http://www.reuters.com/article/news...15?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0&sp=true [rquoter] By Michael Kahn GENEVA (Reuters) - Obesity contributes to global warming, too. Obese and overweight people require more fuel to transport them and the food they eat, and the problem will worsen as the population literally swells in size, a team at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine says. This adds to food shortages and higher energy prices, the school's researchers Phil Edwards and Ian Roberts wrote in the journal Lancet on Friday. "We are all becoming heavier and it is a global responsibility," Edwards said in a telephone interview. "Obesity is a key part of the big picture." At least 400 million adults worldwide are obese. The World Health Organization (WHO) projects by 2015, 2.3 billion adults will be overweight and more than 700 million will be obese. In their model, the researchers pegged 40 percent of the global population as obese with a body mass index of near 30. Many nations are fast approaching or have surpassed this level, Edwards said. BMI is a calculation of height to weight, and the normal range is usually considered to be 18 to 25, with more than 25 considered overweight and above 30 obese. The researchers found that obese people require 1,680 daily calories to sustain normal energy and another 1,280 calories to maintain daily activities, 18 percent more than someone with a stable BMI. Because thinner people eat less and are more likely to walk than rely on cars, a slimmer population would lower demand for fuel for transportation and for agriculture, Edwards said. This is also important because 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions stem from agriculture, he added. The next step is quantifying how much a heavier population is contributing to climate change, higher fuel prices and food shortages, he added. "Promotion of a normal distribution of BMI would reduce the global demand for, and thus the price of, food," Edwards and Roberts wrote.[/rquoter]
speakerbox: You want fries with that? ****** consumer: My GOD man, don't you know how much you are killing the planet?! Why do you hate the Earth??! I wonder, would too many fat people make the Earth spin faster or slower...
And since global warming causes every negative circumstance on the planet, i blame all you fatasses and your insatiable demand for fast food for the Rockets failure to win a first round playoff series.
Give me a break. This new religion is getting crazy. The only way anyone is going to give a flip about this over-reaction, is to have the populace indoctrinated in the hysteria that is man-induced global warming. Only then will anybody take it upon themselves to lose weight for the planet, let alone themselves. Someone send mother earth a notice to stop the volcanic eruptions. While they're at it, why not study the types of foods that make all these people fat, and then we may find the beer industry getting attacked for contributing to global warming. Whoohoo, let's tax someone.
I feel global warming is a big issue, but this is going a little overboard. If anything, a reduction in the number of people is a much bigger influence. The difference between a 160 lb me driving a car isn't much from a 180 lb me. But if I don't exist, then there's no car, and no waste of gas. Big improvement. Should the US follow China and adopt a one-child policy? That will certainly help a lot.
At this point. . . what meaningful action should be taken The list of things that DON'T cause Global Warming is getting shorter than the list that does D*MN near everything Causes Global Warming and Everything is basically a Result of Global Warming Rocket River . . . moving to the Right Causes Global Warming and Global Warming causes people to Move to the Left. . . what do you do??!?!?!?!
Being fat is bad for America. Literally. We're going to have a generation of diabetics with cardiac problems hitting up the hospitals soon. We gon' bankrupt!
I don't know how signifigant of a factor this is but it looks like this could be one of those "kill two birds with one stone." Whether people agree that global warming is a problem most people will agree that obesity is a problem. By driving less, using less fuel and exercising more we could address both problems. For instance biking or walking to work and the store will reduce greenhouse gases while helping you burn calories. In the summer I use a push mower, no motor, to mow my lawn and in winter I shovel my snow myself without a snow blower. I get both more exercise while not contributing as much to global warming.
But you forgot NEGATIVE population growth. I'm pretty sure the US leads the world in causing pollution by a wide margin. If 300 mil is too many people, we can always cut it down to 200 mil, or 100 mil. Kind of like going back to the 19th century. Anyway, obviously I was just joking with having less babies. But how much pollution an average American causes is indeed staggering when I look at how people in other countries live. It has more to do with lifestyle rather than how fat people are.
