The Miami Herald is (Partially) Right – Python Farming Will Not Stop Climate Change
A recent article by the Miami Herald, titled “Pythons are eating the Everglades. Could eating them instead help fight climate change?” highlights some problems with a study out of Australia which proposes python farming as a solution to emissions associated with cattle farming. The Miami Herald points out major practicality issues with Python farming, but in the process misses the more important point that the shift in farming to battle climate change is unnecessary.
The study, published in Scientific Reports “Python farming as a flexible and efficient form of agricultural food security,” claims that python farming is well established in Asia, and offers “tangible benefits for sustainability and food systems resilience.”
The Miami Herald explains that the study authors give several reasons for how Burmese python farming is “climate friendly:”
Scientists found they are incredibly efficient at converting small amounts of food into large amounts of high-protein, low-fat weight gain. Also important, cattle burps, farts and poops are huge sources of methane, making up an estimated 45 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions of the U.S. agriculture industry. Pythons poop every few days to even weeks, and if they do pass gas, it’s much, much less.
While it is true that cattle produce methane, the impact of those emissions are greatly exaggerated by climate alarmists and media acolytes. As discussed previously at Climate Realism (here, here, and here), the Environmental Protection Agency calculated the contributions of cattle related methane and found that cattle make up just 2 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. (See figure below)
Methane itself also plays a very minor role in the atmosphere’s energy absorption spectrum. It has narrow absorption bands that occur at wavelengths which are already being covered by water vapor. It is also a relatively short-lived atmospheric gas, with an atmospheric lifespan of around 12 years, making it unlikely to contribute significantly to any warming effect anyway. Methane is practically irrelevant when it comes to supposed human-caused global warming, so attempting to replace cattle farming with python farming for climate purposes is a waste of time and effort at best.
Besides these errors, the Miami Herald post points out that there are serious scaling (pun intended) issues with python farming, despite the fact that it might be easier to get people to accept eating snake rather than insects, another cattle replacement popular with climate alarmists. Python farmers have to individually remove the snakes one by one from their enclosures to hand feed them, which is labor intensive and becomes increasingly difficult to accomplish with more and more snakes.
Energy efficiency aside, pythons, Miami Herald points out, don’t feed on “sustainable growth like grass,” and are exclusively carnivores, meaning some emissions will result from producing the prey used to feed the pythons, and in housing the pythons in a secure location and processing the waste.
Wild caught snake is no silver bullet either. The Miami Herald reports that some pythons caught in the Everglades “had mercury levels 100 times too high for human consumption,” and the snakes are too difficult to find in quantities that would make them a viable food source for a reasonable number of people.
Python meat is also unpalatable to most python hunters in the Everglades, not just because of the potential mercury, but also because as the Miami Herald quotes, the meat is “very chewy” but slow cooking it turns it “to slime.”
There is nothing really wrong with python farming in general, for those who like the meat, but it is not a solution to climate change. Replacing cattle farming with snake farming will have an insubstantial impact on climate change, if any at all, and it’s questionable if the labor intensity and food requirements are really carbon neutral. The Miami Herald is right to be skeptical about the future of python farming in the West.
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The Spectator is Right, Climate Alarmist Messaging is Harming People
A recent editorial in The Spectator claims that alarmist messaging like warnings of impending doom by climate activists and the United Nations are hyperbolic and even harmful. This is true. Data show that there is no catastrophe in store for humanity due to climate change, and studies show alarmist messaging is counterproductive and harms the mental health of people who take it to heart.
The article, “The irresponsibility of ‘two years to save the planet’” written by Ross Clark, describes the hyperbolic language used by climate alarmists, such as the concept of a climate crisis or giving humanity a countdown to disaster, and how it is counterproductive or even harmful. This discussion follows the recent claims made by the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, in which he stated that there are only two years left to save the planet.
Clark points out that these “only a few years left” warnings have been made repeatedly, and “[b]y my maths that means we became doomed a dozen years ago, so I was resigned to sitting back and waiting calmly for the end, like the elderly couple who sat in deckchairs on the Titanic holding hands as the ship went down.”
