The livestock industry has fought back with a massive public relations campaign, seeking to persuade people that pasture-fed meat helps reduce global heating by storing carbon in the soil. Yet, despite the many claims, there is no empirical evidence that carbon storage in pastures can even compensate for grazing’s current account emissions, let alone address the capital debt. Just as the oil industry tried to convince us that CO2 was good for the planet on the grounds that it’s “plant food”, the ranching industry has sought to sow doubt and confusion about its vast environmental impacts.
Where he is right is that organic uses more land than non-organic farming. So there’s that. But this idea that pasture doesn’t store carbon. Some very sensible* folk disagree. So, who is right?
*Cannot recall the damn name. British/American, I think, died in the last few years, reached great age. The name I keep thinking of is Buckminster Fuller but not him, the other one.
Freeman Dyson is the distinguished gentleman whose name eluded you.
The very one…..
Well he is simply wrong, as he is about everything else. CO2 does not have the effects that he believes it does, because the concentrations of it simply do not exist to perform any kind warming.
Moonbat is a twat.
It’s all circular, surely? Plants photosynthesise CO₂; animals eat plants and turn them back into CO₂. The animal can’t make more CO₂ than the C from the plants eaten. Doesn’t matter whether it’s from pasture or grain or whatever.
Obviously a grassy field stores less carbon than the Amazonian rainforest that was razed to make it; but that’s a one-off cost.
Andrew
We know now that if left to its own devices, the rainforest returns and quite quickly too. It might well be a temporary cost, until the rancher retires and sells all his steers.
Well obviously as one of the greatest criminals the globe has ever seen of course he is wrong- he is a diehard Neo- Stalinist who hates humanity. It’s a redundant question!
There is a lot of soil build up in permanent pasture. Look at the churches and graveyards in areas of permanent pasture: a 400 year old church might be 3-6 feet lower than the surrounding pasture — they would have been at the same elevation when built, the difference being that the churchyard hasn’t been grazed continuously for 400 years whereas the surrounding fields have.
’Our gastroporn aesthetics, embedded in bucolic fantasy, are among the greatest threats to life on Earth.’
Sorry George, but we just aren’t eating the bugs, no matter how much you scream and shout…
I love “plant food” in scare quotes, as if it was debatable.
Anyone who mentions agriculture and fossil fuel in the same argument is talking pure bollocks. You can argue whether the food grown should be fed to people, animals or, in an act of window licking imbecility, motor cars, but agriculture has no effect on atmospheric co2. As Andrew M says, it’s circular. I would say obviously, but apparently it isn’t.
I’ll start taking Georgie boy seriously when he and his fellow greenies:
1) Call for an immigration moratorium.
2) Travel everywhere by bicycle or sailing boat.
3) See Al Gore and Obama sell their seaside properties.
Methane is the thing they’re fretting about. Cow burps. And they’re wrong on that too.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/08/rain-rain-go-away/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=UNFI%20%2020220818%20%20GK&utm_content=UNFI%20%2020220818%20%20GK+CID_8b300d2dd78817d70dbc8cc7754b2278&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Australia&utm_term=Ian%20Plimer%20has%20bad%20news%20for%20climate%20warriors**
Jonathan, when I see the merchants of doom who are constantly telling us CO2 is a problem start behaving as if it really IS a problem I might start to think they have a point.
No, on second thoughts, I won’t because they don’t.
And to answer his jibe regarding “CO2 being good for the planet”, the planet doesn’t give a fuck if the CO2 level is 7000 ppm (which it has indeed been) or 150 ppm.
The trees and animals (including us) on the other hand would definitely give a fuck if it was 150ppm, as we would all die.
I’m more interested in this story:
England must reduce meat intake to avoid climate breakdown, says food tsar
And by “interested”, I mean I’d like to introduce this pustulent twat to my African friend, Simba.
Thanks, Conservatives!
@Matt
One only has to look at any Victorian city park. The paths were originally laid considerably above the level of the surrounding lawns so water would drain off. Most of them are now well below that. It’s not subsidence. It’s more than a century of plant growth & organic matter being incorporated into the soil. And that’s without grazing.
