ruining things with sciencea tumblelog

nonlinearmind:

ronbailey:

rexbarrett:

Your dog destroys the environment faster than my Land Cruiser does. Your argument is invalid.

via

Dude, I hope you were just being snarky here… this chart is moronic.  A dog is a living, breathing creature that has a certain rightful claim to the resources it consumes; the SUV is an over-priced machine with absolutely no intrinsically redeeming value outside of stroking the ego of the chump that pays the loan.

This chart fails to mention that, whether a dog happens to be a pet or not, it will still exist in the world, and that owning them as pets actually controls their population.  There would be much more damage done if every pet dog had instead grown up feral.  SUVs don’t reproduce.

I also find it revealing that the chart stops with a toyota land cruiser, as if it was the most guzzeling of SUVs.  Where’s the F150 and the Hummer?  This from a magazine that once proclaimed “Darwin was Wrong”.

I did some reading on this story last week. It annoyed the hell out of me.

1. Vague Scientist is not even slightly a valid place to publish original work. Give me peer reviewed journals or get the fuck out of my face. What’s that? Your paper failed peer review for even the tiniest and dodgiest of environmental science journals? What a fucking shock.
2. The authors of this report are — surprise! — authors of a book about this very topic and available now from all good book stores. We are definitely at home to Mr Public Relations Pitch here.
3. They consider energy consumption only. No effort is made to consider the secondary effects of waste matter. My car spits carbon dioxide into the atmosphere all the time, whereas my dogs convert their food intake into stupidity, running, and love (and to be fair, very small amount of methane). The carbon dioxide is far more environmentally troublesome than the raw energy consumption.
4. The figures for meat production to feed dogs don’t take into account the fact that dogs are mostly getting offal from animals reared for human consumption. Most of this food production would continue with or without pet dogs and the offal would be wasted.

I’m sure there’s more faults to find, but I think I’ve made my point.