The Art of Misleading the Public

“WHAT DO YOU GET WHEN YOU MIX SCIENCE AND POLITICS? PURE POLITICS” – BILL NYE.

 

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Dear Climate Healers Family,

During my podcast interview on the Kindness with Amy show, I was asked to respond to Elon Musk asserting on the Joe Rogan show that eating steak is irrelevant to the climate. While I expect someone who became the richest man in the world by selling electric cars to lie about this topic, imagine my consternation when senior climate scientists writing the 2024 state of the climate report followed suit.

The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth begins with a pair of ominous sentences.

“We are on the brink of a climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt.”

Then it succumbs to the mainstream framing that fossil fuel combustion is the leading cause of climate change.

Of course, this is just plain wrong.

Here’s an open letter I wrote to the authors of the report pointing out this mistake and requesting a correction.

Subject: Corrections to 2024 state of the climate report

Dear Authors,

In your otherwise excellent 2024 state of the climate report, you state,
“Human-caused carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases are the primary drivers of climate change. As of 2022, global fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes account for approximately 90% of these emissions, whereas land-use change, primarily deforestation, accounts for approximately 10% (supplemental figure s2)“

The second sentence above makes it seem like 90% of all greenhouse gas emissions come from fossil fuel sources, when the Global Carbon Budget in “supplemental figure s2” is only claiming that 90% of CO2 emissions come from fossil fuel sources.

As per UN IPCC AR6, CO2 is the primary greenhouse gas (Effective Radiative Forcing (ERF) = 2.06 W/m2), but other greenhouse gases together contribute even more to global warming (ERF = 2.2 W/m2) than CO2. This warming is partly offset by aerosol emissions and other cooling effects (ERF = -1.66 W/m2) so that the overall ERF is 2.6 W/m2.

Even regarding CO2 emissions, in his October 2024 peer-reviewed article in Environmental Research Letters, Gerard Wedderburn-Bisshop has pointed out that the UN IPCC (and the Global Carbon Budget) is using inconsistent accounting across the land use and fossil fuel sectors. He finds that with consistent accounting, land use change has contributed 19% more CO2 emissions than all fossil fuel sources combined since 1750. This is like a 45-55 split as opposed to the 90-10 split between fossil fuel combustion and land-use change that you refer to above.

In its Climate Change and Land Report of 2019, the UN IPCC has estimated that humankind is using 37% of the ice-free land area of the planet for grazing farmed animals. Mainly to accommodate animal agriculture, we humans have eliminated half the trees on the planet, roughly 3 trillion trees.

In the Sixth Assessment Report, the IPCC admitted that vegetation and soils store much more carbon (450 + 1700 = 2150 GtC) than the entire atmosphere (591 + 279 = 870 GtC). We know that humans have eliminated half the trees on the planet over the past 10,000 years. We also know that forests store 90% of the land carbon. Therefore, we can deduce that the world’s remaining 3 trillion trees and the soils that they live on store more than twice as much carbon (2150 X 90% = 1935 GtC) as in the entire atmosphere (870 GtC) and more than four times as much carbon as in all the fossil fuels we have burned to date (445 GtC).

From these calculations, we can conclude that if the world adopts a plant-based way of living and rewilds the planet to regrow most of the missing 3 trillion trees on the land freed from animal agriculture, it would take the most effective course of action to reverse climate change, restore the integrity of the biosphere and halt ecosystems collapse.

Nevertheless, throughout your report, I found 15 references to fossil fuels, but zero references to animal agriculture. In your concluding section, you even write,
“Rapidly phasing down fossil fuel use should be a top priority.”

As a systems engineer, I couldn’t disagree more. Due to the co-emitted cooling aerosols during fossil fuel combustion, which Hansen et al. has called the Faustian bargain of fossil fuels, it would be an unmitigated disaster to rapidly phase down fossil fuel use without shutting down animal agriculture and rewilding the planet.

Since you recognize “the profound urgency of addressing this global challenge, especially the horrific outlook for the world’s poor,” I plead with you to issue a correction to your report concerning the above points.

Sincerely,
Sailesh Rao.

Sailesh Rao
srao@climatehealers.org
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