The quality of the meat you eat depends partly on whether the animals suffer heat stress on the way to the slaughterhouse. After an animal is slaughtered, its glycogen gets broken down and acidified to lactic acid, lowering its pH from 7 to 5.5 . The meat now “resembles soggy white blotting paper” and begins to smell of decay, says Neville Gregory of England’s Royal Veterinary College.
At what temperatures does this happen? Oh, at about the temperature of the ambient air after global warming.
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Mojib Latif, a climate physicist at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany, warns that natural variability may outweigh global warming for some periods in coming decades. Skeptics of the warming scenario will use this to cast doubt on the whole argument — but, Latif says, the warming will return.
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