Geoff, you are citing figures and not understanding them at all. You don't crop 100% of cropping land annually.

I won't address the rest of your Gish-Gallop. But I will say that red meat doesn't cause cancer, it increases your chances of cancer by 8-15%. Being overweight increases the chance of cancer by 30-35%. You are continually quoting numbers without context or understanding in your anti-meat campaign on The Conversation.

Tim, semantics from you about red meat and colorectal cancer I feel. Yes, cancer causes can be multi-factorial, but the epidemiology is pretty much established now that too much red meat consumption raises the risk of bowel cancer in the absence of confounders. Note the recent dietary guidelines from the NHMRC, suggesting men 'eat less red meat'.

(Even so, a little crumb to the meat industry by suggesting young women 'eat more red meat'. What a nonsense that is -- as if young women with anywhere near a reasonable diet can't get sufficient iron, let alone haem iron from other animal foods.)

Your next headache will be the accumulating evidence that red meat is causal (let's say contributory) for type 2 diabetes.

Am J Clin Nutr. 2011 Oct;94(4):1088-96. Red meat consumption and risk of type 2 diabetes: 3 cohorts of US adults and an updated meta-analysis. Pan A, Sun Q, Bernstein AM, Schulze MB, Manson JE, Willett WC, Hu FB.

"We estimated that substitutions of one serving of nuts, low-fat dairy, and whole grains per day for one serving of red meat per day were associated with a 16-35% lower risk of T2D."

Our friends, Walter Willett et al, at the Harvard School of Public Health.

It isn't me that says red meat causes bowel cancer, but the World Cancer Research Fund:

http://www.wcrf.org/cancer_research/expert_report/index.php

WCRF work rather like the IPCC in that they summarise research and publish reports once per decade. The 150+ scientists involved in the last report were very clear about what they take as evidence that one thing causes another and were quite clear that red meat and processed meat both cause bowel cancer. And yes, obesity is also listed as a cause not just of bowel cancer, but quite a few cancers. It's quite clear from the report that red and processed meats are bigger risk factors for bowel cancer than obesity. But for your overall cancer risk? That's more complex. I haven't done the calculations but I'm guessing obesity is a bigger risk factor because it causes more cancers. But perhaps Tim might reveal his source, if he has one (or more).

Perhaps Tim, you can also contact WCRF and let them all know that they are mistaken and don't really understand anything about cancer and epidemiology and really should have consulted you before rushing into print and making fools of themselves.

And you've only read the dot point summary rather than the entire report. Read the dietary report section with some open eyes. A lot of what I have been saying is mentioned in there. Also, while you are at it, read the "further research" section. Has an interesting point about causality and dose response being largely unknown.

Tim... what the? It's a clear finding: causes cancer. All cancer is a matter of stochastic effect, but there is a pretty short list of foodstuffs that get the causation nod and red meat and particularly processed meat is one. This is what I mean in my comment below about longing for a meat advocate to write something decent and robust. Yet you all seem happy to dispute that which really can't be disputed.

Oh, and as someone who has dealt with Geoff once or twice, underestimating him is a really bad idea. Just a tip.

I'd invite you to actually read the full paper you cite Paul. You will actually find all sorts of problems with confounding of information (processed meats are treated as the same thing as meat, no weightings are given to increased BMI and caloric intake, etc). If you look through the data presented it takes very little to understand that the causal link is not the meat but the overall diet. The lowest quintile consumed 1000 calories less than the highest quintile, that alone will influence blood sugar enough to influence diabetes risks. Instead of treating the data as a linear correlation they actually needed to use multivariate associations to tease apart all the factors and give weightings.

People at the diabetes forum have already discussed this paper:
http://www.diabetesforum.com/diabetes-news/6194-here-we-go-again-red-meat-linked-type-2-a.html

Tim, I can see that you haven't read the diabetes paper if that's what you think. I have.

Either way, do you think Hu and Willett and that team are going to make such a fundamental mistake, considering they are one of the best and most experienced teams of nutrition epidemiologists working in the field?

" . . . after adjustment for age, BMI, and other lifestyle and dietary risk factors . . ."

And I don't think that diabetes forum is worth quoting here. Frankly, it's embarrassing for you.

Ben, I'm not denying the links and the carcinogens in meat. What I'm having a shot at is the statement that eating any meat at all causes cancer. The relationship arrived at by the science is that a diet that has an imbalance and is high in red meat (high being a somewhat unknown quantity at this point) is increasing cancer rates.

There is an important distinction there that gets lost in the anti-meat remarks.

Mmmmm.... yeah, I guess, but I'm pretty sure I could have a shot at the statement that smoking causes lung cancer running very similar logic, but not many people seem to object to the claim.

Don't worry too much about me Tim, I have my specialisations and this is not one of them, so I'll be backing off and watching. As a meat eater for 32 years and a vego for 6 months, these discussions interest me greatly. I'll see how you travel, but so far I have to say I'm not particularly swayed. I'm yet to see anyone shape up effectively in the meat corner, especially with Geoff in the ring, and Paul seems pretty switched on too. Frankly the last article on this (Richard England I think?) was so bad I cringed. Maybe you're the guy?

Continuing on, at home, Clifton (Baker Inst) reports this:

Curr Atheroscler Rep. 2011 Dec;13(6):493-8. Protein and coronary heart disease: the role of different protein sources. Clifton PM.

"Meat protein is associated with an increase in risk of heart disease. Recent data have shown that meat protein appeared to be associated with weight gain over 6.5 years, with 1 kg of weight increase per 125 g of meat per day. In the Nurses' Health Study, diets low in red meat, containing nuts, low-fat dairy, poultry, or fish, were associated with a 13% to 30% lower risk of CHD compared with diets high in meat.

Low-carbohydrate diets high in animal protein were associated with
a 23% higher total mortality rate whereas low-carbohydrate diets high in vegetable protein were associated with a 20% lower total mortality rate."

Common factor.

Full marks to Peter Clifton for going with the data ... it can't have been easy for somebody who has sold a million copies of a book telling people to eat 300g of meat protein daily to write that abstract. I'll need to get the full study. You've made my day Paul !

I agree, there are a lot of holes in this article's argument and meat arguments in general (pro and con). I actually asked a couple of my animal science professors from UWA to weigh in on The Conversation and write an article. Their response was that they had bigger issues to deal with, like actually doing the methane lowering research, figuring out which feeds lower methane and better rumens. Essentially they see a lot of these articles (pro and con) as tinkering with stats to support whichever conclusion you want to draw. Interesting take.

On the lung cancer being a similar argument, yes I suppose. But we are talking magnitudes of order difference in the probabilities of cancer occurrence. We are also talking about an important nutritive source versus a recreational drug.

Paul,

Forgive my lateness here but I wanted to point out that the Nurses Health Study data (and the follow ups data) was, as I understand it, obtained through habit based questionnaires. Even in my minimal grasp of scientific methodology this does not seem like a particularly efficacious method of discerning what is cause and what is correlation. By way of example, a quote from the study itself "[f]or both men and women, red meat intake was negatively associated with physical activity, but positively associated with BMI and smoking. In addition, a high red meat intake was associated with a high intake of total energy and a worse diabetes dietary score". These confounding variables would appear to complicate matters somewhat before we even look into the veracity, or reliability of questionnaires or the definition of what constitutes "meat" in the reporting structure of the questionnaires.

Great discussion everyone. Pleased to have read it.

OK Ben, you don't claim ethics as the reason for being veggie but you are in a tiny minority. Go fish around the many forums promoting veganism and you will struggle to find many that don't have the claim that vegans save animal lives front and centre.
I find it funny that you would call Mike's article 'shoddy' then claim its ok to kill billions of sentient creatures because 'they would have died anyway': surely a justification equally powerful when tried for every killing ever...
In brief, Mike's article sets out exactly why if 'meat is murder' then 'wheat is mass murder'. Is scoffing at the value of certain sentient beings lives really the best you've got to fire back with?

Mark a lot of what you've said is true, please read my whole comment before replying because I do want to listen. A lot of people tend to disregard a species if it doesn't fit into their preconceived definition of a sentient being I.e Arachnids and other Invertebrates.

The issue for me however is not to become some enlightened morally superior super human but to try to reduce my impact on other species as much as I can. It seems to me that everybody is focusing on one piece of a very large picture namely Cows. What about the estimated 250,000,000 Chickens killed each year? What about Pigs they're also fed grains aren't they? If there's a way to eat and survive without causing the loss of another species i would love to hear it because to me I feel I've simply chosen the lesser of two evils.

Another issue this raises is that if Mice are as intelligent as this article so ardently screams then how do we justify testing drugs and cosmetics on them? Is it only an issue when food is involved?

Please don't take this as an attack, I'm simply trying to contribute to the discussion and I hope you'll respond.

Considering the medieval theatre of cruelty that prevails in this “first world” country – i.e., the surgical procedures perpetrated on hapless livestock (without the benefit of analgesics or anaesthesia) which includes chopping off beaks and tails and genitals, inflicting third degree burns, ripping out ovaries, teeth and chunks of flesh and bludgeoning full conscious animals into oblivion, I would say that most contributing to this thread are concerned only about their own hides.

And no doubt they are indifferent to the six million animals that are experimented on in this country’s vivisection laboratories every year (twice as many as the UK), the estimated 10-28 million reptiles and native animals falling prey to man’s stupidity every year in the ignorant state of South Australia, the slaughter of thousands of native birds by a mining industry running amok, the egregious use of the internationally banned 1080 bait and its impacts on non-target native fauna or the overall fragile state of Australia’s environment and biodiversity, which has less to do with growing plants for human consumption and more to do with cowpokes, crops for fodder and greed-driven ecocidal freaks.

Indeed one would have to say that intellectualising “wildlife biologists” and “non-ethical vegetarians” are a big part of the problem and not the solution – the “I, me, myself” brigade who know zilch about ethical veganism. Now we have a "wildlife biologist" blaming the growing of plants for human consumption (and significantly for fodder, in case he's overlooked that dilemma) on vegans who he claims (incorrectly) cares nothing for invertebrates and spiders. What a load of old cobblers when the perpetrators of poisoning and killing off the outback are the growers and the industry aligned sycophantic APVMA. However, if the "wildlife biologist" thinks he can survive on kangaroo alone, good luck to him - meat and no vegies thanks.

Seemingly livestock promoters know zilch about the contaminated sites registers in Australia either – the cattle dips and tanneries that contaminate the biosphere (and residentials) or the myriad of hazardous chemicals that pollute the outback and which are administered to livestock to kill the “beasties” (yes - the good beasties, the not so “good” and the ugly), rendering food critters unfit for human consumption but eat them they do.

And if my laundry mouse (a refugee) could speak the lingo, he/she would agree. Rest assured his/her effortless pirouettes would have put Dame Margot’s endeavours to shame.

I would humbly suggest that all the things you mention- while noble and interesting subjects in their own right- are mainly attempts to change the subject.
The animal rights campaigns of today assert that omnivory results in mass death and that the solution is veganism. The truth is that arable farming kills more sentient beings than animal farming and veganism as a practical and efficient way to save animals lives is a sham. Bad behaviour in other parts of meat production is no more an argument for veganism than the existence of environmentally destructive plant products (palm oil anyone?) is an argument for total carnivory.
If after reading Mike Archer's argument here you don't understand why omnivorous diet featuring kangaroo and beef would fulfil your criteria of living a life which reduces harm to other species then I don't know what else I can say. Veganism clearly won't meet your objective unless you either do some creative accounting with the death tolls or you embrace the fact that you are happy to cause the death of some sentient beings but not others. Be my guest to accord more value to the life of a kangaroo than a mouse or a spider but don't pretend that decision is based on anything more than anthropomorphism and personal whim.

