It is amazing to me there are still people denying global warming is taking place. Many reasons are being cited why it isn’t and they are all wrong. Let me give you an example of one. While the oceans are rising they are rising much slower than they would if global warming was a serious matter. Recently scientists have found out something which has a huge bearing on this statement and shows why without a doubt it is wrong. The scientist found out that the continents are absorbing some of the water, because they are very dry. Obviously as this goes on it regulates the ocean’s rise, but here is the problem. The absorption cannot last. At some point the continents will get saturated and stop absorbing water and then the increase in the ocean’s level will really become noticeable. This was discovered by using two satellites known as the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment aka GRACE. I won’t get too technical, but suffice it to say the two satellites are able to detect the increase in water in the earth.

Scientists have discovered that gravity’s pull changes when the amount of water changes. An example of this is the pull of gravity has lessened in Southern California due to the drought. The scientists think the minimum amount the ocean rise has lessened because of the continents soaking up water is about 20%. Mother Nature is a strange bird, just when you expect something to happen to the environment, it changes what you thought would happen. It is as if nature makes adjustments to try and preserve the optimum balance. All the organisms on our planet have to live together and biodiversity is what keeps our planet habitable. If we had just one or two different plants or animals, that would be the end of the earth and us. We really do not know what plants, animals, insects and fish are required to keep our planet healthy.

In times past it was thought we should wipe out pests like flies and mosquitoes. It turns out this is by far a too simplistic. While these two insects and many others are very annoying to us and can even cause death to humans by transmitting disease, there are other creatures which feed on them and even more creatures which feed on those. Wiping out flies might eventually be responsible for wiping out an animal at the end of the chain which we use for food. On cannot just decide willy-nilly to wipe out any species, no matter how annoying or dangerous they seem to be. It is even a mistake to do it when we think we know the effects. It is very unfortunate for us that many animal species are becoming extinct due to human activity. Take our fish for example. Some species of fish will no longer be available in the future, unless we change our ways of fishing for them. We have become too proficient at fishing and are actually using up some fish faster than they can reproduce. To make this fact even scarier is the fact the earth’s population is increasing and more food will be needed.

We are just beginning to experiment with growing meat in the laboratory. People in the United States eat 2010 pounds of meat a year on the average. In the developing word people are eating more meat every day. It is suspected that by 2030 the world average for meat consumption will increase by 10%. Meat is not good for the planet, because every animal we raise for food had to consume huge amounts of food and water over its lifetime. Animals suffer, some are stuffed into cages where they can’t move, others are treated poorly and yes I believe they know when other animals are being slaughtered that they will be. By the way I eat meat. A couple of years ago Professor Mark Post of the Maastricht University in the Netherlands created a five ounce hamburger patty in a lab and it looked just like the ones sold at the supermarket. It was tried by several food critics. One even said this was meat to him. The problem was growing the patty cost $350,000. The scientist says the price is going down and he hopes he will soon be able to get it down to $65 or $70 a kilo, still far too expensive, but going in the right direction.

I don’t think it will be long before someone figures out how to create meat for the price we pay today for natural meat. Think about all the cost which goes into raising a steer. I checked this out and it seems the average cost to raise a steer is about $364, not counting the damage to the environment. It is said cows and I presume steers are responsible for incredible releases of methane gas into the atmosphere which is not a good thing. There is a team which believes it can sell lab grown meat in five years and do it competitively. There may be something to this, because a scientist might be able to grow a better piece of meat with less fat for example. Tailor made meat or designer meat could become a product of fine restaurants for example.

There will always be those who would rather eat fish. There are fish farms spring up in a lot of places, but disease is a big problem and could wipe out the entire school if a fish got infected. Soon this may not be a problem since NASA is leading a project to grow fish chunks in the lab. They want to use these chunks to feed astronauts in space. They say the fish has plenty of protein for those long space trips. They demonstrated how they do this by slicing muscle parts from a large goldfish and placing it in a vat of nutrient-rich liquid. In a week the parts had increased in size by 16%. A batch was fried up in olive oil, garlic, lemon and pepper and staffers at Touro College in New York said it looked and smelled like fish. Nobody tasted it yet.

The slaughter of animals and fish might soon be a thing of the past. This also might be a lot better for our health, because the meat might be able to be kept cleaner in a lab where it is grown and there is no problems with getting meat from sick animals. Obviously the labs will have to be kept very clean and inspected just as the meat plants are, but it seems they will be easier to keep clean. This could be the next big change in the way we live.