The Mismeasure of Meat

(Via CJR)

Here's a nice example of how the message of science gets lost in translation.

For the last four years, media outlets such as The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Fox News have repeatedly cited a United Nations study which found that livestock production is responsible for about 18 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions—a larger share than comes from all planes, trains, and automobiles combined.

Last week, news outlets revisited those claims, following a talk delivered by Dr. Frank Mitloehner, an animal scientist based at UC Davis, at an American Chemical Society meeting last Monday. Mitloehner criticized the conclusions of a 2006 report from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, “Livestock’s Long Shadow.” The study’s assertion that meat (including eggs, dairy, and other animal protein) production is responsible for more greenhouse-gas emissions globally than the transportation industry is certainly untenable, and likely false, he said.

The problem Mitloehner highlighted is that the FAO performed what’s called a full “lifecycle analysis” for the livestock industry. In other words, it added up emissions from things like fertilizer production and land-use change in addition to those from cow burps and manure. It did not do the same for the transportation industry, however, tabulating the emissions from fossil-fuel combustion, but not from automobile manufacturing or road construction, for instance. Mitloehner has spent the last week explaining to reporters that this led to a classic apples-to-oranges comparison between the two sectors. In one of the first news articles on the subject, the FAO substantiated this criticism, saying that its comparison was indeed flawed.

Okay, so a new study reveals flaws in an old study - so what?

Well, critics of global warming now use this relatively benign correction to make all kinds of groundless assertions:

Eat less meat, reduce Global Warming - or Not Fox News

Meat, dairy diet not tied to global warming Washington Times

And to be fair, prior to these howlers - you had a press community who uncritically accepted that global livestock produce more greenhouse gas than global vehicle emissions. Which is to say how come this earlier assertion wasn't made to show its work? Simply asking the FAO where they got their numbers might have helped. They might have said something like what they're saying now:

“I must say honestly that he has a point – we factored in everything for meat emissions, and we didn’t do the same thing with transport, we just used the figure from the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change],” FAO livestock policy officer Pierre Gerber, a co-author of “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” told the BBC.

Honestly, would that have been so hard?