Parts of the world are in a frenzy as the revival meeting in Copenhagen approaches. The lunatic fringe is energized and the sleaze brokers in the media are happy to publish their shenanigans.

This week an article in The Times of London carried a headline that blared: “Give Up Meat to Save the Planet." . . .

the claim that meat (especially beef) is closely linked to global warming has received some credible backing, including by the United Nations and University of Chicago. Both institutions have issued reports that have been widely summarized as condemning meat-eating.

But that’s an overly simplistic conclusion to draw from the research. To a rancher like me, who raises cattle, goats and turkeys the traditional way (on grass), the studies show only that the prevailing methods of producing meat — that is, crowding animals together in factory farms, storing their waste in giant lagoons and cutting down forests to grow crops to feed them — cause substantial greenhouse gases. It could be, in fact, that a conscientious meat eater may have a more environmentally friendly diet than your average vegetarian.

Eating naturally produced foods, such as those produced by a traditional rancher, is obviously more environmentally friendly than eating field and row crops, but everyone eats them. We are omnivores not carnivores. We need pasta too. No one is innocent. The sensible approach is to seek ever better, less harmful ways to grow foods.

But tell the stories straight. CAFO crowding and manure lagoons are not climate threats. Forests aren't cut for livestock, they are cut for field crops such as soy or maize. The grains produced would still be produced even if there were no animals. They'd be used for producing fuels or industrial chemicals or something else. The problem is field and row cropping, not livestock, and that will continue and accelerate as time passes whether we eat meat or not.

So what is the real story of meat’s connection to global warming? Answering the question requires examining the individual greenhouse gases involved: carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxides.

Carbon dioxide makes up the majority of agriculture-related greenhouse emissions. In American farming, most carbon dioxide emissions come from fuel burned to operate vehicles and equipment. World agricultural carbon emissions, on the other hand, result primarily from the clearing of woods for crop growing and livestock grazing. During the 1990s, tropical deforestation in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Sudan and other developing countries caused 15 percent to 35 percent of annual global fossil fuel emissions.

Much Brazilian deforestation is connected to soybean cultivation. As much as 70 percent of areas newly cleared for agriculture in Mato Grosso State in Brazil is being used to grow soybeans. Over half of Brazil’s soy harvest is controlled by a handful of international agribusiness companies, which ship it all over the world for animal feed and food products, causing emissions in the process.

Nonsense. Most of the CO2 comes from the soil. Plowing the land cause emissions from the organic matter in the soil decomposing. It's harder to measure such non-point source emissions so the lazy and dim ignore them. If the machines ran on solar power the emissions would still be high. The forests would still be cleared and the crops would still be grown. There would still be markets for the products so there would be no climate benefit.

Methane is agriculture’s second-largest greenhouse gas. Wetland rice fields alone account for as much 29 percent of the world’s human-generated methane. In animal farming, much of the methane comes from lagoons of liquefied manure at industrial facilities, which are as nauseating as they sound.

Nonsense. Every bit of organic matter grown will be recycled by bacteria. It rots. Some of the bacteria thrive in anoxic conditions and produce methane. Some thrive in oxic conditions and produce CO2. Every time it rains the aerobic bacteria drown and the anaerobic bacteria have a population explosion. In between rains the situation reverses. Focusing on the easy to measure point sources such as rice paddies is just lazy scholarship. Besides, all of the swamps that have been drained to make farmland produced as much methane as the rice paddies and grain fields that replaced them.

CRITICS of meat-eating often point out that cattle are prime culprits in methane production. Fortunately, the cause of these methane emissions is understood, and their production can be reduced.

Much of the problem arises when livestock eat poor quality forages, throwing their digestive systems out of balance. Livestock nutrition experts have demonstrated that by making minor improvements in animal diets (like providing nutrient-laden salt licks) they can cut enteric methane by half. Other practices, like adding certain proteins to ruminant diets, can reduce methane production per unit of milk or meat by a factor of six, according to research at Australia’s University of New England. Enteric methane emissions can also be substantially reduced when cattle are regularly rotated onto fresh pastures, researchers at University of Louisiana have confirmed.

Emissions from enteric fermentation are irrelevant, another example of focusing on convenient point sources. The bacteria will eat those poor quality forages even if cattle do not. The methane will still be produced. There may be some political benefit to manipulating diets to evade blame for those emissions, but there will be no climate benefit. The natural carbon cycle will proceed unaltered.

Valid reasons to improve cattle diets are to improve their performance and the quality of their products. They do better on balanced diets, but this is only a net benefit to the whole system if a balanced diet can be achieved with forages grown on site.