I am not the one out there claiming my diet saves lives (although, as Mike explains here, in total it does). Its the vegans doing that- and they are wrong. As it happens I was vegan myself for many years so I do know a thing or two about the convolutions of vegan theology.
Life on earth involves killing- there is no escape from your role in this unless you stop eating altogether. Its an objective fact that arable crops cause more death of sentient beings in total than beef or kangaroo production. Sorry. Everything we do has impacts and we can only make the world better if we are honest about what those really are- so, be vegan all you like but quit claiming it makes you even slightly morally superior.

More trees isn't automatically good for all wildlife- you will never find a Singing Bushlark or a Tawny Grassbird in woodland for example. They type of tree is vital too: Mulga in Central Australia is very biodiverse, whereas Witchitty are not.
The beauty of much rangeland grazing is that it needn't involve changing the landscape a great deal, and even when land clearing is allowed (it is banned in many states now) it greatly benefits birds like Australian Bustard and Emu.
The point for me is that while grazed rangelands may vary in their value for wildlife but much of it is really good, arable land does not vary at all- it is sterile monoculture.

Fiona, before you get too excited (Or thrilled) about this ridiculous article and beating up people who have a different view (Vegetarians & Vegans), why don't you go and do some of your own research and be informed...or do what most people do and fall in to line with society and industries that make a lot of money out of ensuring humans stick to a meat and diary diet. (Just like smokers do)

There are so many (Global & Local) studies highlighting the impact of cattle and dairy farming and to write an article claiming that hundreds are mice will be killed if we move to plant based diets is just ridiculous and something you expect to see on Today Tonight. There are also studies highlighting that if we moved to plant based diets, two thirds of the worlds land would be freed up - of course this article seems to forget that land is cleared for cattle, disturbing and killing wildlife, but lets not let facts stand in the way of a good story.

Have a look at this site for more facts, by real professors (I'm not a real professor either) http://whyveg.com/save_the_planet/

Also, there is a great book written by Colin T Campbell, titled, 'The China Study' and will give you the facts, based on 28 year peer reviewed studies.

What does amaze me is that people commenting here are so aggressive about vegetarians and vegans - why is that Fiona? Is it because someone doesn't agree with you and only you can be right? (Just as smokers thought they were right for many years?)

Let me tell you that the move to plant-based diets is not waning and in fact on the increase and you only have to see the new products available in main grocery supermarkets.

But I do love the justification in some of these comments - you are now worried about thousands of mice, so therefore, vegans and vegetarians are now evil people for not supporting the beef industry? So now you are worried about the cattle being killed?

And this has to be comment of the year by Fiona...
"Vegans are deluded if they believe they are having less of a negative impact on the natural world than meat eaters."
Ah, I don't think it's vegans who are deluded, just more informed and not little sheep, following everything society tells them (Pardon the pun)

I did do some research on "Professor Archer" (As I do on people who make these type of statements, as I find they are generally connected to the cattle industry or on the pay role) and can't work out what his motivations are - does he support cattle farming or not? Read the transcripts from an ABC program, discussing kangaroo harvesting and make your own mind up.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/wheres-the-beef-or-is-this-the-end-of-meat/2934388

There is one particular comment he made where he talks about his wonderful pet kangaroo and then states they he would have no problem killing it and eating it. Odd thing to share with people and does make you wonder what kind of person could do that?

Mike, you claimed: "The key point is that vegans/vegetarians can't claim that less sentient lives are lost to provide their food than the mixed diets of omnivores. " ... given that non-vegan Australians consume, via their pigs, chickens and dairy, far more cereals than they would requre if they ate those cereals directly, then your "key point" is simply false. Not debatable, just plain false.

You write a highly provocative piece attacking vegans/vegetarians which prompts lots of ra-ra comments about vegan hypocrisy, accusations of not understanding what I read, of Gish-Gallop ... and you accuse me of bullying?

I've asked you to specify a feasible mix of foods that can feed 7 billion people with less suffering than a pure plant food diet and one that is also compatible with the reforestation and reduction in non-CO2 forcing which is required to fight climate
change? ... why do you seem intent on refusing to do this? In the absence of other evidence, I'm thinking its because you can't.

Fiona/Mike ... my reputation? People who know me know that I'm a perfectly reasonable person, if you think the challenge is unreasonable, then say why. I'm listening. Perhaps we can agree on some reformulation.

Geoff you highlight comments I made, namely the not understanding and the Gish-Gallop. Both of my statements are true.

You keep citing agriculture production figures and not understanding them or contextualising them. My example was your citing of cropping area, a figure that you have assumed is cropped every year. This is the sort of misunderstanding you constantly introduce in your anti-meat campaign here. You keep citing water use for a small industry and ignore the much larger water use associated with lower value crops.

As for my statement about you using a Gish-Gallop, this is exactly what you are doing. Throwing out several of these poorly understand statements seeks to bury everyone in your argument and lose sight of the actual issue at hand. I could go through and rebut each of your points, especially since I contributed to many of the land use figure and cropping figures reports in the past 5 years, but it takes too much time to explain each point, let alone all of them.

My point still remains: There is not enough productive agricultural land to support a move to a non-omnivorous diet for the entire population of the Earth.

Tim, do you have a source for your "point", your claim that: "There is not enough productive agricultural land to support a move to a non-omnivorous diet for the entire population of the Earth." ... where is it? You are peerless at pompous condescending arrogance, but not too good at peer reviewed evidence for your claims.

On the other hand ...

A recent paper by 20 authors in Nature calculated how many Calories
would be added to the global food supply with a shift to plant based diets:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v478/n7369/full/nature10452.html

... 49 percent. This isn't a guess, this is a careful calculation based on an obsessive
attention to detailed preparation of global datasets by many teams over the past
decade or so.

Oh gosh, there I go, bullying people with data and evidence again! Sorry.

The only arrogance here is yours Geoff. You are trying to comment on my field of expertise as an expert. And on this point, every time I do cite science you dismiss it. Even when I point to the actual information in the science you present you dismiss it. Have you read more than the dot points of the cancer report yet, like the actual diet chapter, because it actually supports my overall argument.

My comment about land use: 56% of Australia is extensive agriculture (i.e. dryland grazing). This can't be turned to cropping. What about the ~5,000,000,000 hectares of grazing land worldwide? Going to replace all of those grazing calories? Hardly.

My main gripe with your comments is that you continuously misrepresent evidence from papers or reports you cite. I've already mentioned the cropping figures. The CSIRO Murray Darling Figures you cherry picked are really interesting. You talk about the huge amount of water wasted on animals (specifically dairy) but fail to understand that 16ML is used for animals (irrigated pasture plus drinking water plus washing) whilst 76ML is used for irrigated crops. So by my rough maths that means that crops are using a lot more water.

Your latest post from the Science paper is once again misleading. It doesn't say that a shift to plant based diets would give an extra 49%. To quote the text: "Simply put, we can increase food availability (in terms of calories, protein and critical nutrients) by shifting crop production away from livestock feed, bioenergy crops and other non-food applications. That paper also doesn't suggest going vege or vegan: "But even small changes in diet (for example, shifting grain-fed beef consumption to poultry, pork or pasture-fed beef) and bioenergy policy (for example, not using food crops as biofuel feedstocks) could enhance food availability and reduce the environmental impacts of agriculture." Hardly supporting your statements at all, and actually embracing my points.

So Geoff, the arrogance is from you. You are not reading all the science, only the bits you want to.

Where about does you 16ML figure and your 76 ML figure come from?

Page 73 of the report I cited lists dairy at 4,194,619 ML.

You made a claim about the lack of arable land, the Foley paper shows your claim is false. I never said Foley was advocating a full shift to a vegan planet, only that he had calculation how much extra food it would yield ... 49% more calories. Nothing you have said alters that.

Suppose 22 million Australians read this paper of Prof. Archers and think ... "How can I live with myself, I'll stop eating cereal and animals raised on cereal and dairy from animals fed with grains and replace them with an equal amount of kangaroo and grass fed cattle". What would happen? Given that cereals provide 700 Calories per person per day, chicken and pigs another 270, dairy another 326, so we have stripped 1300 or so Calories per person per day from the food supply and have to replace it with kangaroos and cattle. Replacing the 270 with kangaroos and cattle would be challenging enough ... do I need to dot every i and cross every t? It can't work.

So Mike had better hope like hell that hardly anybody agrees with him.

It's the same as with duck shooters. They call wild duck sustainable. And I say, "ok what if a million other Australians believed you and thought, gosh I'll give up on factory farmed chicken and switch to sustainable wild duck". Oops, in about a week there'd be no more ducks. Duck shooters have to hope like hell that everybody else disagrees with them.

Whereas if everybody went vegan, we could reforest the Brigalow, etc etc. Retire some crop land (or increase exports).

Like I keep saying Geoff, read the report. They have the data there. 16ML is the figure you get from adding up all the animal water, 76ML is from all the crop water.

And yes you did make the claim that shifting to a vege or vegan diet was advocated, to quote your own post: "A recent paper by 20 authors in Nature calculated how many Calories would be added to the global food supply with a shift to plant based diets:" This is in direct conflict with the source you cited, as I pointed out in the quotes above.

So my comments still stand. My figures on the extensive agriculture still stand, even by the figures from the Foley paper.

Tim, I gave you a page number with a list of water
by activity ... page 73 in:
http://www.clw.csiro.au/publications/consultancy/2004/MDBC_stage2_report.pdf

Dairy usage was 4,194,619 ML ... rather higher than your supposed sum of all the crop water of 76ML.

So I've got no idea what you are talking about. Please give me a page number.

Foley and Ramankutty calculated if X then Y. ... if vegan then 49% extra Calories. That's not an endorsement of X, just a calculation of what happens if you choose it.

ML/ha. I'm talking efficiency of production per unit of water.

Ah ... now I understand what you are talking about.

You added the plant numbers in the ML/ha column and then the animal numbers. That's now clear.

So try this, a Toyota Prius uses 4 litres per 100 km and a Toyota Prado uses 10 litres per km. What is the average litres per km of these 2 Toyota cars?

Do I hear 7?

Obviously not. To find the average you need to know how many of each type sold ... or more accurately how many kms all of the vehicles of each type sold actually travel.

As it happens, I've seen this kind of basic numerical error before. I even devote a couple of pages to it in "CSIRO Perfidy". Who did it? Meat and Livestock Australia managed to get it past the journal reviewers in Nutrition and Dietetics a couple of years back so that they could claim that the average fat percentage in red meat was really low. It's beautiful, just list all the various cuts and their percentage fat and then average. As long as you have lots of different low fat cuts, it doesn't matter that most of the meat you might sell is cheap mince with gazoodles of fat. The other cuts will lower the "average".

So, first, you can't just add the figures in that column. Second, as I said, if you want to measure the production efficiency with respect to water, then its litres per Calorie which matters.

Not a basic error at all. You are trying to denote an industry based upon a total water use whilst excluding the size of the industry. If you want to say I've made an error then you are just as guilty, in fact, moreso.

You are still failing to understand the basic tenants of agricultural production. The proportion of water used per hectare is greatly biased towards crop production, as I have pointed out. Diary just happens to be a bigger industry due to the higher value produce per ML of water, thus larger areas of dairy.

Of course we all know why you fail to see this point: you are outside of your field and are an animal liberationist. This isn't about science for you, hence your ignoring of the basic data and cherry picking. Also referencing your own self-pubbed book is another derailment.

