How Livestock Farming Benefits The Planet
February 22, 2023
By Paul Homewood
Maybe Monbiot should pay attention to what the real experts are saying:
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“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. – J Robert Oppenheimer.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
I try to avoid getting caught up in the religiosity associated with the Planet and all the baseless pontificating about “saving the planet” and “protecting the planet”. People using such terms instantly demonstrate their profound ignorance of Earth Systems. We are nothing but a flea on the back of the planet and if we ever did anything which caused a planetary reaction, the planet would scratch and we would be gone. Having an education in the Geological Sciences one is provided with a sober appreciation of the temporary status that all life has on the planet and relevant to us, all hominid life.
Extinction is an important and necessary part of evolution (in spite of the hysterical rubbish currently doing the mainstream media rounds) and homo sapiens will become extinct, that much is a certainty. The question is as to whether that extinction will be caused by our own hand or we will die out “naturally”. I however do not include the unsubstantiated anthropogenic climate claims as one of the threats to our existence. Yellowstone for example is overdue going foom. On it’s own it may not totally eradicate most of life as we know it but in conjunction with other unfortunate events, it might.
There has been a linear decline in atmospheric CO2 levels for 160 million years caused by the evolution of marine organisms sequestrating CO2. The current temporary uptick in atmospheric CO2 will not last and the decline will resume culminating in the atmospheric concentration decline hitting the red line for photosynthesis which is at about 150ppm. When Plants stop photosynthesising they die and when they die all life in the food chain above them dies. That is currently scheduled to occur in about 1.3 million years from now.
We and our activities barely will have archaeological significance let alone geological significance. The processes which occur on a planetary scale are so many orders of magnitude greater than any of our pathetic scratchings.
I think the cause of this is largely that there are way too many humanities graduate shills being given a voice by the bought mass media and then after they created critical media mass, they seduced increasing numbers from the sciences to betray their principles and embrace the dark side in return for meaningless jobs.
If the lack of CO2 doesn’t get us, then the expansion of the sun as it dies will fry the planet.
Your point about our archaeological significance reminded me of an early Attenbollox series before he sold out to the ecofascists. He had a number of braziers spaced out to signify the planet’s timeline and to put us in context he said that on this scale we didn’t even manage to diameter of the final brazier.
Hi Gerry, I think the onset of the second part of the current ice age will get us before CO2 redlining, not forgetting about Yellowstone of course.
At the current rate of population growth something has to give much sooner probably in the usual way meaning global war. It is interesting that exponential population growth is ignored by all the supposed eco warriors… strange unless of course the eco bit, like all the other tedious leftie causes, is just a trojan horse. I was shocked to read that between the year 2000 and 2020 the worlds population had grown 27%. To use a much overused word, this is NOT sustainable. It is only because of the year on year record food production that this is being mostly contained but given that several African countries are experiencing population growth which they cannot themselves support things cannot get any better, only worse. You need then to consider what the latest leftie cause “degrowth” is doing in amongst all of this. I think the answer as we are seeing played out in the marxist plan in the US, is chaos. Messing with the world food supply does what exactly other than cause chaos, famine and of course war. If chaos does not occur naturally then you create it, causing the population to become more compliant and they hands you more control because absolute power is everything to the marxist
As for the Earth getting swallowed by a dying sun, who or whatever will be around to see that happen will not be called homo sapiens for sure.
I do wish people would understand what “population growth” actually is. It’s not lots of new people, it’s people living much longer. 22% of the UK population is aged over 60 now, a figure that 100 years ago would have been thought impossible. As people don’t die in developing nations, the population will increase but for wholly good reasons.
“If the lack of CO2 doesn’t get us, then the expansion of the sun as it dies will fry the planet.”
Oft repeated. Yet the expansion of the sun will be due to loss of mass. Less gravity to restrain the nuclear furnace. To wit, the earth’s orbit will expand, out of the fire. Still fatal, but not KFC.
“If the lack of CO2 doesn’t get us, then the expansion of the sun as it dies will fry the planet.”
An ambitious mankind will reach other solar systems or possibly other galaxies at that stage.
Indeed Mickey, Elon Musk is taking the first small steps towards that at this very point in time.
Brilliant. Absolutely spot on. I wish I could have written such a well crafted piece. You will now receive a cornucopian backlash for your efforts. The extinction limit event could come from many pathways, including mankinds own stupidity. I might experience it and equally I may not.
