The natural carbon cycle would continue, so there would not be more, or less. oxygen or CO2.
Burning fossil fuel (coal, oil, natural gas) adds carbon to the atmosphere and environment that has been locked up underground for millions of years.
When we eat meat, the animals that we eat also ate grain that, if we were vegetarians, we could eat.
The difference is that it takes 3-8 or more times more grain to produce the same amount of nutrition that we could get if we ate the grain directly.
Plants use photosynthesis to combine CO2 and H2O to form simple sugars, and oxygen but they live by combining simple sugars and oxygen to form CO2, H2O and energy. They simply make more sugars than they need to live. The excess sugars are combined much like Lego blocks into cellulose to build the plants, starches and oils to store them for later use. When they die, their mass decomposes becoming CO2, H2O and heat. The net oxygen production of a plant over it's entire life cycle is zero. What resulted in our oxygen rich and CO2 poor atmosphere is water capturing CO2 and forming carbonate rocks and sedimentation trapping biomass before it can fully decay and transforming it slowly into fossil reserves.
It's utter ignorance to say plants emit oxygen.
No.
There is no relationship between the being vegetarian and the rate of global warming.
1. Scale.
2. Stock versus flow.
3. Total carbon footprint of, say, soybeans versus beef cattle.
4. 7th grade math.
=> 5. Obviously not.
Yep, that is exactly what happening. More and more people become vegans, kill and eat veggies, and release green gasses. They should have stick with beef, the planet would be greener and AGW would be gone. That is the solution! Eureka... =D
Beef is brain food. If you don't believe me, just talk to a vegetarian.
No it would decrease GW because fewer animals would be raised to be eaten.
Less CO2, less methane.
Its a typical liberal feel good answer that will produce zero
results.
I am not sure about plants emitting oxygen and using oxygen, I am no chemist or physicist. But let's suppose you just mean "there will be less plants if everyone eats them", let me address that.
There will be far more plants if everyone became a vegetarian, as there were many more plants before meat eating became generalized. Huge forests were cut down to make grazing land for livestock, and more will be cut as demand for meat increases. But even if it didn't increase, even if no more forests were cut, just today's situation is that animals consume more plant-based food than humans possibly could.
Why?
Think of how meat is produced. The animal, a cow for instance, has to live and be fed for 18 months to 2 years (until it reaches a target weight of around 1400 lb.) and for most of this time it will be eating lots and lots of grass/hey/grain. Again, I cannot give you numbers, but a cow being bigger than a human, it eats much more vegetable matter in one meal than you and I could possibly eat in a day. And when this cow is slaughtered, it will yield how many portions of meat?
It has been calculated that cattle consume 16 times more grain than they produce as meat (remember that only about 40% of an animal's total weight is useful for meat consumption)
In a study by Cornell University in 2004, it was found that the amount of feed grains used to produce the animal products (milk and eggs) consumed in the lactoovovegetarian diet was about half (450 kg) the amount of feed grains fed to the livestock (816 kg) to produce the animal products consumed in the meat-based diet. And of course, if we were talking about a vegan diet, it would be much less!
And what about manure's nitrogen, which robs the oxygen from our waterways?
Let me quote some figures.
The average carnivore eats more than 11,000 animals in their lifetime, each requiring vast amounts of land, fuel and water to reach the plate.
30 percent of the earth's land is devoted to raising livestock
A Bangladeshi family living off rice, beans, vegetables and fruit may live on an acre of land or less, while the average American, who consumes around 270 pounds of meat a year, needs 20 times that.
Nearly 30% of the available ice-free surface area of the planet is now used by livestock, or for growing food for those animals. One billion people go hungry every day, but livestock now consumes the majority of the world's crops. A Cornell University study in 1997 found that around 13m hectares of land in the US were used to grow vegetables, rice, fruit, potatoes and beans, but 302m were used for livestock. The problem is that farm animals are inefficient converters of food to flesh. Broiler chickens are the best, needing around 3.4kg to produce 1kg of flesh, but pigs need 8.4kg for that kilo.
It is inefficient to grow grains and other feed crops for animals—only a fraction of what we feed them is actually turned into flesh that humans can eat. The vast majority is used by the animal to live and grow.
Other academics have calculated that if the grain fed to animals in western countries were consumed directly by people instead of animals, we could feed at least twice as many people – and possibly far more – as we do now.
Eat a steak or a chicken and you are effectively consuming the water that the animal has needed to live and grow. Vegetarian author John Robbins calculates it takes 60, 108, 168, and 229 pounds of water to produce one pound of potatoes, wheat, maize and rice respectively. But a pound of beef needs around 9,000 litres – or more than 20,000lbs of water. Equally, it takes nearly 1,000 litres of water to produce one litre of milk. A broiler chicken, by contrast, is far more efficient, producing the same amount of meat as a cow on just 1,500 litres.
Pigs are some of the thirstiest animals. An average-sized north American pig farm with 80,000 pigs needs nearly 75m gallons of fresh water a year. A large one, which might have one million or more pigs, may need as much as a city.
More than 2 billion tonnes of animal manure were produced worldwide during the late
1990s. Assuming an average nitrogen content of around 5%, this makes 100
million tonnes of nitrogen finding its way into our water system. In the waters of the
Gulf of Mexico, pollutants in animal waste have contributed to a “dead zone” where
there is not enough oxygen to support aquatic life. During the summer of 2004, this dead zone extended over 5,800 square miles
I could go on and on, but I don't want to tire you. I am providing plenty of links if you want to know more.
There will be another problem occurs.
people will fart alot more and that can cause some serious problem to our mother earths nose