Geoff, you go on alot about peer review and the use of non-anecdotal data. Do the same standards apply to you? Has the "Duck Wounding Model" you rely heavily on in your campaign against duck hunting ever been peer reviewed? Did you build the model from empirical Australian data or rely on data from other countries involving different environments?

I'm also interested in your experience as a land manager or involvment in animal husbandry or practical wildlife management. It appears that your knowledge in these areas ends at the last page of the last report (peer reviewed) report you read.

Your response to Redmond Fox was very lightweight too. Can you explain how vegans reconcile the use of all the products he listed?

Scott. Of course I hold myself to the same standards. All of the work I use to support my claims about both duck shooting cripple rates and duck shooting wounding rates is peer reviewed. Some of it was done by shotgun makers but was still of good quality and published in reasonable journals. Here's a couple of the key references:

The first is a study of over 2000 shooters in 3 different regions of Canada. It is the only study I know of where shooters were observed without their knowledge ... they crippled about 6 ducks for every 10 bagged ... a "cripple" is a duck that is downed but not
retrieved.

Daniel J. Nieman et al
Monitoring hunter performance in prairie canada.
Transactions of the 52nd North American Wildlife and Natural
Resources Conference, 52:233--245, 1987.

This next is modelling work by shotgun maker Winchester-Olin (n.b. the nilo in the
title is the name of their experimental testing facility). To derive this model they
hung up and shot thousands of ducks with a variety of shotshells and at various ranges.
Birds that weren't dead were tethered and thrown into the air to test their coordination. Really. They took birds with broken wings, legs, bills etc and just hurled them into the air. Then they put them in pens for some days and any that were still alive were retested and classified. The dead ducks were then defeathered and all the exit/entry wounds were measured and inspected.

E.D. Lowry.
The nilo lethality model.
Proceedings of the International Association of Game, Fishing and Conservation, 63:117--141, 1973.

Of course if you think that physics operates differently in the northern hemisphere then that's your choice.

My own wounding model was peer reviewed. One reviewer was Roger Giblin, now retired of University College London.

Lastly, you ask how vegans reconcile the use of all the products he listed?

1) mainly, we don't use them. You'd be surprised at how many people are making vegan friendly stuff e.g., try these wines ...

http://www.templebruer.com.au/organic/vegan.html

2) the list is rather out of date. I actually resigned from the Flinders University Animal Ethics Committee over a decade ago and a key issue was the use of animal products in monoclonal antibody production. A little while after I resigned they stopped using them. Why? They are filthy and contaminated and muck up your research ... which is exactly what I'd been telling them (based of course on good peer reviewed research). Oh well better late than never.

3) Nobody can live a life without some adverse consequences to other animals. Vegans aim to minimise those, that's all. More than a few commenters on this post seem to think that there is no difference between doing some harm and doing truckloads of it. I don't know what drives them to such innumerate conclusions, but the fact that it might be impossible to raise a child without at some point losing your temper and doing something you regret is VERY different from beating the living daylights out of them on a regular basis. I released a silver eye from our peach tree netting yesterday. I could have killed and eaten it (illegal of course) for getting fat on our peaches but I didn't. We are omnivores ... which means we can make a vast range of choices about what we eat ... lucky us!

Geoff

If those references are key it speaks volumes about the integrity of the work you do. One is 24 years old and the other is 38 yo. Were either of them independent? Neither were done in Australia. I know you dont consider this important but its entirely possible that is conducted under different conditions and laws than exist in Australia. I'm aware of the study started in 1957 by the way so lets not swamp the post with a never ending list of research.

Can you please cite a reference to where your Duck Wounding Model was published and peer reviewed?

Its interesting to note that your model fails to reflect what actually happens in the field, even when hundreds of animal rights activists are right on the spot to verify what is actually occurring. I'm referring the 2011 Victorian duck season where activists were going to extrodinary lenghts to "rescue" downed ducks. To say that your model massively overestimates duck wounding would be an understatement.

FWIW I hunt but am not a duck hunter.

So to summarise;

Your qualification lie in maths and computers. You have no qualifications in fields relating to ag science, food science, land management, animal production, crop production or wildlife management.

You have no practical expertise in any of these fields either.

Your knowledge in these fields is limited to the published works of others and government publications.

The credibility of your own work is severely compromised by your activism, the lack of adequate peer review, the reliance on outdated and remote studies; and failure to ground truth the model prior to relying on the output.

Your critique of the comments of others in this conversation is fine but dont lose sight of your own short comings.

And to write off observations as irrelevant because they are anecdotal is the height of arrogance. Is it any wonder the general population has lost confidence academia?

My intention in commenting is not to change your perspective or behaviour. Your zealotry makes this futile. However, if you cast stones at others make sure your own house in order first.

I'll post a little more detail later, but for now ...

Please note that the age of a piece of good research is often irrelevant. The 38 year old Winchester work is a prime example. A shotgun pellet distribution is bivariate normal. It has been bivariate normal since shotguns were invented ... a couple of hundred years back. The occasional misshaped pellet causes a deviation from a perfect distribution but that's of no account. It wouldn't have mattered if Winchester had done this work in 1920, 1950 or 1960 or 2011. Hang a duck up and throw a bivariate normal distribution of pellets at it with a given energy and the same thing happens. It even works the same here in Australia. Results vary with more or less pellets in the pattern and different energies ... which is exactly what they investigated.

Why is a shotgun pellet pattern bivariate normal? ... C.F. Gauss worked this out about 200 years ago ... and, surprise, surprise it's still true today and its even true in Tasmania.

So ... as far as I can work out, you have an ad-hominem attack on me because I don't have scientific credentials outside mathematics and
an attack some sadistic but competent research because it is old.

Do you have any criticisms that relate to the content of either of the studies I cited? Do you have alternative studies that you think more accurately describe things? I'll post details on the best (ie., lowest cripple rate) study I know of later today ... do have any data of any kind in support of your implications that wounding rates are low?

Geoff

Personally I'm not that interested in wounding rates in ducks. No, I can't point you to more relevant research. Firstly because its not a key area of interest for me and secondly I doubt empirical Australian data exists. Please prove me wrong. You will however recall that the number of ducks "wounded" (evidenced by the number collected by activists) in Victoria this year was far, far less than what would have been predicted by your model.

You are oversimplifying the external ballistics of shotgun pellets. And without comparing the shot sizes, shot type, load weights, velocities, ranges and target species between Australia and Canada you cannot extrapolate the data. Maybe its comparable, but to assume it is is scientifically unsound.

What I am interested in is when you so blithly dismiss the observations of others, then call them to account for not citing relevant research to support their claims. Meanwhile you have yet to produce a peer review citation for your Duck Wounding Model. A model which you have used as key evidence to campaign against duck hunting.

Your credentials are key to the discussion because you hold very strong opinions on the subject matter, consider yourself an authority on the topic and have published extensively on it. You have referred readers of this conversation to some of this work.

In my experience strong opinions are best supported through knowledge and experience. You have demonstrated neither. What you have shown great aptitude for is researching and compiling the work of others to support your arguments. Arguments which which sound remarkably hollow because of your lack of training and practical experience. When my car breaks down I dont take it to my accountant to have it repaired.

You think I'm playing the man and not the ball. I think I'm calling a spade a spade. Whenever you are ready with that peer review of your model.

Scott: "A model which you have used as key evidence to campaign against duck hunting." As I keep saying. The peer reviewed field and experimental data shows perfectly well that duck shooting wounding rates are high. My model has explanatory value, that's all. I'll include the reference when I write a fuller reply later.

Is there any Australian field data. Not that I know of. There is however X-ray data. Decades of it. Go out into a swamp and catch a bunch of ducks and X-ray them for embedded pellets. This means they have been shot one (or more) times and recovered. Large ducks can more easily recover from a wounding so are more frequently seen with pellets. If you do this in most places BEFORE the shooting season starts, you will typically find 10 percent of ducks with embedded pellets. Remove your biases and just try and think for a minute. What proportion of ducks get shot in a year?... i.e., the "harvest" rate. 10-15 percent for ducks would be a high rate. How do you shoot this many ducks in one season and leave an embedded pellet rate of 10 percent?
Now what happens to "cripples"? These are the ducks counted by researchers in the previously cited studies. You can see them, they come down when shot but escape. What happens to them? ... most die. How do I know. Research where they deliberately cripple ducks and then attach a radio collar to it them to see what happens. So where do the wounded come from? They never come down when shot. You can't see them in a field study. Bellrose knew this in 1953 and so does every other researcher, but not your average duck shooter.

I'll provide some references later.

Okay, for anybody who is interested in the constant misleading claims that that 1) my model is the sole evidence for high duck shooting wounding rates and 2) that my modelling work wasn't peer reviewed. I have added a page to the Animal Lib blog which details solid evidence for high wounding rates from the two huge field studies which followed numerous smaller studies. I also include the journal title page from the journal which published my modelling work. You can see that the journal was a serious journal with a well qualified editorial board.

http://animalliberation.org.au/blog/119-response-to-the-conversation-critics.html

P.S. I don't get paid by Animal Liberation. I work as a programmer/mathematician, and always have done. That work is proprietary and my boss would sack and sue me if I started publishing stuff. I only work short hours these days, which gives me time for other things :) like this :(

Geoff

Thanks for going to the trouble of posting that but if that's your idea of peer review, well the publication can speak for itself;

"MapleTech (previously called "The Maple Technical Newsletter" or simply "the MTN") exists to communicate applications among creators and users of Maple software."

So what we have is newsletter published to extol the virtues of a specific software application. The newsletter was in print from 1991 to 1996. Publication in one little known, niche newsletter. Is this the high standard of review we should all aspire to?

I cannot locate the article online but why dont you scan it and put it up so we can all have a read of it?

Your point 1 above is inaccurate. Nobody said that your work was the sole evidence. What was said is that your model is flawed. It relies on data remote in time and location. I cannot comment on the integrity of the studies but you have assumed they can be directly extrapolated to Australian conditions. That is massively flawed logic and you dont have to be a scientist to work that out. Anybody knows that if you feed crap into a model you get crap out.

Geoff, I bear you no personal malice but I stand by my previous comments. You are on a crusade to convert the planet to veganism. I'm quite happy with the status quo and dont appreciate you telling me what I can eat, farm and hunt so we are always going to butt heads.

Have a good Christmas.

Well, this vegetarian has a rat-trap and Ratsack out tonight, defending my tomatoes - even growing fruit and vegetables will mean killing pests!

Am I the only vegetarian who feels differently about killing a sheep compared to a fish? Maybe they are all sentient beings, but whereas I think I could kill a fish and eat it if I had to, I don't think I could do the same to a cow. Despite the touching story of the empathetic mice with the babies singing to their mothers to come home, I will be ruthless in stopping them eating the food I'm growing for myself - they're pests. No cows or sheep have yet to invade my suburban vegetable patch.

Keely Boom says: "They act as if they assume THINKK is an activist organisation".

Okay, so what should we thinkk about THINKK?

THINKK's website says it is a "think tank that has been established to undertake independent research and encourage public discourse on kangaroos in Australia".
So exactly how is it staffed, governed and funded?
According to the THINKK website, its research fellows include Dr Daniel Ramp, Dr Dror Ben-Ami and Keely Boom. It is governed by a research advisory committee that includes Dr Daniel Ramp, Dr Dror Ben-Ami and Keely Boom. Its major funding supporters include the Sherman Foundation and the animal rights lobby group Voiceless. The directors of Voiceless - founded by Brian and Ondine Sherman - include Dr Daniel Ramp and Dr Dror Ben-Ami, and Keely Boom is a former Voiceless intern.

So, that seems clear enough: THINKK stands proudly alone and is most definitely NOT activistt.

