Track the lies back though and every time the root of the deception can be found.
Big Farmer and its allies in government, the tame experts, even the UN and the IPCC, the funded institutes and the vested interests don’t want debate.
They want us to keep looking at fossil fuels. They make us keep looking at fossil fuels.
The cow is in the room though, hiding in plain sight, and our debate, free from the pressures and coercion so evident in the usual public discourse, revealed it.
Deceptions are partial truths that are intended to mislead, usually to protect and promote vested interests. Deceptions can usually be detected by identifying inconsistencies in the data sources and/or in the way the data is presented. The United Nations (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate change reports (ipcc.ch) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food Guidelines (myplate.gov) are the sources of our scientific understanding of food and climate, where we have identified the following ten food climate deceptions, making visible the enormous Cow in the Room.
In this deception, the UN IPCC subtly implies that humans started changing the climate only from 1750 onwards with the discovery of fossil fuels.
CO2, one of the primary greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, is absorbed by trees and plants during photosynthesis and it is stored away in vegetation and soil in regenerating forests. However, in the absence of active reforestation efforts, CO2 is a long-lived greenhouse gas that lingers in the atmosphere for thousands of years. At present, about 85% of human-made CO2 emissions are from burning fossil fuels, i.e., coal, oil and natural gas. The remaining 15% is mainly from burning down forests to clear land, i.e., land-use changes. These ratios are, of course, subject to revision when we take into account the remaining deceptions in the UN IPCC reports.
Nevertheless, since CO2 is a long-lived greenhouse gas, it is the cumulative emissions of CO2 over the past 8000 years that impacts climate change, not just current emissions alone. Until the 1900s, land use changes, principally involving deforestation, were the main source of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, while at present, it is fossil fuel burning. Integrating the annual CO2 emissions components over time, we know that from 8000 years ago to the present, CO2 emissions from land-use changes far exceeds the CO2 emissions from all fossil fuel sources combined. This shines the spotlight on land clearing for animal agriculture as the leading cause of anthropogenic CO2 emissions over the years and not fossil fuel burning, thereby making visible the Cow in the Room.
The inconsistency that led us to this deception is that the UN IPCC counts greenhouse gas emissions from 1750 onward, while simultaneously claiming that a significant fraction of CO2 (about 22%), once emitted, lingers in the atmosphere for tens of thousands of years. Please see Table 8.SM.10 on page 8SM-16 of the IPCC AR5 Supplemental material on Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative Forcing. If CO2 emitted today can impact the climate thousands of years from now, shouldn’t we also be considering the CO2 emitted thousands of years ago?
Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that causes over four times as much anthropogenic global warming than CO2 on an annual basis. The leading cause of methane emissions into the atmosphere is animal agriculture, responsible for an estimated 37% of all anthropogenic methane emissions. In the Sixth Assessment Report of the UN IPCC (AR6), methane is estimated to cause 1.2 W/m2 of radiative forcing cumulatively, while anthropogenic CO2 is estimated to cause 2 W/m2 of radiative forcing cumulatively. From this, we can calculate that the 17.6 Billion tons of CO2 we add annually into the atmosphere causes an additional 0.029 W/m2 of radiative forcing each year, while the 362 Million tons of methane we add into the atmosphere annually causes an additional 0.12 W/m2 of radiative forcing, a little more than four times that of CO2.
However, since methane has a half-life of around 8.4 years and reacts with free radicals in the atmosphere to oxidize into CO2, the IPCC is able to diminish its importance by averaging its impact over 100 years. In its 2019 interim report, the IPCC used a 100-year Global Warming Potential (GWP) of 28 for methane so that the 362 Million tons of methane is calculated to be equivalent to 10.1 Billion tons of CO2, about one-fourth of the 39.1 Billion tons of CO2 emitted each year, a more than fifteen fold reduction in the impact of methane than reality warrants. This is the Methane Averaging Deception.
In addition, in AR6, in 2022, the IPCC appears to have gone a step further and virtually eliminated all consideration of methane and other greenhouse gases altogether, by claiming that “given the nearly linear relationship between cumulative CO2 emissions and increases in global surface temperature, cumulative CO2 emissions are relevant for understanding how past and future CO2 emissions affect global surface temperature.” By making this hand waving causative claim (see Box TS.1 on Page 39 of IPCC AR6 WG1), the IPCC now orients itself to look directly away from the methane burps emitted by the Cow in the Room and can therefore pretend that there is no Cow in the Room.
