We also see very little action from investors or consumers to support the sustainable harvest of non-timber forest products such as Brasil nuts as an alternative to the products of deforestation. People must shift their mindset to value the forest more when it is standing than when it has been cut.

It is common knowledge that, of all greenhouse gases, CO2 is the most responsible for global warming.

This is true due to the fact that there is so much more of it in the air than there is of any other greenhouse gas. On a per molecule basis, methane and nitrous oxide are MUCH more potent GHGs than carbon dioxide.

The measurement was taken at approximately 1.5 meters (5 feet) above the ground on trees with diameters more than 10 centimeters (4 inches).

That has long been the standard way to measure the diameter of a tree, so in this age of statistical manipulation, I am grateful that that is how they did it…

Amazonia, where most of the sites included in the study are, is better preserved and has been subject to less reduction in temperature and precipitation.

Yes, many people probably don’t realise that climate change also brings periods of extreme cold to some regions and that this can be a major problem too. (People in the SE Amazon, and especially in Uruguay and Argentina, probably learned that the hard way this past July.)

“This balance could flip at some point, like when the droughts become more severe. But for now, the rainforest is staying resilient and managing to respond to the higher CO2 levels by increasing in size,” Esquivel-Muelbert says.

“Our results don’t mean that Amazonia isn’t at risk because of climate changes. We don’t know how it will respond to more changes in the future, nor do we know if it will keep growing like this as the climate continues to heat up and droughts and extreme climate events become more common. It will be very important to keep monitoring these forests in the future,” Morgan adds.

The study’s two main authors also comment that it is critical to protect these mature trees by fighting deforestation and forest fragmentation, so they can remain standing and keep doing their valuable work in regulating Earth’s climate.

“We can’t simply plant new trees and expect that they will offer the same carbon or biodiversity benefits that natural old-growth forest does,” Morgan says.

Plant new trees, but keep the old. One is silver and the other gold.

That is worth mentioning in the wiki.

Not specific to Disroot, but since they are based in the Netherlands, you should be aware of Nine Eyes and always use end-to-end encryption. I know someone who avoids Disroot specifically but has not stated a reason for it… He uses envs.net though.

It is both a technological and a political issue. The technology would need to be designed in such a way as to not collect “sensitive” data about anyone and to anonymise whatever data needs to be collected. This would not be simple to implement in a way that would prevent abuse, but the example of a motion sensor rather than a video camera would be the sort of thing that I imagine. To what extent a “smart city” could be developed using only privacy-respecting technology, I don’t know, but at least some options do exist.

This begs the question, would it be possible in a world without politicians? In an anarchist society, for example, where capitalism and the state have been abolished, could there be a technologically-advanced “smart city” that did not violate anyone’s privacy? I think that that is the more interesting question. In the world as it is today, of course this would not work.

For those who cannot self-host:

https://riseup.net/radical-servers

Guimarães, a doctoral candidate at São Paulo State University (UNESP), focused on five species of Cerrado-native seeds, including jatobá (Hymenaea courbaril), amendoim-bravo (Pterogyne nitens), mulungu (Erythrina mulungu) and canafístula (Peltophorum dubium).

They don’t want to tell us the fifth?

Meanwhile Brazil’s government is simultaneously doing a great job of slowing deforestation

slowing only the deforestation that they cannot tax

I know what it means; I wasn’t being serious. I know that Sunshine is not the type to use speciesist slurs. :)

Is that a slur? When used as a verb? And would that be against the rules here? If so, oh the irony. 'Twas nice knowing you, valiant Sunshine…

People make things so complicated… Go to the nearest patch of relatively undisturbed native forest. Look at what is on the ground. That is what you should emulate.