[Conflict of interest declaration: I am omnivorous and enjoy eating meat, fruit, vegetables and fungi. I have a grudging admiration for mice. I was independently consulted - without payment - in the drafting of the Archer article and am a long-time friend and more recently colleague of Archer's, although my opinions are entirely independent.]

Back in 1996, DPI Agricultural Economist Peter Hardman did a study on the kangaroo industry ... his yield was a little less than 12 kg ... 10.17 kg. But lets not quibble. Most of the yield is used as "manufactured meat". The World Cancer Research Foundation told people in 2007 to avoid processed meat entirely ... not just limit it. Remove it from the food supply. Why? The cancer risk from just 30 grams of this stuff is similar to the cancer risk of 100 grams of normal red meat. Is all "manufactured meat" in the "processed meat" category? Difficult to say, but more than likely all of it is. What do I mean above by "most of the yield" ... Hardman put it at 70%. The 1.5 kg in the Thinkk report is the industries own yield figure for "quality" meat. The stuff that you'd get served at the Hilton.

Like I said, I don't know how much of the second rate stuff gets
treated, but I'd be interested to find out. It would clarify the debate if
the yield and proportion of processed meat were known. My understanding is that most of the cheaper stuff exported to Germany was processed ... I'd have to hunt down the source, but I think RIRDC.
I imagine such percentages fluctuate wildly.

The smoking gun on red meat is endogenous nitrosamine production which damages DNA in colon cells. Kangaroo meat may well be worse than other meat because of its higher heme content.

Here's the key paper ... it took about a decade to solve the technical details involved in doing this research ... isolating the cells working out
exactly what kind of damage to look for etc ...

http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/66/3/1859.abstract

CSIRO have patented resistant starch products designed to reduce DNA damage from red meat. It's a wonderful business model. Promote the food which does the damage and then have a patent on the products to prevent the damage.

CSIRO have been feeding red meat to rats with all kinds of things aimed at reducing the DNA damage ... I don't think you can guess this stuff ... you might like to suggest they test kangaroo meat? That would be brave!

Most of what CSIRO do uses very crude testing for DNA damage (comet assay). The Lewin work was looking for very particular kinds of DNA damage ... those associated with bowel cancer. Much harder. Most protein damages DNA ... see if you can spot the difference between damage from radioactive caesium-137 and a "mystery product" in the pictures here:

http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/05/02/would-sir-like-a-caesium-salad-with-his-steak/

Your welcome Mike, I saw an interesting video presentation a while ago on pigs as well - apparently we use pig in approximately 180+ products and a lot are used on a daily basis

HERE'S A BIT OF A LIST OF PRODUCTS THAT OFTEN HAVE PIG IN THEM.

Soap
Toothpaste
Shampoo/Conditioner
Anti Wrinkle Cream
Bread (Hair Protein is used in it)
Butter
Concrete
Train Brakes
Cheese Cake/Tiramasu
Fine Bone China
Paint (High Gloss)
Sandpaper
Paintbrushes (Hair)
Hair Brushes (Hair)
Meat Glue
Beer/Wine/Fruit Juice
Cigarettes
Collagen
Bullets
Heart Valves
Renewable Energy

Just to name a few!

Once you really start looking into it we all use animals regardless of what we think, just because you don't eat animal flesh doesn't mean you haven't benefited from an animals death, something Vegans and Animal Rights Groups really should sit down and really think about I feel.

What makes you think vegans don't think about these things? Have you booked an airline ticket lately? Have you looked at the list of special meals? All airlines cater for vegans. Have you ever seen an airline offer a "free range meat" option, or "wildlife meat" option? No? Why is this? My guess is because more than a few meat eaters crow loudly about supporting free range or hunting or whatever, but its all just lip service, almost none actually have any ethical principles that they allow to impact their behaviour. Most vegans will go hungry rather than break their ethical principles, but most free range/wild meat enthusiasts are perfectly happy with crippled chicken or lame pig. Mike calls it extremism, we call it ethics.

Imagine yourself in a country where the culture allows the regular savage beating of children ... which was our culture a century or so ago ... do you join in for fear of being ostracised as an outsider? Or refuse? Mike preaches cultural tolerance ... <A href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment">the Milgram way</A>, I say there are things which are wrong and fight the bastards with the most effective tactics you can dream up.

How does it sit with your philosophy about animal use knowing that you use animals on a daily basis? The funny part is the computer you are using to have these conversations almost certainly has animal product in it!

You can't escape the fact that animals have been killed to benefit not only meat eaters but vegetarians and Animal Rights Groups alike, we all benefit from farmed animals - simple as that.

I know it's hard for you guys to swallow, but its the plain simple truth, where do you think the fertilizers come from that are used in the vegitable/fruit production that feeds you guys? Seriously you don't seem to have any real idea - going by what I've seen on this forum so far.

I remember seeing the reaction of one of the Vegans in KILL IT, CUT IT, USE IT series who was absolutely shocked to find out that her hair products had animal in them (hair spray has Prawn in it) she was most upset, not to mention she washes her clothes in Animal Products as well (Washing Powders contain Animal Products).

I personally don't have a problem with Vegans only wanting to eat veg as such, but it does get annoying when you lot keep wanting to force it down our throats and tell us to not eat meat. I'm not going to change so people are waisting their time trying to convince me change - not happening champ sorry.

Thanks Mike. I was pretty sure that this was how you felt, and was reasonably sure that you wouldn't let political correctness interfere with an honest statement of your views, so I wasn't so much baiting you as trying to confirm my ideas about you.

I've just spent a few weeks reading Steven Pinkers "Better angels of our nature" ... which I think will be judged as one of the key books of the century in a hundred years time. It plots the decline of violence over time, a very long time. My favourite little example is the decline of dueling, Pinker describes it as being laughed out of existence. The satirists blew it apart. Thankfully, they didn't respect the tradition or the culture. Other traditions and cultures have been far more dangerous and have thankfully also bitten the dust ... thanks to people who didn't respect the violence of power and stupidity. We have rather a long way to go in the campaign to reduce violence, but the glory of Pinker's book is showing how many vile and vicious cultures and traditions have been overcome. In the day to day battle against any particular tradition, a show of respect may be the best strategy. That's fine. The fight against female genital mutilation, for example may require tact rather than cartoons and satire ... I don't know. But I do know it is wrong and I'm confident it will be gone in 50 years, maybe sooner. Provided those who preach tolerance do not prevail. The driving force behind much of the decline of violence is the spread of what now seems so obvious that we don't credit it ... the spread of the knowledge that others are like us. Racists really do believe that other races are very different, but education and interaction wakes them up. In times gone past, it wasn't just other races that were persecuted, but anybody from the next valley. The nobles really didn't think the peasants were real people. Thank god (I like the expression, but am about as religious as Richard Dawkins) for the crushers of horrible traditions and cultures.

Are animals sufficiently like us to warrant moral consideration? The use of animals in trials of anti-depression drugs is predicated on their being very similar to us. They suffer and feel, even if they can't play chess. Most of us have worked this out. Even many vegan-hating meat lovers have worked this out. Many were appalled by the 4Corners footage from Indonesia and the Gippsland slaughter house footage. So we come from different cultures and I have no respect for people who hunt without reason and very few people have any reason these days. I have no animosity at people who do what they need to to survive ... but plenty for those who practice gratuitous cruelty.

As for Redmond Fox's list. It's a little lacking. Cattle (with pigs and sheep) give about 6,000 Australian's each year a diagnosis of bowel cancer. The fat which gets a mention generally goes into biofuel these days, but it used to end up in arteries as the gift of a stunning income to bypass surgeons. Of course there is plenty of it left to still give those surgeons a great income. In the developing countries, cattle foul water and generate novel rotavirus strains, contributing to the second biggest cause of malnutrition behind "insufficient food". Of course my favourite item in Redmond's list was "anti-aging cream". Do meat eaters actually believe in things like that?

For people who are interested. Have a look over at Bravenewclimate.com, I've done a 3 part series on food security as we head towards feeding 10 billion people in 2050. The livestock to wildlife biomass ratio is about 7 to 1 and rising. Anybody who seriously sees a role for wildlife as a food source is just guaranteeing the extinction of the little that is left. My vision is to use the least possible land to feed the human population while leaving the maximum possible for wildlife and reforestation.

Carlos,

The CSIRO now acknowledges that raising cattle and other ruminants does NOT increase green house gases (GHG). In spite of this, politicaians and many others still make comments about this and suggest that these animals provide about 16% of Australia's GHG production. That this is nonsense is easily seen from the facts that

1. The carbon in Methane produced by animals is 100% biological being produced from last years sequestered carbon from the air - used to produce the grass or grain.

2. Methane has a lifetime of about 8 years before it is broken down into CO2 and water as well as forming other non-GHG, stable, chemicals. Since the number of ruminants in the world (probably) and in Australia (definitely) is less now than it was 50 years ago, the methane produced today is only replacing that which was produced ten years ago but has now decayed - thus there is NO NET increase.

3. The grass or grain eaten by cattle is less than half of the total carbohydrate produced in the plant from which they "bite", meaning that half of the sequestered carbon remains in the soil, although microbes do delete it in time - back to CO2. 4. Since some methane is removed from the air in the formation of stable chemicals such as carbonates, the process of feeding cattle actually reduces the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, when one follows the whole process to its conclusion.

However, the fossil fuel used in the production of beef is a factor which leads to increased carbon dioxide. How much I do not know, but burping of ruminants is not part of it!
John Nicol

John. Over on bravenewclimate.com you'd be asked to provide sources to back your claims. Under "The Conversations" pretend moderation rules, you can say any garbage you like, provided you say it politely.

So, with respect, have you ever bothered to check any of what you wrote?

How many cattle are there in the world today? Did you bother to check? Obviously not. According to FAOstat, the latest figure for cattle is 2009 when there were 1.4 billion cattle and the earliest figure is 1961, when there were 942 million. And those figures are rather misleading. Why? In 1961 the average carcase yield was 160 kg and in 2009 it was 210 kg. So in rough terms, the cattle biomass has doubled.

With respect, I'd suggest you check the rest of your claims.

The UNFCCC requires Australia to calculate its methane emissions from livestock because they matter ... as does the methane and nitrous oxide from fires ... but not the CO2 from fires. Why not? Because the CO2 from fires doesn't change climate forcings, while the methane represents "carbon on steroids" with a huge increase in forcing until it breaks down. The fact the carbon in methane may have come from the atmosphere isn't relevant, it's the state that matters and when that carbon is in a methane atom it has more of an impact. State matters. e.g., dive into a swimming pool. No worries. Now freeze the water and dive in ... ouch. Same atoms, different state, huge difference.

Geoff,

With all due respects, this is called a "Conversation" so I didn't think it mattered that I didn't quote a reference - only joking of course.

No I did not check the world population of cattle, whch is why I had said "probably", and accept your correction thank you, - again without checking! But I did check Australia's population from the Bureau of Statistics which is what does matter to me.

OK, I was wrong about the 50s - the cattle population here peaked about 1970 at 34 million and are now down to about 24 million while sheep numbers are half what they were in the 1960s (180 Million down to 90 million which is the number we had in about 1912. The carcase mass may have doubled because of better feeding in the last three or four months before slaughter - nothing to do with total biomass on the hoof which could well be much less because of younger slaughtering. The same goes for sheep, mutton or "lamb" - for which beef is a factor of roughtly 7 larger, in terms of carrying capacity of pasture but slaughter weights have a higher ratio of nearer 8.5.

