“What”, asks The Young Ones‘ Rik, “is the major piggy contribution to society? It’s bacon, isn’t it? Bacon and rolling around in the mud!”
According to new research, though, all that rolling around in the mud is making another major piggy contribution to the world: CO2. Yes, folks, ol’ Porky is out to kill the planet, one snuffle at a time.
Researchers in Australia and New Zealand say wild pigs across the world are having the same impact on the climate as a million cars.
Well, Jacinda Ardern, you know what to do: leave off ute owners and get cracking on feral pigs.
Their research, recently published in Global Change Biology, says by uprooting carbon trapped in soil, wild pigs are releasing about 4.9 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.
This is equivalent to 1.1 million cars.
Once again, of course, this claim is predicated largely on the climate hustler’s favourite: computer models.
The researchers from the University of Queensland and University of Canterbury used models of wild pig population density, soil damage, and their effect on soil carbon emissions to reach their findings.
University of Queensland’s Dr Christopher O’Bryan said the wild pigs could be a significant threat to the climate.
Well: get cracking. Wipe the buggers out. Maybe, instead of penalising shooters, Ardern could divert some of the cash for the Mongrel Mob, and give to, oh, “Shooters for Climate”?
“Wild pigs are just like tractors ploughing through fields, turning over soil to find food,” O’Bryan said.
“When soils are disturbed from humans ploughing a field or, in this case, from wild animals uprooting, carbon is released into the atmosphere.
“Since soil contains nearly three times as much carbon than in the atmosphere, even a small fraction of carbon emitted from soil has the potential to accelerate climate change.”
“Our models show a wide range of outcomes, but they indicate that wild pigs are most likely currently uprooting an area of around 36,000 to 124,000 square kilometres, in environments where they’re not native,” he said.
“This is an enormous amount of land, and this not only affects soil health and carbon emissions, but it also threatens biodiversity and food security that are crucial for sustainable development.”
University of Canterbury PhD candidate Nicholas Patton said the research has ramifications for curbing the effects of climate change.
TVNZ
It certainly does. In fact, the research raises a number of questions for the climate-botherers among us.
Firstly, although it’s hard to tell because the full paper is pay-walled, it seems clear that the research pertains to Australia and New Zealand only. Given both of our countries’ miniscule contributions to global human-caused CO2, it seems, then, that feral pigs have an alarmingly outsized carbon footprint.
Wild pigs are one of the widest-ranging mammals in the world. Their numbers in some other parts of the world dwarf those in the Antipodes. How many millions of cars’ worth of CO2 are these porcine planet-killers releasing globally? How dare they!
Is it time for the great Pig Apocalypse? If we humans are expected, as the loons at XR make clear, to drag our lifestyles back to the Stone Age in order to save the planet, it’s about time those bloody oinkers pulled their weight.
What other species are contributing to the 97% of atmospheric CO2 that humans don’t produce?
How many more species ought we wipe out to curb “dangerous climate change”?
In the meantime, shooters: get out there and bag a boar for Gaia.
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