Actually, I do wonder how much difference grazing makes. Whatever vegetation is growing is eventually going to get eaten by something. The digestion paths of animals are all very similar. Cellulose gets broken down by gut bacteria with consequent methane release. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a cow, a beetle or an earthworm doing the eating. They all shit. Chief benefit if it’s cows is that we get to eat cheese or Sunday roast.
Ploughing definitely increases carbon sequestration faster than pasture.
But one thing definitely doesn’t is rewilding. Stops it dead. Trees don’t create soil. It’s doubtful if there’s even much carbon sequestration in the standing wood. All plants photosynthesise with much the same efficiency. So you could write (x)kW > (y)kg C whatever the plants & the numbers would be similar. The C sequestrated in soil by the pasture/agriculture route is probably higher than that temporarily sequestrated in timber.
I’m distressed that Ljh has introduced facts into the debate, which is a medieval idea and not at all relevant to a 21st century debate. George has FEELINGS, which we must all respect, nay, ADMIRE and follow.
Julia – Sorry George, but we just aren’t eating the bugs, no matter how much you scream and shout…
They’ll sneak it into the food chain anyway they can. Watch out for “cricket flour” appearing in the ingredients.
Brexit actually gave us a degree of respite, the Food Standards Agency is lagging behind the Eurocucks in certifying the new slave food for a continent of craven Renfields.
But why entomophagy? For the same reason the Satanic government institute in CS Lewis’ That Hideous Strength insisted on making its acolytes do bizarre and disgusting things to weaken their sense of probity. If we’re willing to eat flies, we’re something less than human and they can probably get us to do anything.
Maybe Jim could help. Mass of haycrop yield per hectare over say 25 years against mass of cut timber from forestry, same period. Should give some indication of the numbers. I’m guessing the haycrop yield will be considerably larger.
…England must reduce meat intake to avoid climate breakdown, says food tsar…
On the positive side, at least we UK taxpayers aren’t funding this person. Or a back office of support tsars and tsarinas. Or a great big building in Central London (which is currently occupied by a doorman and two cleaners, because everyone else is ‘working from home’).
Can we assume that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all have their own food tsars?
Why are these people always tsars? Anything to do with Potemkin villages?
This is far too good to check or to think about nuance:
“Mass of haycrop yield per hectare over say 25 years against mass of cut timber from forestry, same period. Should give some indication of the numbers. ”
Probably too many variables. Is the hay field fertilised, sprayed for weeds? Is it a traditional grass, been in situ for centuries, or has it been ploughed up and plated with a modern rye grass, which produces for just a year or two?
As a very rough guide a non-fertilised non-rye grass traditional ley will produce anywhere from a tonne to 2 tonnes of grass per year. The variation being in the amount of rain one gets. This year such fields did 1 tonne to the acre, it having been a very dry spring, the very same fields have done nearly 2 with the right rainfall. Plus of course they wouldn’t produce so much if the crop of grass was not cut and removed (or grazed) each year, if grass is left to just grow untouched year on year the bottom of the sward becomes largely dead grass, which then swamps new growth. Grass thrives on being cut or grazed. Which is why livestock production is a crucial part of any agricultural system.
As for forestry, not my area of knowledge, I have no idea what the amount of material gained each year by trees might be.
at least we UK taxpayers aren’t funding this person
Eh, you mean Henry Dimbleby, the multimillionaire Eton-educated son of David Dimbleby, and Boris Johnson appointed ‘food tsar’? I think he’s on a cushy six figure pubsec salary, doubt he’s doing it for free.
BiS – we also have a ‘Cost of Living’ Tsar. Which gives me a strange new respect for Leon Trotsky.
Btw his first Big Idea for tackling inflation was to demand that businesses cut their prices. ( 😀 ) By this time next year, I predict the Tories are gonna be roughly about as popular as nude pics of Myra Hindley.
Actually pasture, especially grazed pasture, takes in considerably more CO2 than forestry – over time. Forest typically absorb rather more for 1-3 years, a bit less for 4-5 years, and a lot less from then on. Even very high turnover forestry (25-30 years with pinus radiata say) absorbs considerably less CO2 over the forestry cycle. Unless one uses Kyoto maths, when by political fiat, pasture absorbs zero, we have been wandering down the wrong track for some years, and will continue to do so as long as the primary driver is anti-western and anti-civilisation politics rather than science.