When I was a boy, cattle were usually killed at four years of age and older in Australia, now they will only pay good money for two and a half year olds - two tooth cattle. They dress out at about 280 to 320 kg. Hopefully increased efficiencies may even improve on this.

As for the world, last time I looked, there were about 1.2 Bllion but I will accepth your 1.4 billion as it will go up and down depending on who is counting and the climate in the big holders. India, China and Brazil,together have about 1/3 of the world's population of cattle, all third world countries? Australia's 1.7% is comparable to our green house gas emissions.

However, You did not make any comment on the fact that cattle run on bio-fuel as it were, which takes much less fossil fuel to produce than the acclaimed ethanol for cars!

The fact that UNFCCC requires Australia to calculate methane emissions, supports my case that politicians haven't yet grasped the basic facts regarding the chemical pathway that livestock emissions follow, nor of the stored carbon associated with the farming which is done in parallel with it.

The change in forcings - which is what all the Enhanced Green Hoiuse Effect is about, has been downwards from Australia's point of view. The degree of forcing by Methane, BTW, is such as to barely rate a mention in comparison with CO2 because of the difference in concentrations, even if its spectrum is broader. The biggest culprits are old rotting peat bogs and termites.

Even allowing what you are saying to be true, Australia's 16% of 1.5% works out at less than 0.25% of world out put which means that if we were to cut out our total ruminant production altogether, the world could be cooler, allowing the worst case scenario presented by the IPCC - wait for it - it is 1/6 x 0.02 C or 0.0027 C. his wuld not be measurable. John Nicol

Mr Nicol is a leading global warming sceptic / denier. No amount or valid science will convince him otherwise, even though he has been rebutted convincingly at this Conversation thread here:

http://theconversation.edu.au/how-david-beckham-caused-global-warming-the-man-u-climate-model-4548

Hello Yuri.

Yes, if you say so, but I do not deny that the globe has warmed from 1979 to 1998 which seems to be the qualification required for being referred to as a "denier". As a scientist, I am always sceptical of claims which have not been substantiated by empirical evidence. So yes, I am definitely a “sceptic”.

The best known theories of physics, those of Newton and Einstein, were the subjects of very extensive experimental work which, in Newton's case preceded the theory. In Einstein’s case measurements followed the theory, although two pieces of information did precede “special relativity” – The Michelson Morley Experiment in about 1886 and the knowledge that Maxwell’s electromagnetic equations were not covariant in a Galilean transformation. Nevertheless, people remained skeptical of both theories until the Ives and Stillwell experiment proved that second order Doppler effects was correct, the time variation of a “moving” twin was also correct (about 1970) (Special R) and the precession of Mercury’s orbit around the sun was exactly accounted for by the General Theory (GRT), as was the gravitational effect on light where the “Correspondence Principle” gave only half the angle for the deviation of starlight by the sun, whereas GTR gave the correct angle. If these experiments had not yet shown that Einstein’s theories worked, the theories would have been forgotten, trashed or subject to justifiable scientific skepticism to tis day.

In the case of Global warming, the 200 years preceding 1850, is referred to as the Little Ice Age, when the Viking’s villagess on Green land for instance were covered by Glaciers of ice (Many still are covered!) and Europeans starved because insufficient food could be grown to feed the population. If things change as they have throughout geological history, what must logically follow is either a full blown Ice Age or a warming. It turned out to be a warming period and the earth began, about 1850, to return naturally to the earlier warmer periods when the Vikings settled Greenland and Iceland in the years following about 1850. In that time to the present, there has been a steady warming which, as the ice has melted, quite naturally increases in its rate of warming except when nature has again introduced periods of cooling. If you look carefully at the graph of global temperatures, following the development of the thermometer (coincidentally about 1850), you will see that the measured temperature has gone through three cycles of warming and two of cooling in 150 years – of approximately 60 year period . The first of these shows the highest rate of warming and the third from 1979 to 1998 shows the second fastest, and the middle one is almost as fast as the other two. These warmings are followed by cooling, but superimposed in all of it is a general trend which is slowly increasing as would be expected as the time moves further from the Little Ice Age.

These are empirical facts – all text book stuff for which there is no need to quote references.

According to the latest IPCC Report AR4 -2007 (AR4):

1. The warming from 1979 to 1998 “was unprecedented” – false, the warming in the 19th century was faster.

2. Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) increased almost linearly in step with an almost linear increase in temperature (T) – so there is a correlation between CO2 and T. True, but there was no reduction in CO2 levels with corresponding reduction in temperature to more clearly demonstrate a “correlation”. (One normally looks for a large number of corresponding variations in the values of two parameters before claiming a correlation”)
3. The increase in CO2 has continued but at a greater rate than before, yet the rate of warming has slowed and more recently the earth has cooled very slightly since 2001. – no correlation there.
4. The IPCC does not acknowledge the earlier warming periods in mid 19th and 20th centuries as relevant to their case.
5. The IPCC makes use of, (AR4), 23 models which have been selected as being “plausible” (AR4) as they all show at least a slight warming. Those which were showing future cooling or no warming were regarded as being “implausible” (AR4) Chapters 9 and 10.
6. Of the 23 models used whose results are illustrated in AR4, no two obtain the same result, results which range in temperature increases for doubling of CO2, from 1.3 C to 4.7 C. By implication, only one model can be correct and the differences (errors) between them, 3.4 C, is larger than the values obtained by about half of the models. (This does not represent a high degree of accuracy for the models! 100% errors is not good!) If for example, the errors in the selectd model showing the lowest temperature increase of 1.5 C is +- 3.4, it must allow for possible negative result of – 1.9 C. All other results up to 3.4 C must also allow for a negative result. – and remember, negative models have already been eliminated according to AR4. This comes directly from what is reported in AR4. (I do not need to quote any other “peer reviewed” publications.)
7. The sole justifications for blaming the warming between 1979 and 1998 according to the IPCC is that the models provide the results described in 6. above.
8. Andy Pitman (Letter to the Australian, 2009??) – on the question of what empirical evidence is there that carbon dioxide caused the global warming (1979-1 998 ) “Nothig else has increased except cabon dioxide, so it must be CO2”!
9. Models used by the Bureau of Meteorology for both short term and long term forecasts, are claimed to be very “similar” to climate models. Yet in 2010 the BOM issued an 18 month forecast for Australia for 2011 which predicted flooding in Western Australia and drought in Queensland. 2011 turned out to be one of the wettest for about 50 years and WA suffered one of its worst droughts! I know all the claims that “short term forecast are more difficult than 50 to 100 year forecasts” but the results of BOM’s experiment surely demonstrates huge problems with the models.
10. Further problems for the models is explained clearly in Chapters 9 and 10 of the AR4. They have not yet (as of 2007) been able to reproduce the known climate of the Globe even over the suggested 50 year or 100 year period – say from 1900 to 2000 or 1930 to 1980, so unlike relativity there is as yet no known “verification” for the models. They take Arrhenius’ 115 year old hypothesis and assume that it is correct, even though the accuracy of his measurements was NOT good enough ot show what is necessary for the Enhanced Green House Effect, as was demonstrated quite clearly by Prof. Jack Barrett in 1985..(Barrett is also a well known sceptic!)
11. Early in the “history” of recent climate modeling, the models “discovered” what they called a signature of the Enhanced Green House Effect (EGHE) which was an extraneous warming in regions of the upper atmosphere above the tropics. It must be there they said because the models say so and we can explain its presence. The CSIRO Green House Group under Dr David Evans, spent about 15 years along with several other similar groups around the world using balloon measurements etc to find this signature so as to prove the correctness of the models.
12. No signature of the EHGE has ever been found! Does this give any one confidence in the results from the models.
13. I have spent over five years now communicating with the members of the University Climate Units in Australia – UNSW, Melbourne University, Adelaide, ANU and in particular CSIRO (Dr Penny Whetton. I have asked always for a publication, an internal research report, a set of measurements, the comparison between the output from the models and real world, known data(see 10 above) . I have pleaded and begged very politely. Until recently I had nothing to show – not quite correct, Penny Whetton promised to find an article or two for me but was in the end – eighteen months of correspondence – only able to tell me via their 2007 Report “Climate Change IN Australia” that “We believe that most of in crease in global temperatures during the second half of the twentieth century – not in the 21st century! – were very like due to increases in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide.”
14. Just recently, Will Steffen from ANU sent me a magazine article in the monthly journal of the APS by Pierrehumbert, in which he describes, but with some basic errors, such as the Einstein A coefficient for CO2 radiation at 15 microns and the collision rate between atmospheric molecules (both EXTREMELY important parameters in radiation transfer theory which the article is about) the Green House Effect which every one accepts anyway without question. His attempt to describe the ENHANCED Green house Effect, the one which is of importance in this debate, is crude and unconvincing, although satisfactory for a magazine article. He does not try to accurately obtain that effect, but does describe the principle quite well. However, this is not a peer reviewed paper and simply gives a rough background to the problem
15. Yet Steffen, and now others, quote Pierrehumbert’s paper as the authoritative document. Surely theer must be something more convincing, some measurement, some model which can get the correct answers when compared to known climates! Why else would be facing a Carbon dioxide tax in this country? Yes, it must be correct!

I will look forward to further comments from you Yuri, and anyone else. But could address these to the comments I have made above and please tell me where I am wrong and most importantly of course WHY I AM WRONG!

I await enlightenment. John Nicoljonicol18@bigpond.com .

John - you ask for enlightenment... if only you asked Einstein or Newton. Or perhaps for a living, high-repute vegetarian physicist, you could still ask Briane Greene. As Einstein put it:

Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet. ~Albert Einstein

You must occasionally allow yourself a momentary release from the rigid framework of the scientific method in order to dream about the possible direction in which we should help it develop. That was Einstein and Newton's genius.

John, too many to mention have told you where you are wrong. Your strategy is to ignore them and continue to post as if they had not, like a true zealot. See the other thread.

This is not a thread about global warming per se, but what I would say is that if you think you have something, why don't you try to get it published in a peer-reviewed journal? Well, have you? How did you go?

In the meantime, when the 99% of climate and associated physicists that believe MM global warming is real, start to become sceptics, then get back to me and I might take more notice.

Yuri,

Yes, I agree, many people have said in no uncertain terms and sometimes very rudely unfortunately, that what I am saying does not fit with their own beliefs in the statements by the IPCC. No one yet has been able to show me why the IPCC is correct, nor that the scientific statements I have made are wrong.

As I have pointed out, the people in the units in Australia, and the CSIRO, continue to make claims that their models show this and that but have been unable to justify these claims by demonstrating empirical evidence.. What I am pointing out is that they have NEVER been able to verify these results with actual measurements. In addition there is much evidence from paleantology (Bob Carter), from Infra Red Spectroscopy (Prof Jack Barrett) and atmospheric measurements, to mention only three areas, that show what the IPPCC claims cannot be correct.

I have had a theoretical text book paper, not necessarily publishable in its current form as it is just basic text book radiation physics, on the internet for several years, inviting criticism. The only comments I have had is to confirm my calculations and none of criticism, which I specifically invited. Where were all the knowlegable climatologists.

I am inviting you now to show me here which statements I have made that are wrong and WHY they are wrong. There is no value in comments which just say "you are wrong" A discussion involves making comparisons with what you say are the correct analyses. Please do not hide behind the "Thousands of papers which show..." Penny Whetton started off by saying that but in the end had to admit that what they did with their models was to make assumptions and look at th results. This is not good science Yuri as I am sure that you, who seems to have a scientific background in physics or chemistry to be able to make your comments?.

