Livestock and climate change further explained

I mentioned in my previous post the recent kerfuffle about animal agriculture and climate change associated with the work of Gerard Wedderburn-Bisshop (see this podcast and this paper). I also mentioned that I’m kinda done with getting into the details of all these ‘here’s my one weird trick to save the world’ approaches. But various people have asked me to explain further why I find Wedderburn-Bisshop’s position problematic. So … oh well, here goes. See, this is exactly my problem. You’re not helping. (For those on the other hand who’ve already had their fill of this issue, do just skip this post but please come back for my next one, where I’m going to tell a story…)

I’m going to do this quite briefly and summarily, although it’s still quite a long post. I’m not a scientist, but I’ve followed the issues around this for a while and I think I have an okay basic grasp of them. Of course, I’m open to polite criticisms, pushbacks and clarifications. But, as per above, I’m not planning to dwell on this much further (thanks as ever for keeping the comments coming, which is what makes writing these posts worthwhile, but apologies that I don’t always find time to offer adequate replies).

Before I begin let me say that I think much of the global livestock industry is a horror show, and it’d be great to bring the curtain down on a lot of it. Also that cutting down wild forests or ploughing up wild grasslands are terrible ideas. And that there are a lot of good reasons to opt for veganism. That’s not what this is about. There are fewer good reasons to opt for alt-meat, but that’s (mostly) another story.

I have nineteen numbered points, in which I try to navigate what this is about.

1. The main greenhouse gases of importance are carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. They have different potencies with respect to causing climate change – ‘radiative forcing’ – and different lengths of persistence in the atmosphere.

2. These gases have sources in ‘natural’ (i.e. not human-caused) and biotic processes, and they’re also absorbed and/or chemically changed by other natural/biotic processes (sinks). What’s left at any given time is in the atmosphere, acting as baseline greenhouse gases. But over the short-term on human timescales the natural carbon and nitrogen cycles are quite stable and the climate ...