By now, you know that not all meat is created equal.

That familiar fable about Old MacDonald and his happy barnyard menagerie is a far cry from the cruel reality of factory farms, where cows, pigs and chickens are crammed together in giant warehouses, fattened on grain and pumped full of antibiotics, then rolled out to the slaughterhouse to become the next Big Mac or box of McNuggets.

In regulatory lingo, these meat factories are called “concentrated animal feeding operations,” or CAFOs. (Pronounced "cay-fo.")

Editor's note: CAFOs are known in Canada as Intensive Livestock Operations or ILOs.

Here’s everything you ever wanted to know about them -- and a few things you’d probably rather not know.

The negative impacts of climate change are coming on more quickly than anyone expected. According to a new NASA study, ocean waters are creeping steadily upwards, at rates faster than predicted, Maureen Nandini Mitra reports at Earth Island Journal:

"That ice sheets will dominate future sea level rise is not surprising -- they hold a lot more ice mass than mountain glaciers," Eirc Rignot, the report's lead author said in a statement emailed by NASA yesterday. "What is surprising is this increased contribution by the ice sheets is already happening."

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