There are only a handful of papers which even address the characteristics of carbon dioxide and none of them which does a complete and accurate analysis demonstrates that carbon dioxide can cause the Enhanced Green House Effect. In the huge IPCC report, over 5,000 papers are cited of which less than 50 have anything to do with carbon dioxide and of those simply follow the same simplistic arguments which demonstrate the Green House Effect, but not the Enhanced Green House Effect which is the essential issue here.

But you do have an opportunity to either show me where I am wrong or point to a paper which proves the concept of Anthropogenic Global Warming - and please do not include Pierrehumbert's description in the Monthly APS magazine which tells us partly correctly, how the Green House Effect works. Papers by Harries et al. on the ERBE data are also non starters.

There are very few physicists and geologists who believe in global warming. Astronomers like Schmidt perhaps do, often referred to, very rudely in my view, as stamp collectors. And it is true that most of their time is spent counting stars and cataloguing them, rather than engaging in very much physics. There are not even 97% of "climatologists" who believe in AGW.

Some chemical enginers/administrators like Will Steffen do and some chemists/administrators like Ian Chubb do, but they are not really into radiation physics per se.

However, I know I will not be able to convince you, and am not trying to - but I would like to hear your comments on the physics. You might also give me a very direct reference to the other thread where you claim others - presumably Mark Harrigan and Michael Brown gave me references to John Cooks blog at Skeptical Science!

I look forward to your detailed, scientific comments on the physics of Global Warming and the EHGE.
Cheers,

John

Okay, you have not been able to publish your paper, right? And that's because it doesn't hold up -- unless you believe that, let''s say, 97% of the world's climate scientists are duds and you happen to be correct.

Many, many scientists with better training in this discipline than I have rebutted your premise, so why would I waste my time repeating it?

For the uninitiated, Mr Nicol uses the standard agenda-driven sceptic approach of pretending that his ideas have never been debunked, and repeating this ad nauseum. It's all here, and in many other places, for anyone to read, including the comments:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/

Dear George,

Unfortunately I cannot produce the article at present as I am away from home. I acknowledge that not all scientisrts in CSIRO will say that cattle are not a problem. Those in the Climate Science Group who do all the modelling for the IPCC for instance would not be prepared to admit to that. But there is a report in which one of the sections in the agricultural area did acknowledge just what I had said - that producig grain, for instance leaves more carbon in the soil than is taken out because the biomass in the root system is heavier than that above the ground and much of the stubble finds its way back into the soi. I did comment that much of the carbon is still released back to the atmosphere by bacterial destruction of the roots and stubble. Never the less, the crop does sequester some carbon.

Even without a reference or even an ackowledgement to which I referred, one does not surely not need to be Albert Einstein to do the sums for one's self. The Enhanced Green House Effect, according to the IPCC, depends on the INCREASE of GHGs. It is as clear as anything can possible be, that if the numbers of cattle and sheep decreases as it has done, according to ABARE, the amount of methane put out by these animals must have decreased.

It would seem to me to be equally clear that not one molecule of carbon emitted by belching ruminants - not F.... as many like to say, although as with human beings this contributes a little, - comes from fossil fuels but from previously sequestered carbon, mostly from just the year before. The methane breaks down in about 8 years - no I am not going to give a reference, much of it forming stable carbonates. The net effect is to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. It cannot be otherwise.

I did also say that many political bodies such as the IPCC, the Greens, Green Peace, WWF etc will maintain that the additional methane contributes to Australia's net contribution to INCREASED green house gases. This is just another example of people being totally unable to understand a few very simple scientific facts and to be able to do some grade 3 arithmatic.

Sure cattle produce methane. I am not questioning that It is just that this methane is not actually contributing one single solitary molecule to a net increase in GHGs. Cheers, John

Dear John and George ... Tim Scanlon in an earlier comment stated:

"I actually asked a couple of my animal science professors from UWA to weigh in on The Conversation and write an article. Their response was that they had bigger issues to deal with, like actually doing the methane lowering research, figuring out which feeds lower methane and better rumens."

I suggest John give them a quick call so they can start looking for new jobs since their current jobs are obviously redundant.

Dear Geoff,

As with a lot of research on climate matters of course, the availability of funding is dependent on there being a problem. I would not expect them to change what they are doing simply because it could be a waste of time - they are asked to find a way to reduce methane, so why not do it?

On the other hand, research at Armidale suggests that reducing the methane out put also coincides with increased efficiency in feed conversion - so there are other incentives for this work.

Howevr, I am surprised that you did not comment on the analysis I have presented to you of the sequence of events - CO2 -> grain/grass -> methane -> CO2 and carbonates - therefore no net increase in the Green House Gas (actually small decrease)! Were you able to understand what I was saying or should I put it into a more simple form for you? It would be interesting if you could show me that my analysis is wrong! Cheers, John.

A steady state livestock population now is responsible for a steady state component of methane in the atmosphere ... sure ... but at a level well above that component in
preindustrial times due to livestock. So it is a net forcing increase relative to the preindustrial forcing. As is the forcing due to methane from human sewage ... also counted by IPCC.

Geoff,

Yes, that is correct if we were to try to go back to the level of CO2 in preindustriasl times - 1750 which is before we had any cattle in Austrlai. I didn't think the aim was to go that far back which will mean an awful lot of wind farms!

However, the claim is that we put out 16% every year and are being assessed on the assumption that our methane has been accumulating in the same way as our CO2 and thast we will be continuing to accumulate methane for the next 100 years unless we do something about cattle. This is certainly not correct. The lifetime of 8 years which is 1/12 of 100 years means that our effective output of methane is only 1/12 of the actual annual output - or 1.25 % of our Green House gas contribution, compared with CO2 which does not breakdown. Any CO2 which results from the methane breaking down, and after the formation also of stable carbonates from much of that breakdown, . My thesis is simply that cattle simply provide an alternative pathway for the recycling of CO2 and nothing can be done to remove that - if the grain isn't grown, the carbon won't be sequestered. If the grass is left to die, it will still be converted into CO2 by microbes or other animals. So the effect of grazing cattle and helping to feed the world, is surely better than feeding microbes. I wonder whether sewage produces more methane than the decomposition of excrement and the foul piles of rubbish in the streets of the towns before the IR. The pronouncements from the IPCC never fail to astound. Cheers, John

Ketan, I think you're making a couple of mistakes here.

Firstly, I don't think vegans hold humans to "some 'extra-natural' standard". You seem to be making the point that because animals kill each other in nature, its unnatural to set an ethical standard of not killing. But the idea that someone with the ability to make a moral decision also has the responsibility to make moral decisions is not 'extra-natural' at all.

Secondly, you "paraphrase" the "campaigning of PETA" and then assert that your (wildly inaccurate) paraphrase is actually the main ethical position of a "a large proportion of vegetarians". I can assure you that a very small proportion of vegetarians consider the "cuteness" of animals to be an important consideration. Most vegetarians who are vegetarian for animal rights issues are primarily concerned with the ability of animals to suffer and desire to live. Environmental and health reasons are also common motives for being vegetarian. "Cuteness" of animals is not.

Saying that eating grains kills 25 times more animals than eating meat is important if its true and if it points to an alternative lifestyle that reduces harm. The problem is that it isn't and it doesn't (except under very strict conditions that are completely unrealistic in any practical attempt to feed a large population).

You say the "vegans out there... need to question the notion that us humans should be held to some 'extra-natural' standard when it comes to the treatment of other species". I'd turn that around on you and say, people in general might spend some time seriously investigating and considering their own values and what kind of lifestyle would be consistent with those values. This is best done often, because new information frequently turns up that forces you to reevaluate old positions. You could make it a family Christmas exercise if you wanted.

Mike, first of all, many things are carcinogens in various tests and we should take note of that. However, red meat, not just processed red meat, has consistently been shown to raise the risk of colorectal cancer, even though a no-effect level probably exists. It's not just about nitrosamines, it's more about haem iron, which is toxic in excess (see haemochromatosis), and the polycyclic aromatics and other chemical products of cooking red meat.

It's quite disingenuous to try to suggest that the carcinogenicity of red meat is all about nitrosamines in processed meat.

The risk to humans of acrylamide in food is inconclusive. In any case, if it were to be found to be carcinogenic to humans, why would you not want this to be made public, like red meat and colon cancer, so that consumers can make dietary changes to protect themselves?

Mike Archer uses the "Ames defence". Bruce Ames made his name in the mid seventies with the bacterial assay 'Ames Test' for mutagens and putative carcinogens. His later assertions (Ames and Gold) that the carcinogenicity of certain pesticides and industrial chemicals should be virtually ignored because there are an equal number or more of natural carcinogens in food plants does not hold up. It ignores: 1) additive and synergistic actions of natural and industrial carcinogens; 2) fat soluble carcinogens such as certain organochlorines that are stored in body lipid stores for long periods, compared to plant substances that are mostly metabolised rapidly by digestion and detoxification enzymes.

(Incidentally, most of the human body burden of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) -- substances like dioxins and PCBs, DDE, methyl mercury etc -- comes from animal foods in the diet.)

Ames is one scientist with an opinion. He did not represent the mainstream opinion of the National Cancer Institute or the National Toxicology Program of the US. However, you can guarantee that any industrial interest wishing to defend a carcinogen will use the 'Ames defence' and his work on natural carcinogens. It's worth knowing about, but it's not all that relevant.

Homo sp. has evolved natural defence and selection systems against toxic plant foods and putative plant carcinogens over millions of years. And as Jared Diamond and others have pointed out, the big meat-eating Homo in the evolutionary African cradle, for the most part, was a myth, and high game meat consumption was unlikely to have been a feature of early human diets (despite what The Paleo Diet says).

In any case, I don't know of ANY recognised plant foods that have been proven to be human carcinogens. None at all. Aflatoxins (a mould on nuts and grains); aristolochia, a herbal medicine; and betel nut are proven human carcinogens, but none are foods per se. If there were more natural human carcinogens in the mainstream food supply we would surely have identified more of them. (http://www.iarc.fr/)

In the large EPIC European dietary study, there was a 35% increased risk of developing colorectal cancer in individuals who consumed the highest quantities of red and processed meat, compared with subjects with the lowest consumption. (EPIC, Riboli et al.) This rivals estimates for obesity, and the two (meat eating and obesity), are also related in several studies. There is also emerging data on the association between red meat consumption (and dairy) and the risk of aggressive prostate cancer. The Word Cancer Research Fund (http://www.wcrf.org/) says that the evidence that red meat is a human carcinogen is 'convincing', and that consumption should at least be limited to less than 500 gram/week.

Mike, yes there are some powerful plant-based carcinogens that are carcinogenic in a variety of laboratory tests. I'm well aware of that having once published a professional toxicology newsletter. For humans, the genus Aristolochia (Dutchman's pipe) is a serious poison, and has caused kidney failure and bladder cancer in people prescribed it as a natural remedy for weight loss. No doubt there are others with such potential, eg pyrollizidine alkaloids for example. I wasn't suggesting we start eating cycads, or aconitum or comfrey or the 1080 or stychnine plants <g>.

However, my point was that Bruce Ames claimed that common food plants as diverse as: apples, bananas, basil, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, cantaloupe, carrots, cauliflower, celery, cinnamon, cloves, cocoa, grapefruit juice and others, contained natural carcinogens. If these chemicals produced cancer in humans, we probably would know about it by now. Food taboos and selection pressure over thousands of years have pretty much sorted this out for us. Various anti-carcinogens in varied plant-food diets most likely also help.

But . . . when we do find out about a carcinogen, natural or synthetic, then the judicious public health policy is to recommend cessation of consumption, or if a dose-response is apparent, limit consumption. That's the policy we should adopt with red and processed meat consumption -- not denial. And I do note that you have accepted this.