Apparently being fat doesn't cause hurricanes. oops. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5788568.html Study: Global warming not to blame for rise in hurricanes By ERIC BERGER Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle Hurricane findings Scientists recently simulated 21st century Atlantic hurricane activity in a warming world. What they found: • 27 percent fewer tropical storms formed • 18 percent fewer hurricanes formed • 8 percent fewer major hurricanes formed • 3 percent increase in storm maximum wind speed • 10 percent increase in average storm rainfall Source: Nature Geoscience Cyclone Nargis recently made international headlines for dealing death and destruction to Burma. Yet unlike the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, global warming received little blame for the intensification of Nargis. That's possibly because, in the nearly three years since New Orleans flooded, the science of hurricanes and climate has matured. A new scientific paper authored by prominent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists, published this weekend, reinforces the changing landscape. The paper, which simulated Atlantic hurricane activity during warming 21st century conditions, found 27 percent fewer tropical storms, and 18 percent fewer hurricanes. The strongest hurricanes, the researchers found, had slightly higher wind speeds. "This does not support the idea that we've already seen a large positive trend in hurricane activity emerging from greenhouse gases," said lead author Tom Knutson, a Princeton, N.J.-based research meteorologist for NOAA. "In fact, it points in the other direction." Published online today in Nature Geoscience, the paper is notable for finding such a striking reduction in Atlantic activity. Earlier research has suggested a small reduction in total storms, or little change in a warming world. By suggesting a marked decrease in activity, the new work bolsters the views of Chris Landsea, science and operations officer at the National Hurricane Center, who has argued that the apparent recent increase in Atlantic storm counts is due solely to better observational tools — satellites and the like — which blanket coverage of the Atlantic hurricane basin. "After taking into account the changes in monitoring, the number of storms we're seeing now is on par with previous busy periods in the Atlantic," Landsea said. This doesn't mean there's necessarily an emerging consensus on global warming's impact on hurricanes. While most research has suggested that the number of storms may not increase, and some like Knutson's has indicated a decrease in storm counts, there are troubling signs that the stronger storms' intensities may spike. That's what concerns scientists like Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Some simulations, she said, have found that while the average intensity of storms may not increase substantially, the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes, the most powerful ones, does rise. Some observational evidence may bear this out. Since 1935 there have been four seasons in the Atlantic basin with two or more Category 5 storms. Two of those seasons have occurred in the last three years, 2005 (Emily, Katrina, Rita and Wilma) and 2007 (Dean and Felix). "There is strong agreement that intensity will increase in a warmer climate, although there are arguments about the magnitude of the increase," Curry said. The hurricane-climate debate took off during the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, which set a record of 28 tropical storms and hurricanes. At the time several influential published papers suggested global warming was already having a measurable impact on hurricane activity. "We now have a much more diverse scientific literature, by far," said author Chris Mooney, whose book Storm World chronicles the furious debate within the scientific community that has ensued since 2005 about hurricanes and climate. But in addition to the scientific backdrop, Mooney said other reasons may exist to explain global warming's general absence from the post-Nargis debate. "There's a different bad guy, not global warming but the junta," he said of Burma's ruling body. "And there's the risk of looking craven and opportunistic if you go off about global warming right now." For casual observers following the 2005 hurricane season, there were considerable reasons to think a warmer world would produce more storms. Hurricane forecasters say tropical storms will form when sea surface temperatures reach 80 degrees. In a warmer world, then, periods of favorable conditions for storm formation should last longer. So why doesn't the new study, and other simulations, identify such a trend? "The response of Atlantic tropical cyclones to increased greenhouse gases depends on more than the warming Atlantic Ocean," said Gabriel Vecchi, a NOAA scientist who co-authored the new paper with Knutson. "In our experiments, the reduction in Atlantic storms seems to be, at least partly, related to a projected increase in wind shear in the tropical Atlantic as we look out into the 21st century." Nearly all scientists agree the hurricane-climate debate remains unsettled because computer modeling of hurricane activity for the next century remains problematic. For past simulations, researchers have generally used just one of the climate models employed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, to forecast future global temperatures. But each of these models returns different solutions for wind shear changes over the Atlantic Ocean. A strength of the new study by Knutson is that it uses an average of all the computer models used by the IPCC, a technique that generally leads to better forecasts. But until the climate models all agree on different variables, such as future wind shear, knowing what future hurricane seasons will bring is impossible, scientists say.