The inconsistency that led us to this deception is that the UN IPCC claims that catastrophic climate change is imminent within the next ten years or so, while simultaneously averaging the impact of methane over the next 100 years.
Until about 1800, Nature was able to sequester ALL of the CO2 emitted from human activities so that the CO2 level in the atmosphere stayed constant at around 280 parts per million (ppm) for thousands of years. Since 1800, the CO2 level in the atmosphere has been increasing and it reached 410 ppm in 2020.
In 2020, the CO2 level in the atmosphere increased by 2.25 parts per million compared to what it was at the same time in 2019. Since each part per million is equivalent to 7.81 Billion tons of CO2, that means about 17.6 Billion tons of CO2 got added to the atmosphere in that year. As far as climate models are concerned, it is only this 17.6 Billion ton addition of CO2 to the atmosphere that matters.
However, the UN IPCC contends that humans emitted 39.1 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in 2019-20, of which 33.9 billion tons were from fossil fuel combustion and 5.2 billion tons from land use changes. Then it claims that the “airborne fraction” of the CO2 emissions is 45% as only 17.6 billion tons of the 39.1 billion tons stayed in the atmosphere.
Now, let’s look at how the UN IPCC arrives at these numbers. The 33.9 billion tons of CO2 is ALL of the emissions from burning fossil fuels. The 5.2 billion tons is the NET of the emissions from deforestation (30 million acres) and afforestation (10 million acres) so that only 20 million acres of deforestation are accounted for. Besides, the UN only counts a land grid to have been deforested if its tree cover drops below 10%.
The animal agriculture industry takes advantage of this accounting convention loophole to cut down most of the trees and leave a little over 10% of the tree cover in a 1Km X 1Km grid so that it remains classified as a “forest,” as revealed in satellite photos. Through these accounting mechanisms and the airborne fraction concept, the UN IPCC is able to diminish the impact of animal agriculture while inflating the impact of fossil fuels, in a futile attempt to hide the Cow in the Room. After all, the only CO2 that matters in the climate models is the 17.6 billion tons of CO2 that got added to the atmosphere annually.
The inconsistency that led us to this deception is the fact that the UN IPCC counts CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion one way and CO2 emissions from land use changes another way.
In the Natural Cycle deception, the UN IPCC arbitrarily classifies the following CO2 emissions from the animal agricultural industry as part of the natural CO2 cycle and therefore, do not have to be counted as part of anthropogenic (human caused) greenhouse gas emissions:
1) The CO2 emissions from the deliberate burning of all uneaten regenerating vegetation on grazing lands in the form of pasture maintenance fires (please see the cover of Glen Merzer’s book, Food is Climate);
2) The CO2 emissions from the respiration of farmed animals, who currently constitute an equivalent biomass that is TWELVE times the weight of all the wild animals that lived 10,000 years ago; and
3) The CO2 emissions from the bottom trawling of 4 BILLION acres of the ocean floor each year by the fishing industry.
Nature is still trying to heal and sequesters most of these anthropogenic emissions and only allows an extra 17.6 Billion tons of CO2 to be added to the atmosphere each year. Therefore, if we count all of these emissions, the Airborne Fraction would be much less than 45%, but the contribution of animal agriculture to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions would be more prominent, making visible the Cow in the Room.
The inconsistency that led us to this deception is the fact that the UN IPCC counts methane emissions from ruminant farmed animals as part of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, but counts the breathing contribution of ruminant farmed animals as part of the natural cycle. Farmed animals cannot have their front hooves in the natural cycle for CO2 emissions and their back hooves in the anthropogenic cycle for methane emissions.
To illustrate the Opportunity Cost deception, imagine someone screaming at the top of his lungs that he is drowning in the ocean and needs a helicopter to come and rescue him. Right behind him, there’s a huge boat that he can climb onto for safety, but he chooses to ignore it because he couldn’t be bothered to make the effort to climb up the ladder hanging off the boat.