Mike - I think some vegans - those who eat mostly fruit, vegetables and rice, nuts etc could claim to be killing fewer animals than the rest of us. I don't have any qualms about shooting dogs who take sheep, or foxes who take chickens, or the rats who (would) take my figs, but I feel a little uneasy about the dairy foods I consume - but, from my own experience I know I need them.

I can't share your view that I should think of cows the same way I think about grasshoppers, I don't hink it's 'irrational' to see these as quite different things.

"Think about fruit. To grow it, we dedicate vast areas of totally cleared land to this purpose which clearly impacts negatively on millions of animals of all kinds."

From the 2009-10 year book:

Irrigated areas of fruit and nuts 130,000 ha.
Irrigated areas for vegetables 114,000 ha
Irrigated cereals 340,000 ha

and the irrigated areas for livestock ... bigger or smaller?

Grazing, 554,000 ha
Hay 147,000 ha,
silage 65,000 ha.

Compare a drip irrigated fruit orchard with flood irrigation for lucerne ... there is no comparison.

and it isn't only fruit growers in conflict with wildlife ... think sheep producers and eagles ... would we still have wedge tailed eagles if they hadn't been legally protected?

It is good to see these issues getting some reasonably detailed examination by way of this article and many of the comments.

We all have our own biases, so I've refrained from just joining in the fray for the sake of it. But having read the article and most of the responses I have to make a couple of comments of my own. - (but before I do, I should say as an aside that while I don't agree with the main thrust of the piece written here, it is good to see an author of a piece willing to engage with and respond to points raised by commenters. It doesn't happen anywhere near often enough with online pieces.)

But a few comments made by the author in seeking to defend their position seem to me to just demonstrate the inadequate foundations in the case they wish to make:

The statement that a main point of the article is to "recognise the hypocrisy of some (not all) vegetarians/vegans who rationalise their choice of foods on the grounds that animals don't die to produce them" seems to me to be mostly be driven by an annoyance at the perceived moralising-from-on-high that some vegans allegedly do.

It can be irritating to feel like you're being lectured at by somebody, no mater what the topic. But that doesn't in itself reflect much on how right or otherwise the person is. I am happy to be corrected, but I think it would be quite rare for a vegan to claim that no animals of any sort die as part of producing the food they eat.

As the author of the piece says, "the challenge for the ethical eater is to choose the diet that causes the least deaths and environmental damage".

I have to say the article seems as much driven by the aggravation at the perception of being lectured by vegetarians/vegans, as it does by an effort to produce a comprehensive case that eating some meat causes fewer deaths and less environmental harm than any non-animal based diet.

I'm all for avoiding consciously seeking to convert people to a different point of view from what is perceived to be a high moral ground.

But on a topic like this, it is almost impossible to avoid being perceived as trying to take a high(er) moral ground - which is why providing a comprehensive overview of the facts to back up one's position is more important than usual.

Do you have a point Mike? Plant scientists have been fighting wars like this for decades ... and, happily, winning. Cereals are 46 percent of global food calories. Are you going to replace them with bush meat? Rangeland cattle? All up, beef is 1.4 percent of global calories and still knocking down forests at a massive rate. How much of that is rangeland? Sweet fa. The livestock to wildlife biomass ratio is about 7 to 1. Think about it. Double the planet's cattle population and you could knock cereal dependence down to 44.6 percent. All you'd need to do is totally destroy the Amazon with the Congo thrown in. Sounds like a good deal. Perhaps we could multiply the planet's kangaroo population by about a million fold and knock off another 1 percent?

We have USAID running around Africa telling people to eat more meat so what do those without livestock do? Bush meat. If you want to guarantee the degradation of animal biodiversity on the planet, then advocacy of wild meats as the humane healthy sustainable alternative is the perfect strategy.

I acknowledge that you are not wanting to sound insensitive, but it seems you are saying Australia should not be helping to feed 50 million people (or presumably any number of people) overseas because it is degrading our environment (more than would otherwise be the case) to do so? So are you saying those people overseas should have to pay more for their food by sourcing it from elsewhere?

In particular, you seem to be saying that by producing food for people who live in other countries, it "makes us contributors to the exacerbating global problem of overpopulation rather than part of the solution."

I find it hard to read this in any way other than suggesting that feeding people who live in other countries is a problem, and also that not helping to feed them is part of a solution to over-population.

Is that an an accurate summation of what you're suggestion, or am I missing something?

This conversation is getting impossible to follow - I must have missed a comment by Andrew somewhere!

Re how necessary it is for Australia to feed the world: perhaps some parts of the world would be better at feeding themselves if the distortions produced by subsidised agricultural products from the rich countries wasn't fed into local markets in less developed countries. It's part of the myth that we can produce goods more "efficiently", when efficient doesn't take into account that we are doing it unsustainably.

Mike, are you seriously suggesting we scale back our cereal exports?
and what about our beef exports ... which are more likely from the
feedlot end of the production spectrum? Do you want to scale back these
also? Because of your concerns about sustainability? Are you really that concerned about monocultures?

I'm suggesting we phase out all of our animal industries ... globally ... and Australia can continue to export food ... at least as much,
probably more. I'll spell out the details in a future post.

For anybody who took Mike's health claims about the cancer protective
properties of kangaroo meat seriously ... because of the CLA, I've posted a little of the background on this over on the Animal Lib site.

http://animalliberation.org.au/blog/120-archer-dodgy-health-advice.html

Thanks for that Mike

I don't think there could be much dispute that it would be an "intergenerational crime if we turn over to the next generation of Australians a continent that has significantly less capacity to produce food (and conserve its globally unique biodiversity) than the Australia we inherited from our parents", and even less dispute that that is what we are currently in the process of doing.

(even though there obviously is dispute as to what sorts of food we should or shouldn't focus on as the best way to prevent that happening - or at worst at least minimise the impacts).

My query was more about any sort of linkage being made between our over-production of food and feeding "the starving millions" overseas. As a later commenter indicated, there are various reasons why food doesn't reach the many millions starving or severely undernourished, but it is rarely due simply to inadequate amounts of food being produced - as opposed to market distortions, market failure or even just markets acting as markets tend to, which is direct goods to where the most profit can be made rather than where the greatest need is.

Our own over-consumption (of food, as well as many other things) is also something we need to address. I don't want to side track too far into the population debate - which is another one which can tend to involve people of competing views shouting at cross-purposes to each other.

I think your follow-up comment clarifies things just fine - references to starving people and the like in the context of arguments about the need to cut back food production to sustainable levels for this land just set my alarm bells ringing, and as your follow-up reply indicates, is not something germane to the key point you're making there. (apart from which, I doubt very much that any more than a tiny proportion of food grown in Australia is specifically done with the intention of feeding the starving).

Having said that, i did notice during this year's furore over live cattle exports to Indonesia (livestock exports furore number 20 and counting) that one of the arguments some of the advocates for the cattle exporters repeated a lot was that the trade had a humanitarian element to it as it was helping to improve nutrition/protein consumption for people in south-east Asia - perhaps you were referring to echoes of that sort of justification, which presumably will be pulled out more frequently if calls to constrain food (over)-production in Australia such as you are making gain further traction.

Re the need for Australia to provide protein to Indonesians by shipping cows to them: Indonesian agriculture could be much more productive with improved technologies, infrastructure, and communication to small farmers. Australia could help Indonesia with all of those and allow the people there to be in control of their own food production. That would be a better thing for us to do than have them rely on us for food, when they don't need to.

That said, if we wanted to help Indonesians live healthier, longer lives, we might do better to aim at improving public health infrastructure than boosting their protein intake.

All animals kept for food aren't treated the same way - I didn't like Angus' link advising people to give up eggs and chicken first. If you want to eat eggs look for a good supplier. I think most cities now have Saturday morning farmer's markets where you'll find eggs from chickens that spend their lives scratching around in orchards.

We had an orchard when I was young and had the same set up with chickens - we never killed them when they stopped laying because we couldn't be bothered to keep track of which ones were laying and which were too old, plus none of us wanted to kill anything. The chooks seemed to enjoy their lives, the way chooks do.

Mike, I have not read Lierre Keith's book, nor Simon Fairlie's, but I have followed Monbiot online over this issue. Fairlie may be worth reading but I doubt Keith's book is, and citing her as a source does not enhance your case.

Keith is a supporter (from her web site) of the Weston Price Foundation (http://www.westonaprice.org/), an odd nutrition belief system that defies most of what nutrition authorities worldwide recommend as healthy eating -- including their support for raw milk, saturated fat, and a belief that raised cholesterol does not cause heart disease.

If her agriculture case is as flawed as her apparent nutrition beliefs, and surely we should suspect that this is so, then she has no credibility at all, and why would anyone use this as a seminal reference?

For a brilliant and incisive review and critique of her book, The Vegetarian Myth, I suggest John Sanbonmatsu here at ZNET: http://tinyurl.com/7vhl3ds. It's long, but ranges across sociology, animal rights and the politics of left and right on the issue of how we eat to sustain ourselves.

Hi Mike,

Do you have a separate source that supports your claim that *every* area that grows grain has a mouse plague every 4 years? Because, as I pointed out, that's not what the sources you cite say. Eg the summary of the Caughey book says "There has been a mouse plague somewhere in the Australian grain belt every four years on average since 1900." That, to me, is very different to saying that every area experiences a mouse plague every 4 years. To me it sounds like every 4 years some localised portion of the grain belt suffers a mouse plague.

I haven't read the Caughey book in full itself, so maybe they used their language a bit loosely in the summary. But on its face the language seems to be making a much more limited claim than the one you make.

I would also like to see this cleared up. One of the sources says the number of plagues has increased to once every year or two over the past 20 years but, again, if it's localized, what is a reasonable estimate of the average number of mice killed per hectare across all of Australia's cropland? Some other things that I would need clarity on if I was an Australian vegan (as opposed to a Canadian one) attempting to integrate these arguments into my ethical-eating decisionmaking:

* One of your sources, Mike, indicates that the mouse plagues tend to collapse suddenly of their own weight. But your estimate appears to be predicated on the assumption that all plagues (on all farms in every plague area) are combatted by poisoning, killing 80% of the mice on average. Can you give a reference for that? If not, what percentage of all the mice that plague Australian crops are poisoned?

* You estimate that 2.2 animals are killed on average to provide 100 kg of range-fed beef. But those are the steers themselves. Are you saying that no other animals are killed collaterally or deliberately (e.g. predators)? Is there no mechanical seeding of depleted grassland or harvesting grass to produce silage, with collateral death to field animals? Steven Davis (http://ethik.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/inst_ethik_wiss_dialog/Davis__S._2003_The_least_Harm_-_Anti_Veg_in_J._Agric._Ethics.pdf) estimates that 7.5 animals per hectare are killed on American free-range cattle farms compared to 15 per hectare on intensively cultivated croplands (presumably much fewer on no-till croplands), but since the protein yield for pulse and grain crops is around 500 to 1200 kg per hectare vs 100 kg for free-range beef, the collateral mortality rate works out to about 4 animals killed for beef (not counting the steers) for every one animal killed for grains and beans. (Davis is rebutted here: http://www.veganoutreach.org/enewsletter/matheny.html)

* Similarly, you describe the biodiversity loss when Australian wild lands are converted to croplands, but say nothing about how destructive to wildlife it presumably is when wild Australian rangelands are repurposed to become grazing lands for ruminants.