I concur.
Good post.
Ambitious science and engineering graduates have little hope of attracting grants for academic research if they don’t use the ‘Climate Crisis’ shibboleth. The alumni propaganda that I receive makes this all too clear. I’ve told them not to expect anything in my will although I still contribute to a scholarship fund.
PMFB: Brilliant piece. Concise and relevant. After watching Livingston on GB News (last night, on YouTube) claiming, hysterically, that he worried that his now mature children would die early because of CC, I would have liked someone (you?) other than Stark (if memory serves) took him to task.
Nigel, both of the institutes of learning I attended and once held in high regard, have drunk the leftie koolaid in all its guises taking onboard also all of it’s vices. Both recently sent me begging letters. I replied to each saying how thrilled I would be to support them. I invited both to contact me again once they return to becoming institutions of learning, having cast off their current status as leftie indoctrination farms.
On the subject of climate nonsense I invited both to kindly point to the statistically significant empirical data set(s) which support both the general claim about CO2 being the cause of global temperature change and specifically that CO2 liberated by man and returned to the carbon cycle during the past 100 years was a control knob. So far, like the BBC and countless other organisations banging the AGM drum I have challenged with this demand, they have so far responded only with silence.
Thanks, agree wholeheartedly. To get a response you probably need to outbid Bill Gates.
I have much the same view of my old academic institution. Constant begging letters for funds so that the students could pay the wages of an overpaid vice chancellor; and a shift away from learning to ultra woke left wing politics and pitiful academic standards. The final straw was the Blackbaud data hack. I have now severed all connections with my university and support charities that do not spout green and woke codswallop.
Excellent post, pardonmeforbreathing.
I term it the Deification of Man.
I couldn’t have put that better myself.
thank you for your wonderful articulation, there are many, many “journalists” who would benifit from reading it.
Stated wisely… we get about 80 odd years to here. best spend the time enjoying this trip rather than worrying about what will happen a billion years from now. As George Carlin said, ‘The planet’s fine.’
Excellent post – I have to show my ignorance though and admit I don’t know what you mean by ‘Yellowstone is overdue going foom’.
Yellowstone is a supervolcano.
If atmospheric CO2 concentrations are becoming too low in the future, more technologically advanced and richer populations will simply add CO2 to the atmosphere. People solve problems (even imaginary ones) or we would not exist as a species.
As an English mixed farmer, I’ve watched this many times, and tried to get my head round the management routine. It would seem that we would have to move huge herds every day into a new bit of grazing. This is all well and good – and I accept the premise – but kinda hard work (not to mention the extra fencing) if you’ve got the rest of the farm to run!
We are blessed in our green and pleasant land, it’s do or die in Africa and the rest of the planet’s marginal land.
The massed-herd technique is not aimed at England’s farming in a wet environment.
Indeed – but you wouldn’t believe how many in the Uk’s vocal wokefarming sector have inexplicably embraced ‘mob grazing’ as a concept and a reason to put ‘saving the planet’ in their Twitter bio.
Saw it years ago. Quite agree although Australia ran out of vast herds of grazing animals many years ago. But the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere has benefitted plant life with an increase in greening of the land area.
I cannot believe that an increase in the number of Monbiots would do any good.
Man can change the global climate !!!!. Enough said. He is blind to the facts but drunk with the politics. You have to feel sorry for these misguided persons full of good intent but short on knowledge.
‘Maybe Monbiot should pay attention to what the real experts are saying’
Well that would be a first….
I am of the opinion that, at present at least the antics of certain maniacal polititions and their ambitions are more of a risk to all of humanity than anything else.
Pre industrial CO2 levels sounds like a bad idea so we had better get on with FF burning but otherwise excellent. Definitely made up for the elephant cull. He’s allowed the carbon and methane tropes this time!
Livestock farming benefits people. That’s why it exists and that’s a good enough reason to do it. If it has disbenefits, fine, let’s address those. Otherwise, the planet doesn’t care because it’s an inanimate ball of rock that is not even a speck of dust in the broad scheme of the universe. And in less than 1 million years, we will be gone and the planet will still be here.
