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It is generally believed that cars and trucks and airplanes contribute an ungodly share of greenhouse gases. This has recently led many right-minded people to buy a Prius or other hybrid car. But every time a Prius owner drives to the grocery store, she may be canceling out its emission-reducing benefit, at least if she shops in the meat section.
The world’s ruminants are responsible for about 50 percent more greenhouse gas than the entire transportation sector.
First, climate scientists can’t run experiments. In this regard, they are more like economists than physicists or biologists, their goal being to tease out relationships from existing data without the ability to, say, invoke a ten-year ban on cars (or cows).
enough to sit around and calmly discuss the trade-offs involved in global catastrophe, the rest of us are a bit more excitable. And most people respond to uncertainty with more emotion—fear, blame, paralysis—than might be advisable. Uncertainty also has a nasty way of making us conjure up the very worst possibilities.
But perhaps the best reason is that LoJack actually makes it fun to have your car stolen.
In other words, the economic reality of research funding, rather than a disinterested and uncoordinated scientific consensus, leads the models to approximately match one another.
The data generated by the capuchin monkeys, Chen says, “make them statistically indistinguishable from most stock-market investors.”
