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Help me understand where the water goes (europe.pub)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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Hi there everyone,

Let me start this by saying that this is an honest question. I figure nobody would be better suited to answer my question than a group laser-focused on the negatives of the technology.

I see these types of memes a lot and see statistics of gallons consumed in a lot of articles I read. What I don't understand though is where the water goes that it can't be reclaimed or naturally return from a gas to a liquid.

As a kid(long ago), I was taught of the cycle of rain and the conversion between gases and liquid. It's my understanding that when a liquid is used to cool something, it also follows the same conversion process as it cools.

Could someone explain to me what's going on in this process where the 264 billion gallons of water used in the meme do not return to a liquid state?

I would appreciate any insight into the process that seems to defy this cycle that I am missing. Like I said prior, my knowledge of this process ended in middle school science class so I'm confident that I'm missing something.

Thanks for your time!

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[–] 3 points 1 week ago (3 children)

The better approach for those cases is to let the wild grazers back into the land. Cattle and other modern farm animals don't graze like wild life did

Cows and bison differ in all behaviors — including how they stand, move and graze. Cattle spend almost double the time grazing — 45-49 percent — in comparison to bison — who spend just over a quarter of their time doing so (26-28 percent).

[...]

The types of plants bison and cattle prefer to graze on are also remarkably different. Unlike cattle, who prefer to graze steadily on flowering herbs like clover, milkweed and sunflower, free-roaming bison cover a much larger area, grazing on different varieties of grass, such as perennial grasses, but leaving certain areas of the prairie untouched.

https://sentientmedia.org/cattle-ranching-terrible-for-biodiversity/

Moreover in the net, having cattle on those is usually a net negative to the ecosystem

Livestock farmers often claim that their grazing systems “mimic nature”. If so, the mimicry is a crude caricature. A review of evidence from over 100 studies found that when livestock are removed from the land, the abundance and diversity of almost all groups of wild animals increases

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-damaging-farm-products-organic-pasture-fed-beef-lamb

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    There are no wild grazers here. Closest to it are wild boars and a few introduced deers. I'm in Portugal. Old country. We had a large number of landraces, adapted to specific locations, mostly bred for free range grazing and foraging but the commercial breeds nearly wiped them out.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    If we assume that's true, this still leaves the emission side of things which are quite high for cattle. Cattle are some of the heaviest emitters because of how they digest. Are we at least in agreement that the production level and thus consumption level should come down?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    We do.

    I still remember meat being treated as a speciality dish, not a daily presence. And the animals were allowed to grow slowly. Herds were smaller. The most affordable meats were normally rabbit, chicken and pidgeon, all animals most people raised at home.

    Industrial farming is a monstrosity.

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