* If industrial-scale monocropping is encouraging mice plagues in Australia, is the situation any better on Australian grain and pulse farms that practice intercropping or other mixed crop production techniques? As a vegan, if I source my bread and beans from farms like these, will I have less blood on my hands? In the same vein, rather than switch to eating free-range beef or hunted kangaroo as you suggest, why would I not simply source my tofu and peanut butter sandwiches from crops grown outside of Australia? The extra food miles involved in shipping dry grains would be a small price to pay from my perspective and would still have a smaller carbon footprint, given the much higher emissions per kg of beef vs plant protein (rice from flooded paddies is one potential exception).

Cheers,
Syd

Syd and Brett,

I can clear up one of these questions. Mouse plagues definitely do not cover all of Australia's grain growing regions on average every four years, despite Mike's claim to the contrary.

I haven't been able to find specific data that covers the whole country, but this article published in Australian Wildlife Research provides data on plagues in SA between 1900-1984:
http://www.publish.csiro.au.virtual.anu.edu.au/?act=view_file&file_id=WR9890677.pdf

There were 20 plagues in that period in SA. Four are reported as covering nearly all cereal producing areas, while the other 16 are reported as being "restricted to specific areas or isolated cites". There are maps of the affected areas for each plague in the study and there is a map that gives the total number of plagues affecting each area. Some areas experienced nine plagues, while most areas experienced less than four plagues over the 84-year period.

There is scarcely any data at all regarding the total number of mice involved in each plague and less data regarding the number killed. This is because its very difficult and expensive to estimate. There are a variety of methods used for estimating mouse populations, but all methods fail during plagues. There is an article on 'best practice for mouse population estimates' produced a few years ago, but I lost the link. It makes the point very clearly that trapping is the best method of estimation, but only during 'normal' population periods. During peak population periods, there are no reliable population estimation techniques.

There is even less data regarding the number of deaths per 2000 calories (a more relevant ratio than the number of deaths per kg of useable protein).

This doesn't contradict what Mike has claimed in comments to be his only point: that “no matter what your food lifestyle focus is, there is no death-free lunch” and therefore vegans should not proclaim to be holier than thou. But it doesn't do much to support the points actually made in the article: “if you want to minimise animal suffering and promote more sustainable agriculture, adopting a vegetarian diet might be the worst possible thing you could do.”

Thank you very, very much, Dominic. Mike, we await your reply.

As for "no death-free lunch," for thoughtful vegans the goal is to try and minimize unnecessary harm - we know we can't eliminate harm, whether it's killing a particularly aggressive mosquito or using important or essential products that unavoidably have animal byproducts somewhere in their production chain. Ironically, harm minimization is a credo to which most people would subscribe, regardless of the kind of diet they've consciously or unconsciously adopted.

The collateral killing of field animals in crop production strikes me as a largely unnecessary and avoidable harm. I think vegans should "extend our circle of compassion" accordingly and try and encourage the use of less destructive farming practices, including R&D. For example, could sound or scent be used to scare animals away from an approaching combine? I'm sure many ethical eaters would pay a premium for food produced more humanely this way.

Mike,

I have to say that if I was an Australian vegan I would be no better informed now than I was a couple days ago. To give one glaring example: the source you quote says "They [mouse plagues] occur somewhere in Australia once every four years on average." But you continue to interpret this as supporting your assertion that "on average, each part of the eastern Australian wheat belt is subject to a plague every 4 years--on average." There's a world of difference between *each part* and *somewhere in Australia*. The former leaves open the possibility that only a tiny portion of Australia could be plagued by mouse infestations over the course of four years (or one or two years, going by the last twenty years). The latter - your assertion, and the basis for your entire argument - implies that the entire wheat belt tends to be infested over the course of every four years. (We're also left to wonder if mouse plagues are any worse or better for other Australian crops that provide protein for vegetarians. How can we be confident that wheat is a good proxy?)

To break this down further, going by your source, somewhere in Australia could be an area as small as under 1% of the total Australian crop area. Since you're the one arguing a scientific case here - and a very socially significant and polemical one at that - the burden is on you to provide the hard figures to support your assertions and conclusions. Is it on average 0.1%, 1%, 15% or 25%? Only 25% would support your argument (but with objections I raised in my last comment still unanswered). If on the other hand it's 1% every four years, that would mean that only 0.25% of Australian crops are tainted every year (on average) by the blood of 80% of 500 or 1000+ mice (assuming your poisoning estimate is correct). If we use the higher figure, we get 800 mice mortalities per hectare on 0.25% of the cropland which equals just 2 mice per hectare when averaged over all of Australia's grain growing regions. This would make your case only slightly stronger than Steven Davis's, but applying the logic of Gaverick Matheney's critique (and the points raised by Shirley Birney in another comment here today), the numbers would still decisively favour Australians eating plant protein directly (much more protein per hectare/animal killed) rather than from free-range ruminants if they wish to minimize collateral death to animals.

We still lack "full-cost accounting" to weigh the competing alternatives, including the collateral death toll of free-range beef and dairy production in Australia. Even on the subject you raise of animal lives that could have been - a kind of opportunity cost - are you suggesting that when pristine Australian rangelands are taken over by ranchers and their herds of megafauna this doesn't necessarily rob a corresponding mass of animals - most of them smaller animals, so greater in number - of the potential to continue subsisting on that land? Surely commercial ranchers seek to populate their acreage as densely as possible with their commercial animals, even in sustainable operations. A successful ranch is one where as much of the land as possible is devoted to grass to be eaten as much as possible by the cattle, not by other animals. In other words, the dynamics are at least qualitatively the same as for crop production.

Syd

Well put. You think clearly enough to be an honorary vegan :) But, with great respect, I still don't think you get it. Mike is old-school paleontology ... these boys and girls (mainly boys) don't let facts get in the way of a good story. Hence his pompous plea for me to stop thinking like a mathematician. We like to get stuff right. I have to confess to not really thinking that Mike could be all that wrong about the mouse death toll ratio, but your and other comments eventually niggled enough for me to go looking for the data. I'm writing it up now and will post on the Animal Lib blog and notify this thread with a link. The only thing I'm still chasing is the poison sales data. That would seal it, so if you come up with it, please post.

Geoff, I'll be honoured to be made an honourary Australian vegan. Here in Canada, I've been a vegan for nearly a dozen years and a near-vegan for over 30 <g>.

I also assumed that Mike's mouse mortality stats are reliable, so I would defer to Brett for being the first, apparently, to fact-check them and alert this discussion board to the discrepancy.

I just noticed that I got my "latter" and "former" mixed up in my previous comment. I wrote:
"There's a world of difference between *each part* and *somewhere in Australia*. The former leaves open the possibility that only a tiny portion of Australia could be plagued by mouse infestations over the course of four years (or one or two years, going by the last twenty years). The latter - your assertion ..."

What I should have said is "The latter leaves open..." and "The former - your assertion..." Sorry for the confusion.

Sorry Syd, I misinterpreted "If I was as Australian vegan" to mean you weren't any kind of vegan. Yes, Brett deserves primary credit. But I've also had some back-channel emails indicating that others have been aware of the problem ... I've just been around a little longer and knew where to look for the data. Animal Liberation SA (I'm on the committee) actually co-sponsored a conference back in 1990 on fertility control in wildlife so mouse plagues aren't a new issue for us, ... though I have lost track of the on-going research over the past decade. Anyway, I will post something tonight, even if I don't find the poison sales data.

Geoff, thanks so much for making the effort to do a serious quantitative critique of Mike's arguments on your blog (notably, http://animalliberation.org.au/blog/122-archers-dodgy-mouse-claims.html). As I was going through your authoritative source for the mouse plague claim, I came across this stat: "In addition to intensive farming, the grazing industry is impacted through mice consuming pastures, destroying feed grain and damaging stored hay." Mike, this is just one example of the skewing of your moral calculus, which implies that no animals at all - other than the cattle themselves - are killed to put beef and dairy from pasture-grazed cattle on Australians' tables. And ironically, in this case it's the very same field mice you beat those hypocritical, benighted vegans about the head and face with. For now, I'm using Steven Best's collateral death estimates for intensive grain production vs free-range cattle ranching as a baseline, Gaverick Matheny's critique of Best which takes into account the much greater protein yield of grains and pulses, Geoff's material to add an extra 8 mice deaths per hectare per year for Australian grains and pulses (total: 23) and 0.5 to Davis's pasture estimate extrapolated to Australia (total 8), to obtain an admittedly "preliminary" estimate (an estimate based on estimates) of 4.5 collateral field animal deaths to produce as much nutritionally equivalent plant-based protein (grains plus pulses roughly equals quality of beef and dairy) as Australians would get from a 50:50 mix of free-range dairy and beef at the cost of 8 field animal deaths. If this estimate is in the ball-park, "ordering the vegetarian meal" (vegan actually) should put about half as much blood on an Australian's hands as ordering the free-range cheeseburger with milk. I welcome more accurate data and estimates.

Menkit,

With all due respects, I believe your comments regarding degradation by animals, which have roamed this earth for thousands of years and still live in areas of effectively undespoiled landscape, indicates that you have not yet actually ventured into the regions of Australia, Canada, America or Europe, where these anaimals are actually husbanded. If you had and could envisage a landscape in the place where you are, 200 years ago, you would find very little difference indeed. My comment here does not apply to areas where large forests have been cleared, most of the worst of which actually applies to urban areas along the coast, rather than to the major farming regions. John Nicol

John, did you check any of your claims? What are Australia's urban areas? How much land has been cleared? How many non-native grasses have been introduced?

Urban areas? 1.4 million hectares

Land cleared? 100 million hectares

Land cropped? 24 million.

Introduced grasses? About 5,000 species ... not to mention plenty of varieties of
dung beetles.

John, please, you shouldn't just make stuff up because it sounds nice. Some of
us actually care about claims being true or false. We check things.

For links to land clearing figures ...
http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/10/18/who-crippled-the-murray-darling-basin/

Geoff,

Your figures of clearing are including a lot of areas which were not in fact cleared of any more than a few stunted bushes as is well known. However, I will take your numbers at face value if you wish. There are a lot of areas by the way, which are much better forested than before men came here and helped to prevent bushfires and other fairly uncontrolled burning. The Mulga areas in South West Queensland and Northern NSW are cases in point. The same cannot be said for urban areas where where deforestation is complete and permanent. I am a little unsure of your numbers, suggesting that of 100,000,000 hectares cleared, only 24 million are farmed.

My question again is whether you have actually been in any of the areas which the previous writer to whom I responded, claimed had been degraded by livestock? If not you should get out there and look at it in detail - may take you a few years - and spend some time along the Cooper, the Condamine, the Darling and the Murray River and see whether farming has been detrimental to the system. In case you were not aware the Murray River system has been subject to a drought over the last 10 or more years in which time irrigators have not taken a significant amount of water and during which the Darlling and Murray River NEVER ceased to flow. In 1856, 57, 58 or thereabouts, the Darling River stopped flowing COMPLETELY for three consecutive years. Not a lot of irrigation then!!!

You have not remarked upon the fact that livestock have lived and been herded in very large large numbers, much more densely than in Australia I should add, with little if any change to the country landscape in which they live. Yeah, I think you may need to get away from your desk occasionally and have a good look at the real world rather than rely on Barry Brook's Blog for information! Cheers, John

John,

How do you square your very sanguine view of the global impact of livestock production with the FAO's (among others - as far as I know theirs is a consensus position): e.g., http://www.fao.org/ag/magazine/0612sp1.htm ?

Syd

Syd,

The link you gave me doesn't work now apparently and its redirection did not help.

I square my "very sanguine view" with observation which even FAO do not claim to be part of their excercise last time I looked. Have you done any observing lately? Beats theory every time.

If you can give me a live link to the FAO article I will look it up. Thanks.

Cheers,

John