Is Alcohol Killing Our Planet? 468
Andy_Spoo writes "Something that I've been trying to get an answer to: Is alcohol killing our planet? Alcohol is a byproduct of yeast, but another is CO2. As we all know (unless you've been asleep for years), CO2 is helping to warm our planet, sending us into destruction. So how much is the manufacture and consumption of alcohol contributing to the total world CO2 level? And don't forget that bars and pubs force beer through to their pumps using large compressed cylinders of CO2. Does anyone know?"
Re:Bloody hell! (Score:5, Interesting)
[Citation needed]. The biochemistry of anaerobic conversion of sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide produces a fixed ratio of alcohol to carbon dioxide, independent of the yeast strain. The main difference would be that baker's yeast has to be rapid-growing (the bread has only a few hours to leaven), while brewer's/wine yeast can take more time but must survive under high alcohol concentrations.
Re:Bloody hell! (Score:3, Interesting)
I've brewed with bakers yeast before. It makes a drinkable, if fizzy, pint.
Re:Bloody hell! (Score:5, Interesting)
How to Brew Beer in a Coffee Pot:
http://www.allaboutbeer.com/features/235coffee.html [allaboutbeer.com]
Shouldn't have to worry (Score:1, Interesting)
You shouldn't have to worry because our planet is NOT warming, and even if it was, Man, and Carbon emissions have nothing to do with it.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24036736-7583,00.html
Re:We All Know (Score:3, Interesting)
OK, I went and read the paper, and basically what they're arguing is that the last ice age wasn't ended by an increase in CO2.
Fine. But that doesn't prove that CO2 has no effect on climate. Quite the opposite:
Finally, the situation at Termination III differs from the recent anthropogenic CO2 increase. As recently noted by Kump (38), we should distinguish between internal influences (such as the deglacial CO2 increase) and external influences (such as the anthropogenic CO2 increase) on the climate system. Although the recent CO2 increase has clearly been imposed first, as a result of anthropogenic activities, it naturally takes, at Termination III, some time for CO2 to outgas from the ocean once it starts to react to a climate change that is first felt in the atmosphere. The sequence of events during this Termination is fully consistent with CO2 participating in the latter ~4200 years of the warming.
There is, in fact, an argument for manmade climate change. They finish up by saying
The radiative forcing due to CO2 may serve as an amplifier of initial orbital forcing, which is then further amplified by fast atmospheric feedbacks (39) that are also at work for the present-day and future climate.
There's a positive feedback loop here that's quite scary. You heat up the atmosphere a tiny bit, you get outgassings of greenhouse gases (CO2 from the oceans, methane from defrosting ice sheet in the north, gases released by dying wetlands) and that heats up the atmosphere more. Which releases more gases...
Feedback loops can cycle out of control damn quickly. Ever held a microphone in front of its own speaker?
One last point: even if you weren't misreading this paper, the way you cite it as counterevidence is totally bogus. There are hundreds of papers making the opposite argument. You don't bring the whole edifice of argument down just by citing somebody's inference from one set of ice core samples.
Re:Bloody hell! (Score:2, Interesting)
It's amazing how much "pros" rely on pseudoscience to make their brews.
They also believe that bakers' yeast has low tolerance when it's quite the opposite. The little liquid pockets on bread get very alcoholic very soon. It is not as strong as strong yeast varieties, but it is far stronger than beer and ale yeast.
They will also tell you it generates off flavors, don't believe the bullshit. Anything off there may be is bacterial infection, dead and rancid dried yeast, and maybe some memories of prison booze. I have made 15% mead with bread yeast and it tasted better than most store-bought wines.
The trick is pitching with a starter batch instead of throwing the crappy 3+ years old bakers' yeast powder into something you are actually going to drink.
Re:Nope (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry, but that's bullshit. (Do you have a citation to support this theory?)
-- You're the Zogger from Technocrat? Bruce was a bit of a bastard to pull the plug with not a word of warning, wasn't he. I'll never sign up for anything he does again.
Don't forget soft drinks! (Score:3, Interesting)
Considering there's almost 200% as many people drinking soda pop, one would think there's more of a threat from drinking a Coke than someone drinking a beer.
No carbon being created (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeast do not create carbon from thin air. They convert the sugars in the plants (grapes or barley) into alcohol and CO2.
The plants have absorbed that carbon from the atmosphere using photosynthesis.
So the total sum of carbon added to the atmosphere is zero. And this is a dumb article.
Re:Bloody hell! (Score:3, Interesting)
It wasn't ending a sentence in a preposition, it was "look like sloppy". You didn't end the sentence in a preposition, "do" is a verb.
In fact, none of your examples are ending sentences in prepositions either. While "on" and "out" can be prepositions in these cases you're using them as adverbs or adjectives (simply modifying "print", "point", and "radio"). Ending a sentence in a preposition might look like:
This is the table the radio was on. ("on" connects to "the radio" to "the table". A crude re-ordering is "This is the table on which the radio was", which sounds dumb. Rather, we'd say something like "The radio was on this table", although that would be a somewhat unnatural answer to certain questions.)
What are you talking about? ("about" connects "talking" to "what". You might write, "You're talking about what?")
The rule isn't just about prepositions ending sentences, either, it's that a preposition should precede the rest of the prepositional phrase; the rule that it can't end a sentence is just a side effect of this. I've read, however, that the rule was really devised by American teachers with an unhealthy Latin obsession, and that people have been moving prepositions all over the place for centuries. I'm not really an expert on that, however... just a lowly computer programmer.