Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by n1 on Tuesday May 06 2014, @12:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the but-not-hot-sauce-resistant dept.

Evan Halper writes in the LA Times that with efforts to reduce carbon emissions lagging, researchers, backed by millions of dollars from the federal government, are looking for ways to protect key industries from the impact of climate change by racing to develop new breeds of farm animals that can stand up to the hazards of global warming. "We are dealing with the challenge of difficult weather conditions at the same time we have to massively increase food production" to accommodate larger populations and a growing demand for meat, says Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. For example a team of researchers is trying to map the genetic code of bizarre-looking African naked-neck chickens to see if their ability to withstand heat can be bred into flocks of US broilers. "The game is changing since the climate is changing," says Carl Schmidt. "We have to start now to anticipate what changes we have to make in order to feed 9 billion people," citing global-population estimates for 2050.

Warmer temperatures can create huge problems for animals farmed for food. Turkeys are vulnerable to a condition that makes their breast meat mushy and unappetizing. Disease rips through chicken coops. Brutal weather can claim entire cattle herds. Some climate experts, however, question the federal government's emphasis on keeping pace with a projected growing global appetite for meat. Because raising animals demands so many resources, the only viable way to hit global targets for greenhouse gas reduction may be to encourage people to eat less meat and point to an approach backed by Microsoft founder Bill Gates that takes animals out the process altogether. "There's no way to produce enough meat for 9 billion people," says Bill Gates. "Yet we can't ask everyone to become vegetarians. We need more options for producing meat without depleting our resources."
 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday May 06 2014, @02:32PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 06 2014, @02:32PM (#40157)

    There is some use for specialty livestock, in that historically we've always pushed cattle to garbage land thats unsuitable for anything else (historically as in pre-1900s or so). So the semi-arid deserts of TX are, and should always be, full of cattle. Pretty much if cattle and buffalo live there, you probably don't want to live there because its garbage land.

    Now economic pressures, blah blah, and temporarily you can drain the aquifers for a few decades, blah blah, so you get people living in Las Vegas (seriously, WTF?) and cattle living nearby people (WTF?) but in the long run the sustainable pix is cattle living on large amounts of basically unlivable unfarmable land... as long as they've got water and it doesn't get too hot...

    However there's land so awful even cattle can't live there, at least now. And poultry are even wimpier. So the idea of making death valley a paradise for bison or maybe even chickens is not entirely crazy. Someday Texas might be too warm for existing cattle, would be nice to have a breed ready to deploy at that time.

    If I've written it one time I've written it a million times that coasties don't understand climate because of diurnal wind and ocean currents, they just can't internalize non-coastie climate. Away from the coasts you measure warming in miles. So over a lifetime I've basically moved about 10 miles south. It matters, sorta, just not as much as real problems. I'd worry much more about killing every commercial fishing stock in the ocean, or poisoning the oceans, or the upcoming inevitable conversion away from crude oil and aquifer based industrial farming, or killing all the pollination bees. There are bigger fish to fry and climate change simply doesn't matter compared to them. Its a distractor from the real issues. Then you start asking yourself why a meaningless irrelevant distractor is being pushed so heavily and all discussion of real problems is being avoided...

    For example the day the last Cod is pulled from the ocean is going to kill a lot more people than 1 degree C. Or the day the last AN fertilizer or K plant shuts down for lack of feedstock in about 20 years is going to kill a heck of a lot of people. How about the first non-insect pollinator harvest, that winter a lot will starve. The Ogwalla aquifer is about empty now, and when its totally drained, very few will die of dehydration, but when the farms turn to dust, oh, they'll starve that winter, all right, thats for sure. "Well, the beach is one degree warmer this year" isn't going to make the news when they're busy covering the food riots...

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +3  
       Insightful=2, Interesting=1, Total=3
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 1) by Yates on Wednesday May 07 2014, @01:42AM

    by Yates (3947) on Wednesday May 07 2014, @01:42AM (#40397)

    "historically we've always pushed cattle to garbage land thats unsuitable for anything else (historically as in pre-1900s or so)." ... "Pretty much if cattle and buffalo live there, you probably don't want to live there because its garbage land."

    Ummm... I don't think so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_Ranch [wikipedia.org]

    "Parker Ranch is a working cattle ranch on the Island of Hawaii" ... "The ranch was founded in 1847 and is one of the oldest ranches in the United States" ... "Spreading across approximately 250,000 acres (100,000 ha) of the island"

    • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday May 07 2014, @02:25PM

      by Reziac (2489) on Wednesday May 07 2014, @02:25PM (#40539) Homepage

      You do realize that a great deal of Hawaii is rocky land with shallow soil? it gets enough rain that it gets lots of growth anyway, but it's not suitable for cultivation. Crops make considerably more money per acre; no one runs livestock if they have the choice of crops.

      --
      And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
  • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday May 07 2014, @03:31AM

    by Reziac (2489) on Wednesday May 07 2014, @03:31AM (#40414) Homepage

    One degree C is not even a blip for most domestic livestock. They won't even notice. We've selected for adaptability with regard to climate for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years, because following the herds as they seasonally migrate is just not practical if you have much of a stationary civilization. So livestock have to tolerate a wider range than do their wild counterparts, since they don't get to follow their ideal temperature as it moves with the seasons.

    The only domestic animal that really has a problem with heat are pigs, and most pork is grown under climate-controlled conditions already, precisely for this reason. Otherwise you've gotta provide wallows (or the pigs will destroy the facility to make their own), cuz pigs don't handle temps above about 70F very well. A few degrees more or less isn't going to change this.

    --
    And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday May 07 2014, @01:46PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 07 2014, @01:46PM (#40525)

      I thought a pretty hard core belief of the global warming crowd was higher average T means wilder weather in general resulting in increased variability. So TX would experience both a week of delta T of -10 C (no big deal, starting to sound like a civilized climate) and a delta T of +11 C (whoops everythings now dead), although the annual average is only net +1 C higher.

      Also in the really bad border areas, much like the treeline on mountains, there's kind of a "shall not pass" line in the sand, and 1C warmer might mean quite a few square miles of a continent are now on the other side of the "shall not pass" line in the sand... so it would be highly economically profitable to grow some neo-steers or whatever in that newly unusable land. Otherwise that land is utterly useless.

      • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday May 07 2014, @02:20PM

        by Reziac (2489) on Wednesday May 07 2014, @02:20PM (#40537) Homepage

        That must explain why we've had only a fraction as many hurricanes as usual, these past 15 years or so. ;)

        Yep, I think if someone were to actually map it out, rather than just make wildassed predictions, we might find that 1C suffices to give us significantly more net usable land. As to the problem of "tundra is just frozen bog" ... one reason it's bog is that it never gets a chance to dry out, cuz it spends 10 months a year locked up solid.

        (Tho we're on our way to it this year... it still hasn't stopped snowing here pretty regularly down to about 4500 feet, and we got it again today. I've never seen it that way, not even in the bad winters of the 1960s and 70s. The guys clearing Beartooth said it's way over normal up there too.)

        --
        And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
      • (Score: 1) by Hawkwind on Thursday May 08 2014, @12:01AM

        by Hawkwind (3531) on Thursday May 08 2014, @12:01AM (#40743)
        Just came across Lloyd's of London taking this position. "Lloyd's says damage and weather-related losses around the world have increased from an annual average of $50bn in the 1980s to close to $200bn over the last 10 years." http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/may/08/ll oyds-insurer-account-climate-change-extreme-weathe r-losses [theguardian.com]