Humor aside, Clark’s perspective is shared by many, and not only among those who are skeptical of the climate crisis narrative. Climate Realism covered a trend last year in media outlets admitting that the catastrophe narrative was becoming counterproductive even to their would-be supporters, as climate “doomers” began to believe that it was already too late to do anything about climate change, so why bother.
WaPo stated at the time “some scientists and experts worry that their defeatism — which could undermine efforts to take action — may be just as dangerous as climate denial.”
Climate Realism previously discussed another one of Clark’s articles, where he pointed out that “if you believe that human societies are doomed anyway — as 56 per cent of young people apparently do — what is the incentive to cut emissions?”
Besides the general non-issue of climate apathy, however, there is one troubling result of catastrophizing, and that is the state of mental health among younger people. Clark talks about a 2021 study which asked students at the University of Bath between the ages of 16 and 25 questions about climate change, which found “45 per cent of people in this age group were so worried about climate change that it was affecting their day-to-day life, while 56 per cent said that they thought humanity was doomed and 40 per cent said they were hesitant to have children because they would be bringing them up in an uninhabitable world.”
He goes on to say that “[n]o reasoned interpretation of the evidence would say that humanity is doomed by a changing climate,” which is absolutely true. Weather is not becoming more extreme, the planet is greening and crop production is growing, and issues like sea level rise are occurring at a very manageable rate.
Climate Realism has likewise addressed the fact that many peoples’ mental health are being impaired by the media’s coverage of climate change, here, here, and here, for example. The media and alarmists spin catastrophic narratives that real world data debunk, but, unfortunately a lot of people believe the hype and don’t check or follow the science.
It is always beneficial when media outlets, like The Spectator, run op-eds which provide much needed balance to the discussion. In the face of the copious evidence that no climate crisis is in the offing, it is unreasonable to be terrified or deeply distressed by climate change. It takes efforts like Clark’s to inoculate people against catastrophism with the truth.
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Hidden Behind Climate Policies, Data From Nonexistent Temperature Stations
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicts July, August, and September will be hotter than usual. And for those who view warmer temperatures as problematic, that’s a significant cause for concern.
“Earth’s issuing a distress call,” said United Nations secretary-general António Guterres on March 19. “The latest State of the Global Climate report shows a planet on the brink.
“Fossil fuel pollution is sending climate chaos off the charts. Sirens are blaring across all major indicators: Last year saw record heat, record sea levels, and record ocean surface temperatures. … Some records aren’t just chart-topping, they’re chart-busting.”
President Joe Biden called the climate “an existential threat” in his 2023 State of the Union address. “Let’s face reality. The climate crisis doesn’t care if you’re in a red or a blue state.”
In his 2024 address he said, “I don’t think any of you think there’s no longer a climate crisis. At least, I hope you don’t.”
When recalling past temperatures to make comparisons to the present, and, more importantly, inform future climate policy, officials such as Mr. Guterres and President Biden rely in part on temperature readings from the United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN).
The network was established to provide an “accurate, unbiased, up-to-date historical climate record for the United States,” NOAA states, and it has recorded more than 100 years of daily maximum and minimum temperatures from stations across the United States.
The problem, say experts, is that an increasing number of USHCN’s stations don’t exist anymore. “They are physically gone—but still report data—like magic,” said Lt. Col. John Shewchuk, a certified consulting meteorologist.
“NOAA fabricates temperature data for more than 30 percent of the 1,218 USHCN reporting stations that no longer exist.”
He calls them “ghost” stations.
Mr. Shewchuck said USHCN stations reached a maximum of 1,218 stations in 1957, but after 1990 the number of active stations began declining due to aging equipment and personnel retirements.
NOAA still records data from these ghost stations by taking the temperature readings from surrounding stations, and recording their average for the ghost station, followed by an “E,” for estimate.
The addition of the ghost station data means NOAA’s “monthly and yearly reports are not representative of reality,” said Anthony Watts, a meteorologist and senior fellow for environment and climate at the Heartland Institute.
“If this kind of process were used in a court of law, then the evidence would be thrown out as being polluted.”
Critical Data
NOAA’s complete record of USHCN data is available on its website, making it a vital tool for scientists examining temperature trends since before the Industrial Revolution.
