Besides being catastrophic for the environment, a fucking shitton, actually. Maybe if you actually cared about cows' quality of life, you wouldn't selectively breed them to overproduce milk so that you're "forced" to milk them, you wouldn't take their child away from them that would otherwise drink the milk, and you wouldn't forcibly impregnate them on a rape rack in order to get them to produce milk. (Also, it's "heifer", not "heffer", just like it's "margarine", not "mardrine".)
Pretty sure those studies are bullshit and terrible "projections" based upon going to a single farm then guesstimating the world's cattle methane production.
[The Global Methane Budget 2024 paints a troubling picture of the current state of global methane emissions. The new report reveals that human activities are now responsible for at least two-thirds of global methane emissions.
Pretty sure oil production (blow off valves not calculated by petroleum companies), jets and large ships have a much more substantial effects than cattle ever could.
Did cattle population explode by 20% world wide??
Humm ya think oil companies don't go around and pay for bullshit studies to pull the attention away from them?
How about an oil spill created by Taylor Energy in 2004 and lasted to 2019 (apparently went it 'stopped' yet still collecting oil
Gee, who am I to trust? A peer-reviewed paper you've never read meta-analyzing 1530 studies in one of the most rigorous scientific journals in the world whose methodology section directly contradicts the ignorant horseshit you're saying and which is written by 1) Dr. Joseph Poore, the director of the University of Oxford's food sustainability program and 2) Dr. Tomas Nemecek, an expert on agroecology and life cycle assessments from the Zurich University of Applied Sciences... or the random Internet person who thinks it's spelled "mardrine" – a word I probably learned to spell in fourth grade?
The rest of your comment is just textbook whataboutism, and I'd call you deeply intellectually dishonest, but I'm not sure at this point that you're capable of any sort of intellectualism – honest or otherwise.
Every time you show up to talk about this paper, you just say it "misuses LCA" and then never elaborate because you don't actually understand anything about the paper. See where the authors discuss their methodology? Please go there and point out how exactly it "misuses LCA". Make a pointed, falsifiable criticism of the paper, please.
Okay, so do what I asked. If you've said something substantive, thought-out, and falsifiable in the past, it should be trivial for you to copy-paste that here.
LCAs are not transferable between studies, and poore-nemecek ignores this guidance, compiling multiple LCA studies into their "meta-analysis". it's bad science.
"Um, ackshually, it's bad science to create a meta-analysis of 1530 studies." I hope you understand what a complete clown you come off as to any even moderately scientifically informed reader.
Oh, that's super cool: you've actually made a claim that can be addressed. So now substantiate it. You say "the studies", but ostensibly there are 1530 of them. Out of the 1530, how many say this? Because I imagine you're saying you've at least checked some subset of them. Can you point to even a single specific one which Poore & Nemecek used in their analysis? More importantly, can you point to even a single one of those authors (or hell, anyone else) who issued any sort of commentary calling this paper out for this alleged "bad science"?
After all, the scientific process isn't just being extremely credentialed; it isn't just meta-analyzing over 1500 papers; it isn't just standing up to the scrutiny of peer review prior to publication: it's knowing that at any time, someone else can read your paper, say "that's wrong/dubious, actually", demonstrate that objectively, and then publish that information. This is an extremely economically important topic with an industry who would be champing at the bit to publish a paper debunking this one, the work has been discussed in international news, and it's published in one of the most prestigious academic journals, so clearly it should have undergone some level of public scrutiny.
Clearly you as someone with (obviously) literally no background in this field can point out such an egregious error, so why hasn't any actual credible scientist? Or better yet, why haven't you compiled and submitted this information for publication?
You understand that the sham papers aren't uniformly distributed over journals, right? You understand that 8000 of them belonged to a single publisher and that thousands of fully legitimate papers are published every day? And that Science is – again – one of the most rigorous academic journals in the world? Just blanket denying science that you pretend to understand isn't going to help your floundering credibility.
They do get cited in journals, most scientific work is based upon prior works. Many journals have had to redact stuff due to fake papers being cited, regardless of what you say.
Where did the 20% methane emissions over the past 5 years come from? Was there an explosion in the cattle industry?
Also the oil industry lies, they omit lots of data to make the industry look cleaner than it is.
This is the most ideal scape goat for the industry, and would not surprise me.
Thank you. I still have no idea why people make the ridiculous argument of "Well what will we do with all the living ones?" It's either what you said, or they think there's going to be an entire multi-billion-dollar industry supporting tens of thousands of cows for each individual of the last remaining non-vegans. It's so disingenuous that they've either never thought it through or actually just don't care.
It's frustrating how arguments supporting the overwhelming status quo don't need to hold up to scrutiny at all. Then the ones speaking out against it have mountains of credible data and airtight logical arguments that can just be dismissed out-of-hand by complete, nonsensical bullshit, and the general public will lap it up.