Dr. Sailesh Rao’s Urgent Climate Update: Why Veganism Is the Key to Saving the Planet

What if everything you’ve been told about climate change has missed the biggest culprit?

In this eye-opening episode of The Glen Merzer Show, Dr. Sailesh Rao, systems engineer turned climate activist, makes a bold and vital claim: agriculture—not fossil fuels—is the leading cause of climate change. And the solution? A global shift to plant-based diets.

“The number of vegans keeps increasing,” Dr. Rao shares, pointing to a hopeful global trend. But more importantly, he notes, “Most people are vegan at heart”—they just need the tools, knowledge, and support to make the change.

This isn’t just about greenhouse gases. Dr. Rao dives into effective radiative forcing, the overlooked metric that reveals how animal agriculture traps far more heat in the atmosphere than most realize. He unpacks how the dairy industry, often left out of the climate conversation, plays a destructive role—and how our food choices can reverse the damage.

Dr. Rao also highlights a fascinating link: obesity and chronic illness are tied to dietary patterns and even rising CO₂ levels, showing that climate health and human health are deeply connected.

With science, clarity, and compassion, Dr. Rao delivers a message of urgency—but also empowerment. “Nature knows what she’s doing,” he says. “We just need to work with her.”

🎧 Listen now to discover how you can be part of the most impactful climate solution—right from your kitchen.

📌 Watch the episode here: Meet Dr. Nathan Gershfeld

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DISCLAIMER: Please understand that the transcript below was provided by a transcription service. It is undoubtedly full of the errors that invariably take place in voice transcriptions. To understand the interview more completely and accurately, please watch it here:

Here's the transcript:

Welcome to the Glen Merzer Show. could find us across all your favorite podcast platforms. You could find us on YouTube. Please remember to subscribe. And you can find us at RealMenEatPlants.com. My guest today is one of my favorite recurring guests. I call him the avatar of optimism.

Dr. Sailesh Rao is the founder of climatehealers.org and he is the man probably more than anyone else on the planet who is trying to make us all understand that the leading cause of climate change is not the burning of fossil fuels. That's a distant second. It is in fact animal agriculture. Silas, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Glenn. Thank you for having me, Glenn. Coming to us today all the way from India. We appreciate that. You know, I always love to talk to you when when I'm not feeling optimistic and I need a little burst of optimism. So tell me in these dark times, why should I feel optimistic today? Well, it begins with knowing that the transformation is already happening.

It is. Yes. We're doing it. We're doing it. You're in the middle of it. And you're saying, I'm not feeling good. I'm saying, what? How could you not feel good when you're in the middle of it? So what's the evidence for this transformation that's happening? Well, the number of vegans keeps increasing. OK. And the journalists' are getting published. So which means the European journals are now admitting what the Indian journal already published.

My paper got published like four years ago, But it's an Indian journal. So now Europe and North America has to agree that what I wrote was correct. So it's happening in pieces. And Gerald Bishop's second paper just got published yesterday. And this is a paper in which he asserts that animal agriculture is responsible for 52 % of greenhouse gases. Is that right?

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It asserts that animal agriculture is responsible for 52 % of all the heating that has happened today. Okay. It's a it's basically a cumulative estimate of all the heating that has happened today. All right. And, and I have a few slides to show you how he came up with that time. And it sort of, you know, explains

We'll get to that in a few minutes. So one cause of optimism is the publishing of academic papers explaining the cause of climate change. Another cause, there are more vegans than ever. How do we know that there are more vegans than ever? Well, I keep meeting more and more of them. I don't know if that qualifies as science. That is it.

There is a statisticians done some statistical analysis and they're estimating around 280 million vegans in the world today. And I looked at their numbers and I think they're overestimating the number of vegans in India because they asked people in India on online, know, are you vegan? And people here get confused about between vegan and vegetarian. A lot of, there are a lot of vegetarians in India. And so.

So I think they get confused and they say they're vegan, but they're really vegetarian. Is the population of cows in India declining? Hard to tell. There a lot of them in the streets. But I also, just came from a vegan forest festival in India and there were 1183 people with a tender looking at the footfalls.

And it was amazing. It was amazing. I would say that one third of the people who attended were not vegan. But by the end of the festival, I think most of them went vegan. Some came to the festival non-vegan and left as vegans. Right. There's your evidence. You know, it's happening. Yeah, well, we'll call that scientific evidence.

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Now, some people, you and I embrace the word vegan. There are other people in the movement. These are people who usually are vegan and understand that a diet of plants is healthier than a diet with animal foods. But they don't embrace the word vegan. They say, let's not use the V word. Let's say plant based whole food, plant based plant predominant.

Mediterranean diet, something like that. How do you feel about this, the shying away from the term vegan that a lot of our friends and colleagues do? So how do you feel about that? I think they should be using the word vegan. Because to me, most people are vegan at heart.

because no one would really want to an innocent animal unnecessarily. So most people, in my opinion, are vegan at heart. So it means that the world is full of closeted vegans and out vegans. Okay. Now, vegans- So in other words, everybody is either a closeted vegan or an out vegan. Exactly. Even if they're big meat eaters, then they're just closeted vegans.