Dunno either Jim. Maybe hay’s not even the right example. Just the first came to mind. The point is that each m² of land gets the same amount of sunlight energy. Therefore roughly the same area of photosynthesising by plants will be going on at all roughly the same efficiency, whatever the plants. Water’s the same, isn’t it. A m³ is going to get the same rainfall, whatever the plant. The inputs are fixed. So it’s difficult to see how you could get different outputs. You only have the one chemical process going on. Photosynthesis= energy+water+CO²= plant mass.
One could do it with potatoes. But then one has the mass of water in the potatoes so one would probably have to convert one’s units into Cadbury’s Smash.
“There is a lot of soil build up in permanent pasture.”
It’s visible even in the short lifetime of road verges. Within a few years of a new road being built, the grass verge is noticeably higher than the carriageway edging. In some places the verge gets so deep it actually looks really untidy where it drops off suddenly to the roadway.
The sunken lanes of Devon and Normandy are caused by the passage of traffic over time. A similar but smaller effect will be seen everywhere else. So that needs to be taken into account.
Most of the anti-meat propaganda comes from corporations hoping to sell huge quantities of factory-produced ‘plant-based’ sludge and cicadaburgers. Vegans and morons like Moonbat are simply their useful idiots.
Bill Gates flew straight from COP26 to a party on a colossal floating gin palace. That tells you all you need to know about climate change.
Also there is heave and subsidence as the water content changes. So you would need to take a series of measurements, not just a snapshot.
Foundations are not some sort of whimsical architectural feature.
The whole point about CO2 emissions is that the allegedly naughty stuff comes from coal, gas and oil which contains carbon that was taken out of the atmosphere over millions of years. Are grazing animals powered by fossil fuels? Obviously not so what the hell is he talking about?
The other thing that he’s missing is that if we all start eating bugs instead then they will have to be farmed on a huge industrial scale. What exactly will the emissions from that be?
There is a path made of pavers that runs the length of my garden which is lower than the surrounding area and floods in the winter. Sorting it out is one of the jobs on my infinite to do list.
Foundations are not some sort of whimsical architectural feature.
True. But they are very rarely put in to prevent subsidence. They’re usually to prevent lateral movement. If one’s putting in foundations one excavates down to where the substrate is stable & won’t compact. Of you just get the foundations subsiding.
“there is no empirical evidence that …”: well, there’s no fucking empirical evidence for the global warming scare either.
“Forest typically absorb rather more for 1-3 years, a bit less for 4-5 years, and a lot less from then on.” Then don’t grow conifers, grow broadleaf woodland and coppice it on, say, a seven year cycle. Don’t worry about the labour costs, Moonbat and his chums can be put in leg irons and sent out to do the work.
The sunken lanes of Devon and Normandy are caused by the passage of traffic over time.
Unlikely. The imposed loads are trivial. And they simply aren’t built like that. They’re built to provide a durable surface, not to spread loads. If that happened you’d simply get subsidence where the traffic wheels ran. Which is what you do see on roads laid over insufficiently compacted substrate.
Incidentally, the Norman bocage is really an extreme example of soil creation. The hedgerows tend to collect & stabilise wind blown & rain washed material off of the fields. So the next iterations of hedgegrowth get progressively higher. If it was a subsidence matter, you’d expect the hedges to be subsiding as fast as they were growing. Resulting in raised roads rather than sunken.
I did some hedging on a bit of land we have. Standard way. Had to clear a load of brush & small trees so interlocked it all into a fence stops people falling off the terrace in the dark, 10m to the one below. That then protects plants which grow up through the fence to form the hedge. Been in about 8 years now. The hedge is quite substantial. And already it’s doing a miniature bocage. Collected soil at its base around 6-12 inches higher than the land.
Spanish don’t seem to do hedging. I wonder why? The goats eat ’em?
Err … he doesn’t claim “that pasture doesn’t store carbon” but rather that pasture’s GHG storage doesn’t outweigh cattle production’s GHG emissions. Not like you to misrepresent one of your interlocutors’ arguments, Tim!
Also surprising that you didn’t reproduce the link to the Oxford Uni’s (and others’) article he cited for the words “no empirical evidence”.
Like you (perhaps), though, I’m still unconvinced either way on this particular question. That could be partly because I’m looking forward to sparking up the barbie shortly, though…
“…pasture’s GHG storage doesn’t outweigh cattle production’s GHG emissions.”
