Posted by
BLOGASSAULT on Friday, February 26, 2010 7:16:30 PM
So many things can be part of the reason why global warming is such a problem today, and now we can
add another to the list.
Whaling. Yes, whaling is now a cause of global warming, according to a new study.
A century of commercial whaling has released around 100 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- that's equivalent to burning more than 50,000 square miles of temperate forest or 128,000 large sport-utility vehicles driving for 100 years.
Those are the findings of a study by U.S. scientists from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute unveiled by Andrew Pershing from the University of Maine at the Ocean Sciences meeting this week in Portland, Ore.
"Whales, like any animal or plant on the planet, are made out of a lot of carbon," Pershing was quoted as saying at the conference by BBC News. "And when you kill and remove a whale from the ocean, that's removing carbon from this storage system and possibly sending it into the atmosphere."
If my tax dollars paid for this study, I want to move to another planet.