A 2025 peer-reviewed paper published in Environmental Research Letters by environmental scientist Gerard Wedderburn-Bisshop argues that animal agriculture is actually the primary driver of climate change, responsible for 53 percent of global average temperature rise between 1750 and 2020. That equates to 0.64ºC of warming. In contrast, he claims that fossil fuels are responsible for 19 percent of warming, equating to 0.21°C.
Links to the reports:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10...
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10...
This video explores three developments in climate accounting and climate science that upend our understanding of which human activities cause climate change.
1. The first is consistent carbon accounting, the subject of a 2024 paper by IPCC convention. We measure the full carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, but only about a third of the emissions from land clearing. This is inconsistent because all carbon emissions are equally absorbed by growing vegetation and by the oceans, with the remainder staying in the atmosphere. The airborne fraction affects our climate, but emissions from both of them behave the same way in the real world. So why account for them differently? Using consistent accounting, we find that land clearing has emitted more carbon than fossil fuels. Extensive land users therefore become heavy emitters.
2. The second development is to use effective radiative forcing (ERF) rather than global warming potentials to compare different gases. ERF is the best climate science there is. It's not a future projection but fitted to known measurements.
3. The third change is inclusive accounting, including both heating and cooling emissions. The paper that explores these last two developments was published in February 2025. So let's take a closer look at these two.
The IPCC has published effective radiative forcing of 11 gases that show warming caused by each gas from 1750 until 2020. The aviation industry routinely uses ERFs because it's similar to agriculture - a combination of long and short-lived emissions and other atmospheric interactions. We can see the warming from each gas in the IPCC diagram. This is carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, halo carbons, and others, including cooling aerosols. ERF boosts the relative warming from methane by a factor of three. Cooling aerosols are emitted when we burn fossil fuels. Their impact is strong; they have prevented nearly a degree Celsius, masking three-quarters of all fossil fuels’ warming.
Emissions of each gas are then allocated to sectors. And we can see in this graphic how each gas contributes to each sector’s warming or cooling. Above the line is heating, and below the line is cooling. The combined warming caused by each sector is the black dot. This is fossil fuels, which are responsible for 18% of warming up to 2020. This is agriculture, making up 60% of global warming. And within the agriculture sector, animal agriculture is responsible for 53% of global warming. Animal agriculture is therefore the leading cause of climate change. Note that even if you ignore cooling aerosols, agriculture has still caused more warming than fossil fuels.
So why is this assessment so different to previous studies? There are three reasons for this. Firstly, deforestation has been undervalued by two-thirds due to inconsistent accounting. Secondly, methane’s warming has been undervalued by a factor of three, from the best ERF estimates. And thirdly, cooling aerosols have prevented three-quarters of fossil-fuel-warming but are just not counted by convention.
These studies are based on data from the global carbon budget, newly published gross and Net Land clearing carbon, and IPCC effective radiative forcing values from the sixth assessment. So, it's the latest data. The result is that agriculture has caused three-quarters of a degree centigrade warming, which mostly comes from animal agriculture, responsible for 0.64 of a degree. Fossil fuels have caused 0.21 of a degree. And methane alone has caused 0.6 of a degree warming because it has no cooling co-emissions. Consistent carbon accounting also exposes the full extent of drawdown, which is thousands of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide since 1750. This is not carbon cycling. This is locked-up carbon. The sheer size of this storage is largely due to carbon dioxide fertilization. Also, since 1750, three-quarters of all fossil and land carbon has been locked up by vegetation in the oceans. And in the last two decades, two-thirds of all carbon emissions have been locked up. Nature is doing a formidable job in dealing with our pollution.
So, this gives us hope for the future when forests and drawdown are revalued and the industries that continue to cause deforestation and methane emissions are prime targets for mitigation.
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