So where does the extra GHG come from? Basic physics says that it has to come from somewhere.
Couple of things :
I was taught at school that the height difference between bank and roads was caused by a combination of the build up of ( taking a cross section will be like a tree ring ) and that some fat bastard called Orson Kart used to go up and down them before the council came along and tarmacked them.
Outside of France, hedges on the Continent are a rare sight. One reason being that the pattern of landownership is different.
build up of soil
Bloody tablet
“Cattle production’s GHG’s”
If cattle don’t eat the grass, something will eat the grass. And since that something will have much the same bacteria in its stomach to process the cellulose as a cow, you still get the GHG’s.
It’s not the cow produces the GHG’s. It’s the bacteria.
The precis is surely that all carbon in agricultural products, or that is breathed, belched or farted out by things that are destined to shortly become agricultural products, was very recently in the atmosphere anyway.
Maybe the fact that people will increasingly realise this over the short term is is why they are moving on to nitrogen as the great terrible pollution that must be eliminated. Because much of that does involve releasing locked up carbon to the atmosphere.
One does rather pity those suffering from chitin allergies and similar when our alien overlords finally take off their masks.
The potential role of chitin in allergic reactions
@stony
“So where does the extra GHG come from? Basic physics says that it has to come from somewhere.”
Methane as a by-product of rumination. Have a look at the document I (and MB) linked to. It explains it pretty well in the Key Points box at the start of section 2. Cattle (or rather the bacteria in their stomachs!) turn the CO2 that was absorbed into the grass into methane, which is a much more powerful GHG.
@BiS,
See, this is exactly the sort of “detail” that means I’m still on the fence about this one.
You say “much the same bacteria”. Is it? I’m not sure if other animals’ (/insects/worms/etc?) stomachs have the same bacteria, but I would imagine most of the dead plant material in a forest gets broken down on the first floor rather than eaten by a mammal or bird. Again, that’s (mostly?) a bacterial process, but does it produce much the the same amount of methane as that in a cud-chewer? I don’t know.
Bullet 2 of the linked document says that decomposition of a dead plant releases “much” of the carbon drawn into the atmosphere during its life. I think this implies that it doesn’t produce as much, but I’m not sure.
@Jonathan
4) Campaign for a yuge nuke programme.
@BoA720
Yes methane is amore powerful ‘greenhouse’ gas than CO2, but it get’s oxidised to CO2 in pretty short order (a few decades, rather than the centuries CO2 hangs around). Bottom line: it’s a second order effect, and you can’t simply compare CH4 from cattle etc with CH4 from drilling.
PS The bacteria in the guts of termites (which produce a lot of CH4) are closely related to those found in the gits of cattle.
@Chris,
The linked document has quite a useful discussion around that point at Box 12 (page 74).
@Bloke on A720: Methane has about the same greenhouse effect as water vapor. But the average concentration in the atmosphere of H2O is around 10,000 ppm, while CH4 is around 2 ppm, so the ‘warming’ caused by methane is negligible.
“Outside of France, hedges on the Continent are a rare sight.” Caesar complained about the hedges in Gaul. The bastards used them as defensive features, impenetrable by cavalry and obscuring their troop movements from Roman eyes.
(Yes, I’ve recently reread Caesar on his Gallic Wars. Dear God, it’s better in English.)
I don’t get this expectation (from just a few admittedly) that trees and grasses should capture CO2 at the same rates. It’s like expecting men and hippos to be equal at football.
They use different chemical pathways to convert CO2 into carbohydrate, one grows from the roots upwards to avoid defeat by ruminants, the other outcompetes its floral enemies for light by growing taller and making bark to defeat ruminants. They might expire CO2 at different rates at night, I don’t know on that one. Just saying there is no reason to expect CO2 capture rates to be the same.
@Bloke on A720
It doesn’t really matter what name a bacteria puts on its Twitter profile, it’s what chemistry it employs to extract nutrition from cellulose. And all use chemistry that produces CH4 as a bi-product. So it’s irrelevant whether the bacteria are in a mammal, bird, reptile, insect, worm or just living free in the soil, it’s the same CH4.
@bis,
Based on a bit of Googling, it seems that the chemistry produces sizeable amounts of methane only in anaerobic conditions, so I’m assuming that, yes, it would happen in a worm’s gut, but presumably less so from foliage rotting in the open air, which presumably(?) is the fate of most non-cultivated plant material.