Those idiot students at Cambridge who’ve just voted in (enforced) a vegan menu, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/02/21/cambridge-university-students-vote-vegan-only-menu/
should be locked in a lecture theatre and made to watch this thrice over.
They should also be forced to come ploughing with me, while I prepare a field for wheat. The animal deaths would scare them.
You are still ploughing Charlie! That’s terribly bad for the ‘environment’ (sarc)
Must be great business for the local takeaways and cheap restaurants. Can you still get a moussaka at the Eros?
Leftists never consider unintended consequences. Leftists putting unreasonable, ideological mandates on people is like putting a girdle on a fat woman; it will just pop out somewhere else. Leftists always push it too far; regular people will rebel.
Droogs all.
The anti-pastoral-farming brigade will cling to their favoured hypotheses, they had a field day when someone suggested that a few grazing goats turned the Sahara from an oasis to a desert:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-really-turned-sahara-desert-green-oasis-wasteland-180962668/
“A new hypothesis suggests that humans may have tipped the balance”
Ah, a “new hypothesis”!
Must be right!
Well my impression after years of walking and flying over farmland in Rhodesia was the land divided by a fence, one side Tribal Trust Land managed by slash and burn until there was no fertility left and then grazed by goats leaving eroded gullies and soil washed away, and the other side with managed crops and at that time making Rhodesia the third most efficient agricultural economy.
Allan Savory talks a lot of sense and even followed in farming practices by Jeremy Clarkson!
Is Fifa’s football expansion putting money before planet?
BBC Sport article about football and climate change https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/64717357
all about the world cup causing climate change
So not only do we have to put up with the propaganda from Rowlatt et al we now have it from a Sports correspondent
Did you know that the PFA (pro footballers ass.) have a “sustainability champion” ?
It is all the usual b*ll*cks from various interested football people
The T-4 generating capacity auction set a price of £63/kW for 43GW of capacity. Together with earlier auctions it means we will be paying at least £2.8bn in support to keep dispatchable capacity operating as backup to intermittent generators in 4 years time. Another hidden cost of renewables.
George Monbiot said of [Allan Savory], “his statements are not supported by empirical evidence and experimental work, and that in crucial respects his techniques do more harm than good.” He then goes on to waffle at length totally ignoring that Savory’s methods have actually worked turning semi-deserts into lush pasture lands.
But then George Monbiot does George Monbiot whatever the facts may say.
There are none so blind as those who will not see.
This video is accepting ‘climate change’ as a fact…I thought this blog did not?
Climate change is a fact. Climate changes, it’s natural, get over it. Savory didn’t express views on the alarmism as touted by lazy journalists he simply acknowledged the carbon cycle, which is very real and very misunderstood by so-called scientists.
Thanks. I thought a distinction was often made here by Paul between ‘weather’ which changes – and climate change….but I may have misunderstood – I’ll get over it x
The phrase “Climate Change” has been so abused by propagandists that most people now can’t tell the difference between weather, which changes, climate, which changes, pollution which is a separate problem, the environment and anthropogenic global warming. The last being a theoretical framework that correlates increasing fossil fuel emissions with increasing atmospheric CO2 which in turn correlates with rising surface temperature.
can’t make the like function work. thks for yr clarification re climate etc
If we live in a bubble like the Alarmist we would be as bad as them. This guy has his opinion, one I don’t particularly align with, but what he has done and the fact that he has questioned ecological thinking makes him qualified to see his video shown here. I have learnt from what he has said and demonstrated and, if it can get aired elsewhere, I hope others will learn as well.
Monblot is a lost cause of course.
thx
Norfolk four-course system, part of the British Agricultural Revolution. Something else that the British gave to the world.
We have been down this road before with George Monbiot. See letters he provoked on The Guardian on 21st August last year. The NFU should be able to produce the article by one of its members which , in essence, says that until humans can graze and ruminate herbivores can do the job and produce the protein.
It’s a pity that we, the Commentators, are so profligate with the information we exchange and the sources that Paul draws to out attention.
It’s well outside my competence but there should be some software that can index our collective annual output — the authoritative bits anyway — for annual distribution. For the time being we have to make do with articulate but familiar sources which seem to cover much old ground. All somewhat repetitious and frustrating.
Alan savoury orchestrated the shooting of 40,000 elephant.
Read his interview here
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/243721657
Yes he admits it was the biggest mistake of his life on the TED talk