Oooops! Another UN global warming study debunked.
Pierre Gerber, a policy officer with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, has admitted that the 2006 report he co-authored, “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” exaggerated the impact of meat production on climate change.
In a paper presented to the American Chemical Society, University of California/Davis Professor Frank Mitloehner found that UN scientists used faulty methodology to conclude that livestock production creates 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide – more than all the automobiles, trucks, trains and airplanes on the planet.
UN scientists added up all the energy used in every state of meat production, from fertilizers to grow feed to the meat-packing processing, Dr. Mitloehner pointed out, but failed to do the same for the transportation sector, including only tailpipe emissions in their calculations.
Raising cattle and pigs accounts for only about 3 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., Dr. Mitloehner said. “Producing less meat and milk will only mean more hunger in poor countries.”
“I must say honestly that he has a point – we factored in everything for meat emissions, and we didn’t do the same thing with transport,” Gerber said.
So the Livestock report joins a growing list of UN “scientific” studies that are now laughingstocks, including the one that predicted the Himalayan glaciers would be completely melted by mid-century and the one predicting that global warming would reduce crop production by 50 percent and cause mass starvation in Africa.
All now worth even less than a cowpie.