@ZT,
Hmm. I’m not convinced. This, for example, seems to be saying that increases in the “long-lived” GHGs (CO2, CH4, N2O) lead to small temperature increases, which leads to more water vapour, creating a positive feedback loop. While they describe CO2 as the most “important long-lived” GHG, it seems to me that, if the choice is between a tonne of carbon being turned into CO2 or it being turned into CH4 (which cattle farming, possibly, does more of), the latter is going to have the bigger warning effect.
Does that paper explain how past high temperatures leading to more water vapour and creating a positive feedback loop were followed by ice ages and today’s temperate climate? Because otherwise we can disprove the “positive feedback loop” by looking out the window.
BiW, I have been making that point for some time. If the planet didn’t burst into flames when CO2 was 7000ppm it certainly isn’t going to at 800ppm.
Also, I read somewhere this week but can’t find it at the mo’, that the IPCC uses different residence times for man made CO2 and naturally occurring CO2. It’s the same molecule for fuck sake!!!
Interesting if true. Just goes to show that it’s somewhere between a self-induced illusion and totally fraudulent.
Then again, we always said that the government would figure out a way of taxing the air, which is what all this greenist bollocks actually is.
Can’t find the exact link but it seems the IPCC consider that as man made CO2 is extra the residence time is 100 years. Everyone else estimates 3, 5 or 16 years.
Can’t find the exact link but it seems the IPCC consider that as man made CO2 is extra the residence time is 100 years. Everyone else estimates 3, 5 or 16 years.
I s’pose that would make sense. If you’re going to work on the basis that pre-industrial CO² levels were static because emission balanced adsorption, then the only route to remove it from the atmosphere is the molecule being split by high energy particles from space. That a bit more vegetation is going to grow to take benefit of the increase in plant food isn’t going to occur to you. Is it? Being scientists ‘n that.
The runaway greenhouse effect relies on the reduction in CO2 absorption from the oceans and land (vegetation). However (from https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091230184221.htm):
“Most of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activity does not remain in the atmosphere, but is instead absorbed by the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems. However, some studies have suggested that the ability of oceans and plants to absorb carbon dioxide recently may have begun to decline and that the airborne fraction of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions is therefore beginning to increase. In contradiction to those studies, new research finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades.”
Even the IPCC reports show that the Carbon Dioxide airbourne fraction has not changed over time (Figure 7.4 in https://archive.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch7s7-3-1-3.html).
So,if the amount of C02 in the atmosphere is stable and hasn’t changed over 150 years, why would it suddenly runaway now?
There is some logic issue here that I obviously don’t get.
Carbon Dioxide is heavier than air and will be forced by gravity towards the Earth. Some will remain in the air, carried by winds and water vapour. So if a Carbon Dioxide molecule reaches the Earth and is not absorbed by the sea or a planr, what does it do then? Go on holiday instead ? It is at ground level, it has nowhere else to go.
@BiW and @Addolff
I haven’t seen that it does. Might have missed it. TBF to the authors of the paper, which is specifically about food production, that’s a little off-topic.
This puts forward an answer (which, of course, I’m not qualified to fully evaluate) pretty concisely, though.
I think a key point of difference on this particular point is over whether GHGs are the only factors that determine temperature.
@wolfgang
I’m pretty sure that’s not what figure 7.4b is saying. The caption says “(b) Fraction of fossil fuel emissions remaining in the atmosphere” and basically it shows that fraction staying broadly the same. So they’re saying for every 100 tonnes of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, about 50 tonnes stay in the atmosphere. Thing is, the amount emitted has risen steadily over the period, which I’m sure we can agree on (whether or not we can agree that it matters ).
@BiS,
Can’t speak for the scientists n that, but I would tentatively suggest the following thought experiment: if we pretend there’s no rising emissions trend and CO2 ppm suddenly changed overnight, with nothing else changing (ignore, for example, any impact this would have on water vapour concentration and temperature), I’d expect that, yes, there would be a boost to vegetation, which would absorb some of the extra CO2. However, it wouldn’t absorb all of it, because as the extra vegetation causes the CO2 ppm to trend down to where we started, the extra vegetation would die back again. Instead you’d reach a new equilibrium with some ppm between where you started and the higher ppm.
