Experts have warned that if we are to combat climate change that is caused by agriculture, it is essential that Westerners cut half of the meat out of their diet. Scientists of Exeter University published this conclusion in the Energy and Environmental Science journal. Tom Powell, leader of the project: “By focusing on making agriculture more efficient and encouraging people to reduce the amount of meat they eat, we could keep global temperatures within the two degrees threshold.”

Source: telegraph.co.uk

More and more studies continue to emerge proving the connection between human actions and our changing environment. The most recent study about climate change, published in Nature Climate Change, proved that humans are playing a dominant role in the rising of the oceans temperature. Oceanography expert Nathan Bindoff: “This paper’s important because, for the first time, we can actually say that we’re virtually certain that the oceans have warmed, and that warming is caused not by natural processes, but by rising greenhouse gases primarily. We did it. No matter how you look at it, we did it. That’s it.”

Source: huffingtonpost.com

Rising prices, concern for the environment or a growing emphasis on health are causing Americans to eat less meat and in stead to opt for other high protein foods like tofu, lentils, nuts, beans, etc. The USDA expects Americans to eat 12% less meat and poultry this year compared to five years ago.

Source: yourlife.usetoday.com

Scientists of Lancaster University in the UK have calculated that, out of 61 researched foodstuffs,  meat and cheese have the largest negative impact on the environment. If everybody in the UK would go vegetarian or vegan, the environmental effect would be as great as taking half of all cars off the road.

Source: independent.co.uk

New research published in the journal Nature Climate Change shows that bird and butterfly communities are not responding fast enough to climate change. Over the past 20 years butterflies are lagging behind 135 km the temperatures shifting northwards, and birds even 212 km.

Source: sciencedaily.com

A Berkely study that will be published in the Journal of Arid Environments on December 16th, found that over the last fifty years even the drought-resilient trees of the Sahel are dying because of climate change. Between 1954 and 2002 rainfall has dropped by as much as 48 percent.

Source: bitsofscience.org

With the population now at seven billion, it’s time we turned our attention from fattening animals to feeding people, writes Steve Jones in an article at telegraph.co.uk.

Hundreds of millions of people may be trapped in inhospitable environments as they attempt to flee from the effects of global warming, worsening the likely death toll from severe changes to the climate, a UK government committee has found.

Source: guardian.co.uk

A new method of crunching climate data could make it possible to put a figure on climate change’s contribution to freak weather events, something that’s been difficult to do with empirical precision. According to the analysis by climatologist Stefan Rahmsdorf of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, there’s an 80 percent chance that climate change was responsible for the Russian heat wave of July 2010, which killed 700 people and was unprecedented since record keeping began in the 19th century.

Source: wired.com

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, found several key issues that sceptics claim can skew global warming figures had no meaningful effect. The Berkeley Earth project compiled more than a billion temperature records dating back to the 1800s from 15 sources around the world and found that the average global land temperature has risen by around 1C since the mid-1950s.

Source: guardian.co.uk