While the causes of climate change (nature vs. nurture run amok) will be forever debated, there is an undeniable human factor, which, not surprisingly, makes things worse. Not only will human food consumption increase (this alone is not really such a bad thing), but our tastes for the foods most damaging to produce will increase exponentially. A recent Al Jazeera report quoted William Ryerson (president of the Population Institute) as saying "[as] the demand for more meat instead of grain [increases] as incomes rise, China is projected to need to import 240 million tons of food annually by the year 2030". Land cultivated for meat is land lost for the cultivation of anything otherwise sustainable, and cattle and pigs have a tendency to release enormous amounts of methane and carbon into the atmosphere. Is the rancorous debate about the causes of global warming as important as the (currently much quieter) debate about our overall impact on the globe as it relates to its dynamic meteorology?
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