I think this is actually what Wolfgang’s figure 7.4 is about. For every 100 tonnes emitted, concentration, only about half stays in the atmosphere because of, presumably, processes just like this.
If I remember correctly things like rice thrive up to about 1500ppm of CO2, so food production could well increase just based upon the rise in CO2 alone. As for the temperature rise related to CO2…Press “X” to doubt.
@ Bloke on A720
The important factor is that for the scary-end-of-the-world runaway greenhouse effect to take place, the balance between emission of CO2 and absorption has to decouple. This would be visible in an increase in the atmospheric CO2 fraction because it wouldn’t be absorbed (so higher proportion stays in the atmosphere). But we don’t see that – and haven’t for the last 150 years.
So, it’s not the absolute amount of CO2 in the atmosphere that is important, it’s the ratio between emission and absorption that matters. That’s why we had higher CO2 in the past without Earth becoming Venus.
If you take the climate models and remove the assumption that the airborne fraction of CO2 increases, then the whole narrative falls apart! How would you control the proles then?
Ah, Venus, the planet that was the basis for the ‘Look what happens when CO2 goes up = you get runaway global warming’ bollocks….. Thing is, we KNOW that will not happen on Earth because it HAS NEVER happened on Earth despite CO2 levels being far, (far, far, far, ad infinitum) higher.
And, does CO2 cause warming ONLY: https://notrickszone.com/2022/08/18/new-studies-claim-the-more-co2-in-the-venus-atmosphere-the-colder-it-gets/
@wolfgang (and this also addresses Addolff’s first point),
OK, I get you now(*).
Thing is, while there are undoubtedly some extremists who talk about Earth becoming Venus (and may even believe it), the mainstream argument for doing something about it isn’t based on avoiding this; it’s based on avoiding the impacts of a few degrees of warming.
e.g. the IPCC said ages ago that ‘a “runaway greenhouse effect”—analogous to Venus–
appears to have virtually no chance of being induced by anthropogenic activities’.
There are, of course, differing and often valid views on the extent to which it’s worth the bother.
(* – purely as an aside, I thought the theories around runaway effects were more about sudden tipping points, like the moist greenhouse limit being reached, rather than processes that would necessarily be observed to be beginning now. Either way, I don’t think we need to worry about that.)
@Addolff,
Apparently not, no.
On the more pertinent point of bankrupting ourselves now to save Gaia.
What is actually happening is that as greenhouse gas emissions increase, the planet warms a little, more water is taken into the atmosphere (clouds) which increases the Earth’s albedo meaning that the increase in temperature caused by greenhouse gases is offset by the increased reflectivity of cloud cover.
In https://hoffman.cm.utexas.edu/courses/runaway_greenhouse_2013.pdf they demonstrate that the Earth is actually very stable in terms of balancing the effects of solar radiative forcing and surface (greenhouse) temperature. This can be seen in the “hump of stability” between 270K and 350K in Figure 4b across just about all levels of greenhouse gases (it did break at 30,000 ppm however!).
The problem being that this feedback loop isn’t instantaneous – so it it takes time to happen there will be period where the Earth gets warmer or colder. The magnitude of these changes could be 1-2 degrees as per the dire forecasts.
Note that there are two factors at play here – surface greenhouse and solar radiative forcing. One we have some control over, the other we don’t. So there are 4 possible outcomes:
1) Increased greenhouse and increased solar – gets hotter.
2) Increased greenhouse and decreased solar – likely okay.
3) Decreased greenhouse and increased solar – likely okay.
4) Decreased greenhouse and decreased solar – gets colder.
It would be bad if we spent lots of money getting rid of the greenhouse gases if it coincided with a reduced Solar Minimum as we’d probably freeze. Thank $DIETY this isn’t the plan…
Apologies, the “hump of stability” is shown in Figure 4f.
Nah, because Antropogenic production of greenhouse gases is a rounding error in comparison to natural sources.
I’m more worried about another Deccan Traps style volcanic outpouring over an extended period. That lasted for about 30,000 years. If we had that happen today then we would be in a pickle.
” I’ve recently reread Caesar on his Gallic Wars. Dear God, it’s better in English.”
Is he still attacking ramparts with ladders? Thats all he ever seemed to do when I was a lad learning Latin.