Archived Study Blames White American's Diet For Climate Change (wattsupwiththat.com)
submitted ago by sand_mann
Posted by: sand_mann
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Archived on: 7/2/2019 10:00:00 AM
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Archived Study Blames White American's Diet For Climate Change (wattsupwiththat.com)
submitted ago by sand_mann
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[–] Fact_Checking_Alien ago (edited ago)
I'm astounded this article is so small and uncritical. I'm further astounded nobody seems to have bothered to read the thing, because anyone with anything remotely like a bullshit detector would be dealing with a four-alarm-fire.
In the first case, the primary claim in the abstract cannot be evidenced by the methodology. Case in point:
This is not an analysis of overall diet. Rather, they selected the most intensive foods from each group from a survey as representative, and this is catastrophically inept or malicious. High consumption of a given kind of "most intensive food" does not represent overall diet, and in fact you can easily hide the true impact of a given groups overall diet by simply saying "Look how much of this group they consume", when in fact the overall diet could be composed of the least impacting foods.
Furthermore, while the results are "statistically significant", look at the offending graph. The primary reason for the difference found in the paper is, exclusively, milk. Which more blacks cannot consume due to lactose intolerance.
Now here's the real intolerable part: There is no controlling for SES. This is intolerable because, on average, more white people are very wealthy than the average black person. Without controlling for SES, you are not representing any real variance in like-for-like circumstances, and blanket-stating "white diet" as "harmful" when this data not only cannot determine this but does not represent the average (median) dietary values, only the average mean values. So what they're finding is, essentially, the wealthier white population as a whole uses more than the poorer black population as a whole. No shit sherlock.
Even so, the variance is only this much: Land (meter squared per year) 220 (blacks); GHG (Co2/greenhouse gas 680 kg of CO2/year ) 80 (whites); water (in liters per year) 16,800.
And they even admit, in their discussion, exactly why this whole endeavor is plagued with stupidity:
Except for their whinging part way in this paragraph claiming "oh no we've totally fixed it". No you haven't. And I can point out in such a way exactly how you haven't such that anyone can understand it, even a child: Black people are, on average, more obese. They consume more calories, worse food, and I doubt "wheat" counts all the donuts they eat. QED.
And I propose you pull your heads out of your asses and reconsider using such a terribly inaccurate dataset to make determinations about whole groups of people without controlling for SES. Because you might quickly realize the biggest offenders are not people on SNAP, but people who fly private jets everywhere. You stupid cocks.