In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.”

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC) is one such group. It is a group of climate scientists who compile scientific reports in accordance with governmental policies. These are the same governments who insert the four deadly dietary deceptions – protein, calcium, omega-3 and starch – into childrens’ science textbooks so that the children grow up to be fat, sick and willing adult customers of the pharmaceutical and medical industries.

Therefore, it is understandable that the UN IPCC is also engaged in a deadly dietary deception to keep the general public in the dark on the leading cause of climate change.

Please take a look at the above graph that the UN IPCC has published about the Absolute Global Warming Potential (AGWP) of carbon dioxide (CO2) in its analysis of Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative Forcing of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (Fig. 8.SM.6, page 8SM-20). You can see that ACO2 keeps increasing for over 500 years and in fact, in the text of the report, the UN IPCC notes

“As explained in Section 8.7.1.2, the GWP (Global Warming Potential) gives the ratio of two integrals: one of a pulse of a non-CO2 gas that decays to zero and that of the CO2 response for which 20 to 40% of a pulse remains in the atmosphere for centuries.”

However, the UN IPCC fails to note that the CO2 “pulse remains in the atmosphere for centuries,” provided humans continue deforesting the land and bottom-trawling the ocean for centuries and preventing the CO2 pulse from being absorbed by regenerating ecosystems. This is a fundamental assumption that the UN IPCC makes about human behavior in response to the climate disaster – continued deforestation and desertification of land, coupled with continued depredation of the oceans, year after year, ad infinitum.

From an engineering perspective, the UN IPCC’s failure to include the CO2 response if humans were to stop bottom trawling the ocean and start regenerating the planet is absolutely inexcusable. Any self-respecting engineering team would have fired the UN IPCC for such a glaring omission in its scientific analysis.

This is like a group of medical doctors who urge their patient to gouge his gaping wound with a knife and scrape it with a fork every night and then proclaim that the wound will not heal for hundreds of days. If those doctors urged their patient to dress his wound and leave it alone, perhaps the healing could happen much sooner?

Likewise, if we stopped bottom trawling the ocean and started replanting trees instead of constantly burning down forests, the CO2 response would have a half-life of around 10-12 years, similar to the half-life of methane in the atmosphere. Then the GWP of methane would be around 130 regardless of the time span over which it is measured, whether as GWP10 or GWP20 or GWP100. Then as a society, we would be more conscious about reducing our annual methane emissions, i.e., cutting down on its primary source, our animal food consumption.

The only explanation for this glaring omission in the UN IPCC’s climate change reports is that it is actively engaged in MeatSplaining, a collection of rhetorical strategies by which it shields the animal agriculture industry from critical scrutiny. Therefore, the UN IPCC begins with the assumption that the meat, dairy and fishing industries have to grow year after year and therefore, humans will continue deforesting land and bottom trawling the ocean year after year so that nature can never sequester the CO2 pulse that was added into the atmosphere.

Frankly, if our plan is to continue bottom trawling the ocean and deforesting land year after year for even the next decade, much less the next century, we would have no business pretending to be an intelligent species, much less Homo Sapiens Sapiens, a “wise, wise hominid.”

Despite this glaring MeatSplaining faux pas, we owe the UN IPCC a debt of gratitude for categorizing forests on land into forests managed for timber (i.e., plantations) and intact or primary forests on Page 4 of its 2019 special report. This shows that of the 60.4 MKm2 of forests that existed 10,000 years ago, only 11.7 MKm2 of primary forests are left and therefore, the true deforestation rate is 81% and not 33% as the UN FAO has been MeatSplaining.

All the best,

Sailesh Rao, Vega, Cow & Climate Healer and the Climate Healers Team.