Jamal Munshi, emeritus professor at California’s Sonoma State University, wrote in a 2017 paper that because many of the stations in the USHCN, and their data, date back to the 1800s, they’ve been “widely used in the study of global warming.”
“The fear of anthropogenic global warming has generated a great interest in temperature trends such that even minute changes in the temperature record are scrutinized, and controversial implications for their effects on climate, extreme weather, and sea level rise are weighed against the cost of reducing emissions as a way of moderating these changes,” Mr. Munshi wrote.
“Energy and development policy around the world are impacted by these evaluations.”
Mr. Shewchuk said the USHCN data is the only long-term historical temperature data the United States has.
“In these days of apparent ‘climate crisis,’ you would think that maintaining actual temperature reporting stations would be a top priority—but they instead manufacture data for hundreds of non-existent stations. This is a bizarre way of monitoring a climate claimed to be an existential threat,” he said.
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Global warming as ritual
The other day we were driving in a major Canadian city and a large wide heavy industrial truck trundled past with the slogan “On the Road to Net Zero” stuck on its side.
Whoever put it there probably realizes that the proposed destination does not permit trucks of this kind, yet they dutifully cheer on their own demise. Which oddly reminded us of the latest order of clothing to arrive from Amazon, also by truck, in a package claiming to be “reducing carbon emissions”.
Both offer up conventional pieties in an unconvincing, lackadaisical manner, as in the decadent phase of a state-imposed civic religion. It is like living in a society where it remains customary to offer oblations to the Olympian gods, while not giving two seconds’ thought to what Hermes would want you to do, or whether Zeus might punish you for denying hospitality to strangers.
The weird ritual quality to it all suggests the worst combination of conformity, cunning and indifference. Whether you call it “greenwashing” or mere hypocrisy, it is a rarity in the debate in that it irritates the zealots and the skeptics equally.
The former grumble that all these corporations genuflecting before the sign of Net Zero are just faking it while destroying the planet, and the latter that by carrying on with the pretense they are shoring up bad public policy.And both are annoyed, rightly, that this stuff is everywhere but doesn’t seem to mean anything. You can confront intransigence. But not mush.
The people who, for instance, make the garments in question are not lying when they say “Being earth-friendly is important to us.” We have no doubt that the majority of that firm’s employees, from top to bottom, really do care about the environment and like to go to bed at night thinking they haven’t spent the day helping wreck it.
The problem is that having agreed to the conventional formulation, like someone mumbling their way through the Lord’s Prayer while thinking about cooking some bacon for breakfast as soon as the dreary thing ends, they do not spend much time actually conforming their behaviour to their words, probably because they haven’t bothered discovering much about what it would require.
In the case of the trucking firm, the problem is that what they do is energy-intensive. And since wind and solar cannot power our economy, for reasons this firm certainly cannot control, the fact that they might at some point buy enough offsets or engage in other Jesuitical jiggery-pokery does not mean that they will not emit carbon.
It just means they’ve purchased the modern equivalent of an “indulgence”. Again, we do not accuse them of having worked through the whole thing and decided to fake it. On the contrary, we accuse them of having vaguely absorbed a few conventional pieties without careful consideration, made them into a slogan, and gone about their business.
You can find literally thousands of examples. Indeed, it is hard to find a product nowadays that does not merely claim to be environmentally friendly, but make a hoo-hah about climate in particular. Go ahead. Read the package, or the website promo, before you buy it. Whatever it is. And yet we are not on the road to Net Zero collectively because we are not on it individually. That people really think offsets somehow work doesn’t make it better. Especially if they go out of their way to avoid listening to any contrary claims lest it disturb their sleep.
P.S. We ourselves, since we do not believe in a man-made climate crisis, are not being lazy hypocrites in rejecting the advice on the underwear package to “Wash cold and save energy”. We strongly suspect that most people who buy such things don’t hunt through the packaging for ideological sore points.
(Just as most normal human beings don’t get riled up at those ridiculous notices telling you that everything you buy is known to the State of California to cause cancer, partly because they don’t read them.) But among those of us eccentrics who do, we strongly suspect that they wash them in whatever way they think will work, and those who choose to wash in cold water aim to save money not the planet.
https://principia-scientific.com/its-the-lack-of-thought-that-counts/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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