Here you can see the numbers without the COC included (X% + COC), so that is a more “apples to apples” comparison…

I haven’t actually done the measurements and repeated all of the calculations, so I can’t verify these or any other numbers, but from what I observe in the world, “common sense” suggests that animal agriculture does in fact have the largest ecological impact. When we consider the aerosol emissions from coal and oil, the ERF (not necessarily GHG emissions) of animal agriculture being greater than that of fossil fuels doesn’t seem like much of a stretch. Ultimately it doesn’t matter so much if the numbers are off; both the exploitation of non-human animals and the burning of fossil fuels will need to end, and the former is much easier to end quickly with minimal disruption to infrastructure.

they aren’t looking at what carbon opportunity costs exist if we sequester carbon in other ways, e.g. an equally implausible alteration as ending all animal agriculture and replacing the land used for animal agriculture with carbon sequestration would be to eliminate cars entirely and to replace parking lots with trees

How would you even account for this? You couldn’t count it as part of the carbon opportunity cost of fossil fuels, as some cars are electric. You couldn’t count it as part of the carbon opportunity cost of industry, as the industry that makes the cars is not responsible for constructing the parking lots. You would need to look at every aspect of car culture from mining the materials to manufacturing the cars to constructing the roads and parking lots and determine how much deforestation is involved in every step of the process, which would be no easy feat, especially as the ratio of gasoline to electric cars is now changing relatively rapidly and the footprints of these different types of cars would differ as a result, and then calculate the carbon opportunity cost of cars on the whole as a separate category (which would make the totals add up to more than 100%, as there would be overlap with the footprints of fossil fuels and industry, for examples). If you wanted to calculate ONLY the carbon opportunity cost of the land area used for parking lots not being forested, then that would be a much easier calculation, but it isn’t really fair to criticise Sailesh / Climate Healers or the sources that they cite for not running those numbers; that is a very specific climate footprint to track compared to agriculture, industry, forestry, etc.

Regarding climate change specifically, I just want to put these numbers out there as well…

Is it 14%, 18%, 24%, 34%, 51%, 53%, 66%, 87%, or 118%? There are a whole lot of percentage figures associated with the climate impact of animal agriculture. In this article, we will examine why there are such wide discrepancies and where the truth actually lies.

At Climate Healers, we’ve been saying 87% and now 118%, while most others seem to be stuck on 14% at the other end. So, what is the truth behind these numbers?

Two Questions

The two main questions around which scientists have been compiling animal agriculture’s climate impact estimates are:

A) How much of the annual climate impact is caused by animal agriculture?

B) How much of the cumulative climate impact is caused by animal agriculture?

While Question A is concerned with the rate of change in warming, Question B is concerned with the totality of warming since the pre-industrial era.

The Truth Behind the Numbers

Where the Truth Lies

In reality, the estimates for both questions should take into account all 12 emissions components, not just a subset of them.

If we use ERF as the metric of choice, we can augment the 66% estimate with a COC component to answer Question B.

In order to answer Question A, we need to compute the derivative of the answer to Question B. This analysis is being conducted at the moment and we will report on our findings shortly.

…and the follow-up: Where the Truth Lies

“I feel like those people who blame us for air pollution are the ones who eat the meat and the eggs that come from animals fed on our maize,” Sprite said, though he acknowledged that some maize farmers in Mae Cham had continued to burn their fields without care. “If I could tell the public anything, I’d say if you stop consuming, I’ll stop producing.”

There it is, straight from the source.

That’s an excellent point. I’m reminded of when Doug Graham made a similar argument that purchasing vegetable oils and grass seeds at the normal retail price subsidises the animal cruelty industry. There are many reasons to say no to these things.

My point was that the vast majority of soya is used as feed for cows, pigs, chickens, and other enslaved animals, so even though those plantations are not pasture land, they serve essentially the same purpose.

Not just ranching, farming too (particularly soy). With the ongoing tariff war and China’s demand for soy shifting away from the USA, this is poised to become an even bigger issue.

Yes, soy/maize/etc is the second leading driver, and who is eating all of that soy?

When it is cleared, the mostly sandy soil gets depleted very fast

Some parts are sandy, especially in the east and around the white-sand rivers and varillales, but much of the rainforest is lateritic clay (ultisols and oxisols). That’s true of equatorial rainforests in general. It’s not so much that the soil gets depleted; the soil is not very fertile in the first place, as the nutrients are held in the vegetation. When the vegetation is slashed and burnt, one heavy rain can wash away the fertile ashes.

Debunking Myths

✘ Fires in the Amazon region occur naturally and are beneficial for the ecosystem.

✔ Fires in the Amazon region are caused by human activity and are highly destructive to the rainforest ecosystem.

✘ Fires in the Amazon happen because of logging.

✔ Vast areas of the Amazon biome are set on fire to make way for cattle ranching.