No, Agriculture & Meat Aren’t A Bigger Driver Of Climate Change Than Fossil Fuels

Fossil fuels are the dominant cause of global climate change. Decades of rigorous scientific research, repeated validation, and global scientific consensus confirm this unequivocally. This core truth needs reinforcement because a provocative paper recently published in Environmental Research attempts to upend this established understanding by claiming that agriculture, particularly livestock farming, far outweighs fossil fuels in contributing to climate change.

The paper’s headline figure—that agriculture is responsible for around 60% of historical warming, compared to approximately 18% for fossil fuels—attracted media attention and sparked a heated debate, despite its fundamental flaws caused by deep biases. To state it clearly upfront, the paper’s conclusions are wrong, scientifically unsound, and misleading. It exemplifies how bias-driven methodologies can distort climate accounting and, in turn, confuse critical policy discussions.

The fact that it’s a single-author paper triggers one of my red flags for assessing credibility, as scientific papers typically have 2-5 authors. That Increased transparency in accounting conventions could benefit climate policy is a Letter means that peer-review is typically briefer, but the errors should have been caught and the letter not published.  The journal isn’t a predatory journal, and has an impact factor of 5.8. That makes the publication of this paper troubling, as it’s a reputable journal that gave this deeply flawed piece legitimacy it doesn’t deserve.

At the heart of the paper by Gerard Wedderburn-Bisshop is a novel and indefensible reinterpretation of standard accounting practices used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other authoritative bodies. He challenges mainstream climate accounting conventions by making several inappropriate methodological choices: counting land-use emissions from deforestation as gross emissions without balancing them against natural sinks, using instantaneous effective radiative forcing rather than established integrated metrics such as global warming potential over 100 years, and including short-lived aerosol cooling emissions alongside warming emissions. Each of these methodological decisions individually skews the analysis toward vastly overstating the role of agriculture while significantly understating the responsibility of fossil fuels.

The most glaring flaw in the methodology lies in its use of gross emissions from land-use change instead of the conventional net accounting. Standard scientific practice accounts for land emissions as net fluxes because deforestation emissions are partially offset by carbon reabsorption through regrowth and forest restoration. Counting emissions grossly, without offsetting for regrowth, is akin to accounting for a person’s income without ever acknowledging their expenditures—clearly misleading.

This approach dramatically exaggerates the emissions attributed to agriculture. Prominent climate scientists like Pierre Friedlingstein of the Global Carbon Project and Drew Shindell of Duke University have strongly criticized this method, highlighting that only net emissions ultimately influence atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Gross accounting, therefore, provides a distorted picture incompatible with physical realities of the carbon cycle.

Similarly problematic is the paper’s use of instantaneous effective radiative forcing (ERF) metrics, which capture the current warming or cooling effect of emissions but neglect their longevity and cumulative impact. This choice artificially deflates the historical contribution of fossil fuels, which release long-lived carbon dioxide, and instead inflates short-term emissions impacts, including methane from agriculture and cooling aerosols from fossil fuels. These aerosols, emitted largely by burning coal, have temporarily masked a significant portion of fossil fuels’ warming effect.

But aerosol-driven cooling is transient and highly problematic; reducing air pollution, a public health imperative, quickly removes this temporary cooling shield, leaving behind persistent warming from fossil CO₂ emissions. Hence, the snapshot provided by ERF is profoundly misleading as it disregards the future trajectory of emissions and their long-term climatic effects.

The inclusion of short-lived cooling pollutants in emissions accounting further compounds the confusion. While scientifically accurate that aerosols provide a short-term cooling effect, interpreting these pollutants as genuine offsets to long-term fossil fuel emissions is dangerously misleading. It implies fossil fuels are less harmful to the climate, neglecting the severe, persistent warming locked in by CO₂ accumulation. Such a conclusion risks dangerously misguiding policy by minimizing the urgency of fossil fuel phase-outs. Scientists such as Professor Piers Forster from the University of Leeds have clearly articulated these concerns, warning policymakers against being seduced by temporary aerosol cooling effects that vanish quickly and leave permanent CO₂ warming.

Understanding the fundamental reasons behind such significant methodological missteps leads directly to examining the author’s evident bias and intellectual focus. Wedderburn-Bisshop is openly committed to anti-deforestation and plant-based diet advocacy, serving as the Executive Director of the World Preservation Foundation, an environmental advocacy organization promoting narratives that strongly emphasize the harms of animal agriculture. His longstanding dedication to highlighting agriculture’s environmental impacts appears to have warped his methodological choices profoundly. Instead of objectively evaluating emissions, he appears to have actively sought methods to amplify agriculture’s climate impact.

This intellectual monomania, while arising from commendable passion for environmental conservation, leads to significant analytical distortions that undermine the scientific credibility and practical utility of his conclusions.

Reception within the scientific community further highlights the paper’s critical shortcomings. While certain advocacy and plant-based groups enthusiastically embraced the conclusions, the wider climate science community swiftly and robustly refuted them. Detailed critiques by climate experts and fact-checking organizations systematically dismantled the paper’s key assertions, labeling them misleading and scientifically unsound. Climate scientists emphasized repeatedly that mainstream IPCC guidelines and Global Carbon Project assessments remain robust, transparent, and scientifically accurate, clearly showing fossil fuel emissions as the primary driver of historical and ongoing climate change.

The danger inherent in flawed papers receiving widespread media coverage is clear: policymakers and the public risk confusion and misinformation at a crucial moment in climate mitigation efforts. Misleading methodologies, particularly when driven by personal advocacy goals rather than scientific impartiality, disrupt efforts to craft nuanced and effective climate policy. Agricultural emissions unquestionably matter and deserve greater attention. Still, policy decisions must be grounded in scientifically robust accounting practices that accurately reflect the relative magnitude and permanence of emissions sources, not distorted snapshots that conceal fossil fuels’ enduring harm.

Ultimately, rigorous scrutiny and transparent scientific debate are essential in climate science, but the analysis must meet the highest standards of objectivity and methodological rigor. The Wedderburn-Bisshop paper falls short of these standards by a considerable margin.

Fossil fuels remain indisputably the largest contributors to climate change, a fact supported by extensive, consistent scientific evidence spanning decades. Climate policy must continue to prioritize rapid fossil fuel emission reductions, alongside—but never eclipsed by—efforts to tackle emissions from agriculture and deforestation. The fight against climate change demands clear-eyed accuracy, scientific integrity, and balanced accounting. This paper, unfortunately, provides none of these essentials.