People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has a new campaign to stop global warming by having everyone stop eating meat and switch to a vegetarian diet. (This campaign assumes that greenhouse gases are the primary cause of claimed recent increases in average temperature of Earth which is debateable, and ignores that the temperature has not increased since 1998.) I saw a PETA representative discuss this on CNBC. The moderator apparently didn't know enough to challenge the proposition that animals add more net greenhouse gas than all industry, transportation, etc. Humans each generate about one kilogram of carbon dioxide per day, and animals similarly generate carbon dioxide. But, this carbon dioxide could be classified as "renewable," since the carbon comes from plants that recently grew by absorbing carbon from the atmosphere. So, there is no net increase in carbon dioxide from animal metabolic processes. People have to eat something, so if they don't eat meat, they will eat grains directly rather than eating meat that was produced by an animal that eats grain. (Animals also produce methane, which is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, so I suppose an argument could be made that eliminating animals would help. The fact that the amount of methane in the atmosphere has been declining wouldn't make that argument compelling.) This global warming stuff is getting ridiculous. We are in an era in which scientific knowledge is essential to understanding the issues we face, and yet most people, including opinion makers like politicians, Hollywood actors, Newspaper Reporters, and TV announcers are woefully ignorant of science or technology.