that have to allow mass immigration from Africa, because whites are responsible for global warming and global warming is causing all the problems in Africa (of course population growth and their inability to govern themselves has absolutely nothing to do with it you racist!).

At the rate Africa is using it's ground water it's a non renewable resource, their coming massive water shortages have comparatively little to do with global warming.