🌏What should I DO with the burning world? I despair a little when I read headlines such as “Today was the hottest day on record” but not for the reason you think. I suspect there have been hundreds if not thousands of hottest days on record in the last 20 years. As a scientist, the lack of depth and nuance in the headline message frustrates me. I am not a climate change denier! I sure as heck have seen enough data to be seriously worried. Even if our best actions for reversal of anthropogenic warming fail to stop the world from burning it seems pathetic not to at least try. My actionable attempts to eat less steak, to drive a very fuel-efficient car, and to fly less are a drop in the ocean. I am much better at avoiding gimmicks such as eating local food that has low food miles but is produced very inefficiently in an unsuitable environment and therefore is worse for the world than a further away alternative. Trying to convince others to reduce their warming activities doesn't seem to work. Others in my family, my neighbourhood, my country, other countries…..they all shrug their shoulders and say “why me?” So, as a scientist what can I do to help? I work in the area of genetically improving plants and animals. Many of my clients are feeling serious heat🔥. From farmers, from consumers, from government. Oh and from consulting scientists, but why should anyone take notice of them? As one of these consulting scientists, here are three things I can do: 1️⃣ Breed plants and animals that are more resilient to environmental variability and extreme disruptions to their food supply and living conditions. 2️⃣ Breed plants and animals that will perform in the future farming systems that will need to evolve to deal with extreme environmental variability. 3️⃣ Breed plants and animals that either sequester more carbon into the soil, or that emit much lower amounts of warming gases when they are being farmed. So to all my professional colleagues who are reading this and have got this far, lets join together to try and implement these. We are never going to have a bigger opportunity to make a difference to the future of the world. #globalwarming #climatechange #genetics #sciencecommunication #agriculture
Thank you for those thoughts Peter. In the global debate we need to also be mindful of the vested interests and lobby groups trying to influence the arguments and shift attention to where it is least damaging for them. It still basically comes down to the simplicity of reducing then eliminating the taking of long term stored carbon in a variety of forms and transferring it into atmospheric gases - ruminant farming has been a bit unfairly singled out I feel - the methane and CO2 coming out of animals in a pasture based system is coming from their forage which regrows and removes CO2 back out of the atmosphere - with methane having a 12 yr atmospheric life if we changed the models to look at farming over a 20yr window then as long as livestock numbers are stable the system would be much closer to carbon neutral than the annual models would show - yes we still need to address all the other issues such as carbon neutral fertlisers, energy, vehicles, transport, agri-chemicals etc but at least we would be focussed on the stuff that really matters - the stuff that is really taking that long term stored carbon out of the ground. We will need to breed plants and animals that will better cope with what's coming - so keep up the great work!
GM Anafibj and Full Professor in Animal Breeding and Product; FedAna TD
8moI totaly agree with you Peter, moreover we can also remind to all that agriculture impact for only 7-8% of total GHG and livestock sector (ruminant mainly) for the 50/60% of these 7-8% with a biogenic origin of the methane abd CO2 and considering agro-livestock production system we stay probably in balance interm of emission minus sink, and in several regions of the world (e.g. grazing and pasture or lo forest livestock ststems) we contribute positively on subtract o recycling carbon. The battle against livestock sector is not honest.