That life-saving boat is the Opportunity Cost of the 40% of the ice free land area of the planet that we could free up if we abandoned animal agriculture in favor of a plant-based Vegan world. Every day we choose to continue consuming animal products is a day we choose not to rewild that 40% of the ice-free land area of the planet and thereby start healing the climate. Instead, by continuing to consume animal products, we choose to continue heating the climate, while destroying an additional 100,000 acres of tropical forest and extinguishing another 100 species, every single day.
The inconsistency that led us to this deception is the fact that the UN IPCC makes dire pronouncements about the harmful impacts of climate change, admits that animal foods have an order of magnitude greater climate impact than equivalent plant foods and yet openly serves animal foods at all UN Climate Change meetings.
To illustrate the Opportunity Benefit deception, imagine someone screaming at the top of his lungs that he is drowning in the ocean and needs a helicopter to come and rescue him. Right behind him, there’s a huge gun on a boat that he is planning to shoot with a remote button when the helicopter comes so that it kills everyone on board and likely kills him as well.
That gun on the boat is the Opportunity Benefit of the cooling aerosols that we emit when we burn fossil fuels. These cooling gases would disappear if we stop burning fossil fuels and yet the only debate that is going on in the mainstream discourse on climate change is about reducing the use of fossil fuels without addressing the Cow in the Room.
The inconsistency that led us to this deception is the fact that the UN IPCC reports on the source of cooling aerosol emissions and yet blithely contends that “given the nearly linear relationship between cumulative CO2 emissions and increases in global surface temperature, cumulative CO2 emissions are relevant for understanding how past and future CO2 emissions affect global surface temperature.”
To quote Dr. John McDougall, “effective marketing focuses on the “unique positioning” of products, promoting the most exceptional characteristic of a selected merchandise to enhance sales, regardless of the consumer benefits.” The meat industry has chosen the macronutrient, protein, as the unique positioning for the sale of meat (and other animal products, such as eggs and whey) and takes pains to promote protein as the most important macronutrient that we need to consume in abundance, regardless of our health consequences.
The capture of our government by corporate forces is evident in the fact that the USDA My Plate formulation for a healthy diet contains three food groups, Fruits, Vegetables and Grains, plus a fourth category as a macronutrient, Protein. It seems to imply that Fruits, Vegetables and Grains do not contain Protein, which begs the question as to how gorillas and elephants are able to grow so big by eating just fruits and leaves.
The industry’s unique positioning of dairy products is their high calcium content, but cows are merely channeling the minerals that they consumed in the plant foods they ate. There is adequate calcium in all the plant foods, with some foods like sesame seeds providing an order of magnitude more calcium per gram than dairy products.
The capture of our government by corporate forces is evident in the fact that the USDA My Plate formulation for a healthy diet contains three food groups, Fruits, Vegetables and Grains, plus a fourth category as a macronutrient, Protein, plus a fifth separate category for Dairy. It seems to imply that the consumption of dairy products is essential for human health, which begs the question as to why Canadians seem to be getting along fine with drinking just water.
The industry’s unique positioning of fish products is their high Omega-3 fatty acid content, but fish are merely channeling the nutrients that they consumed in the plant foods they ate. There is adequate Omega-3 fatty acids in plant foods, with some foods like algae, seaweed and flaxseed being an abundant source of these nutrients.
It is a scientific fact that animals do not make nutrients. Only plants do. Whenever science books promote an animal product as a source of specific nutrients, we can be sure that industry capture is on display.
The industry takes pains to malign starchy foods such as potatoes and rice as “fattening foods” in order to promote the consumption of animal foods. The increased consumption of animal foods leads to chronic diseases requiring frequent visits to doctors and hospitals, while the increased consumption of starchy plant foods leads to fitter, trimmer populations who rarely need to visit doctors and pharmacists and therefore, cease to be a source of revenue for the industry.
A simple survey of starch eating populations vs. animal food eating populations reveals that carbs do not make us fat and in fact, quite the contrary.
Animal Agriculture, aided and abetted by vested interests, corrupt officials and wilfully blind ‘experts’ is the Cow. By destroying vast forests and with massive production of methane, it is the primary cause of the planet’s problems and not fossil fuels, and veganism is the primary solution.
Disagree? Then listen to the experts in their field make their case at the Oxford Union when they debated This House Would Go Vegan.