Tor G.

Topic: Cattle farming's effect on global warming

As I swam up to my iceberg I had two things on my mind: seals and sleep.

As the world gets hotter, it doesn’t only get worse near the cattle farms, but also in other areas like Antarctica with this polar bear. With all the cows burping and farting (methane gas), it just makes matters worse than they already are.

As I swam up to my iceberg on the second day, I noticed that it was smaller than it had been the day before. When I surfaced, I saw that all the other icebergs were almost all gone. What was happening? I was so worried that I went to my friend to check on him, and when I got there he was sitting on a sorry excuse for iceberg. I asked what was happening, and he said, “The ice is melting and we need to move, but we won’t be able to hunt seals if we do.” As I swam away from his iceberg I had two things on my mind: sleep and food.

However, this story is not over: All over the world people are frantically trying to cut down on CO2 emissions: not using cars, not burning fossil fuels, and reducing their carbon footprint. Even after all of this work and all this effort, they still don’t see that the BIGGER problem is cow burps and farts that hold 23 times more heat than CO2 does. You might be wondering what's so bad about CO2 and methane. Well, let me educate you. Methane and CO2 are both greenhouse gases. That means that they trap heat, and if that is in the atmosphere, that's making the world hotter and hotter every day. This leads to melting the ice. Polar bears and many other animals need ice, and if it isn’t there they will die.

Here I was, swimming away from my home, no idea where I was going and not to mention I don’t know if I will be able to catch enough food. I might even have to swim back to sea to hunt seals when I can’t catch land prey. As I stepped out of the water, oblivious of what was happening to the world, I went to the usual place we go when we go to land.

But polar bears will just adapt, right? No. In winter, polar bears migrate to the sea ice to hunt seals so they can gain weight so that in spring they can make up for the amount of prey they don’t catch. If they can’t, they will die. This is all the effect of cows and the fact that people can't live without meat. All of this can be solved by a methane tax that would make you have to pay more to have livestock.

As I was swimming back to the sea I had only one thing on my mind: Where did my iceberg go?