Finally, livestock farming plays a role in nitrous oxide emissions, which make up around 5 percent of this country’s total greenhouse gases. More than three-quarters of farming’s nitrous oxide emissions result from manmade fertilizers. Thus, you can reduce nitrous oxide emissions by buying meat and dairy products from animals that were not fed fertilized crops — in other words, from animals raised on grass or raised organically.

Nonsense. Nitrous oxide emissions result from bacterial decomposition of nitrate. It doesn't matter where the nitrate came from. The nitrate produced by nitrogen fixing soil microorganisms is identical and will be eaten by nitrogen consuming soil organisms. Arguments against the use of fertilizers are arguments against increased production. Sure, there are less emission when less is produced, but that means that more land goes into production, more water is used, more forests are cut, more labor and machinery is used for less net benefit. The more assiduously you do that the worse things get when full accounting is done.

We need to move beyond these sterile religious debates about agriculture and do science that takes whole systems into account. We need to get very much better at agriculture so that less land is used to produce more food using fewer net inputs. The problem is most acute in developing regions where productivity is a low fraction of that in developed regions. They use more inputs for less production, just as their manufacturing processes are more carbon intensive due to inefficiencies up and down the linked processes.

There are opportunities for improvement in developed regions too as new technologies evolve and agronomic techniques improve. Once those better methods are developed they too can help developing regions become ever more productive for ever less cost.

Some examples might make it easier to grasp. Earlier posts have dealt with narrow specifics but it may be difficult to assemble such piecemeal techniques in thought and see how the system can be improved. Consider the new knowledge about inhibition of nitrifying bacteria by plant root exudates, which in the end also inhibits denitrifying bacteria that produce nitrous oxide. Plants can use ammonium rather than nitrate so they still thrive, and ammonium is a cation that is adsorbed by soil so that it doesn't leach away either. Another often discussed knowledge increase is the use of charcoal to amend soils. It directly addresses a number of emissions issues. These two concepts together - ammonium and charcoal - can be knitted together by seeing that charcoal increases adsorption of ammonium in addition to other benefits.

The idea that ruminants are a climate problem is obvious nonsense to anyone with at least a modest amount of knowledge, and more knowledge shows that they are in fact a benefit, more so when smart methods are used, and even more so when new knowledge is used for even smarter methods. Agriculture is a general problem that can be improved but we won't achieve that objective with muddled ideas about hunkering down, eliminating part of the general system or reverting to preindustrial techniques. Eliminating animal products from the human diet will hurt not help, and reverting to the suite of old methods arbitrarily included in the "organic" concept will be just as harmful when the impacts on the whole system are accounted for.

In some ways that's the great benefit of climate hysteria. The kind of sloppy thinking and selective data use that animates vegan and organic thinking is exposed because it doesn't matter to a global issue like climate if small pockets of improvement are achieved by spewing larger amounts elsewhere, off the books, since everything is on the books for a global issue. Learning to think in global, whole system terms while still being able to have the detailed local focus necessary to do a competent job on the specific tasks at hand will make us better.

Catering to the neuroses, food fetishes and eating disorders of obsessives who seek to exploit our legitimate concerns about the environment in general and climate change in particular to advance their agendas will not help with those legitimate concerns. Often they cause harm as well as making life a bit uglier. We need to shrug off their wacko nonsense and see things more clearly.

For example, the reason to be concerned about nitrous oxide emissions from soil is that it's wasteful. It increases the cost of getting in a crop since less of the natural fertility or bought inputs goes into the crop, meaning that more is required to do the job, or that yield is reduced thus wasting land and water as well as nutrients.

Similarly, the reason to have concern about methane production from enteric fermentation is that it's wasteful: there's more energy that could be wrung from the forage to grow livestock, and unbalanced nutrition is bad all around. You get less production and the quality is lower. It's bad farming and bad business.

If your agronomic system is inefficient and so requires a premium price for products that's a clue that your methods are bad. The higher costs mean that your methods are destructive. Your accounting system may not recognize the harms done, but they exist. Similarly, a low cost of production may not be a reliable indicator of virtue for the same accounting reasons. If all costs are not recognized, swept under the accountant's rug, then you don't have an accurate measure of your system.

This is where the energy and resources of those who are sincerely concerned about the environment and climate should be spent. That it would also help with poverty and development is an indication of the correctness of the approach. Some might argue that it is also an ethical issue but there's no truth value to such claims since ethics are not grounded in reality: they are preferences. There's no way to resolve ethical disputes.

N.B. There's nothing wrong with foods that command a high price due to their quality and/or rarity. That's the just reward for excellence by producers.