Yeah, because they would tell you that they would not hurt an innocent animal unnecessarily. And they're eating meat because somebody told them it's necessary. If you don't eat that meat, you're not going to get your protein or something. Somebody told them some lie, which makes them think it's necessary. They said they're eating. But they really are vegan at heart because they wouldn't hurt an innocent animal unnecessarily. So that being the case, know, think of the

gay movement, right? And the LGBT movement, LGBTQ movement, basically one of the steps they went through was to get their friends who are vegan, who are gay to come out as gay, be proud, out and proud as gay. What does that do? It normalizes veganism. When you're out as vegan and you're proud as and out as vegan, it normalizes veganism.

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Okay. Not only does it normalize veganism, it tells our friends and relatives that there is, you know, there are these categories of people who actually are our friends and relatives who are called vegans who don't eat animal foods. So think about it. In any festival, in any celebration, we want to be inclusive, do we not?

If you go around saying I'm not vegan, mean, just plant based, they're going to keep doing what they're doing.

But if you're vegan and you go to festivals and you're out as vegan, right? And you're going to say, hey, I cannot eat this stuff. I cannot eat that stuff. And people realize that they're not being inclusive.

And to me, getting festivals and celebrations to be whole food plan based and vegan is extremely important.

be healthy and vegan. Because why are we celebrating with food that makes us sick? Why are we celebrating with food that's not inclusive?

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That was then, you know, we still are celebrating as if we are still in the 19th century. That's over. We are now in the 21st century and we need to be celebrating with food that we know to be healthy and that is inclusive, that everybody can eat.

And then if you want to go home and eat your addic- a- a- a- a-

I remember there was a fellow a couple of years ago who wanted me to join an organization he started that was in the movement. So I said, sure, I'll join. And I went to the website to join. And the first thing I had to do was fill out a questionnaire. And the first question was, are you whole food plant-based or are you vegan? And I said, well, I want to say yes, but I didn't have a choice of yes.

I said, I can't join. Can't join. I don't know how to choose. I don't want to say I'm not whole food plant based. I don't eat whole foods. No, I eat whole foods and they're plants, but I don't want to say I'm not vegan. So I don't know why he had to begin with that choice. Right.

I also embrace the term vegan. And what I don't like about the term plant-based is I don't know what it means. Is it there as an excuse for people to have a little bit of meat, a little bit of fish, a little bit of eggs, a little bit of cheese? don't know what, and then how much is a little bit? Once a day, once a week, twice a day. So it just gives people an out.

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to not come out, as you would say. Not come out as vegan. So I do embrace the term, at least what I've read is that the term vegan is not popular. That is, you were running for president and you said you were vegan, it would be hard to get elected.

that the term is not popular with the mainstream public. What do we do, since you're an optimistic fellow, what do we do to make the term more popular? Well, it's not popular because the meat industry and the system has been sort of bashing it, know, trying to make, and I said, look at the definition of veganism. What is wrong with it? Why is that not popular?

Why isn't that something that everybody's embracing? Right. And give us the definition. So the official definition is a way of living that seeks to exclude as far as is possible and practicable all forms of exploitation of animals for food, clothing, or any other purpose. And then it goes on, that's the gist of the definition. Right. And I say the, you know,

Unofficial definition is a way of in which we seek not to hurt animals unnecessarily. I also have an acronym definition of EGUN. What's that? It is vitally engaged guardians of animals and nature. Vitally engaged guardians of animals and nature. Right. So it says that you have a-

responsibility for being undeserved as a vegan. Vegan is accepting your responsibility. closeted vegans are still not accepting responsibility for being widely engaged guardians of animals and nature. Because if you're guardians of animals, you won't eat them.

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Now, when I first became vegan, you might say I was a dietary vegan and I still had some leather belts, know, still had leather shoes and what have you. I became a vegan 35 years ago or so. Those ancillary uses of animals other than food, to what extent

Would those ancillary uses still occur if everybody was a dietary vegan? In other words, economically, would it be sustainable economically for those animal industries to exist if people weren't eating animals? they wouldn't exist at all. It would be so expensive to raise animals just for their skin. Just for leather.

Yeah. So your leather shoes would be like a mink coat. Right. It's expensive as a mink coat. Right. So the real focus needs to be, it's better for the planet. It's better for our movement if people

first become dietary vegans rather than first become, won't wear leather shoes. It's more. Well, yeah. So me, you know, there are four different portraits that people come to veganism for, four different portraits. One is the health portrait, which is how you came. Second is the ethical portrait. People say, you I don't want to hurt animals and that's how they come to veganism. Third is.

the environmental angle, which is how I came to it. I realized, my God, I'm destroying the planet in my consumption. And the fourth is a spiritual portal, which is you want to elevate your consciousness. And so that's how you come to veganism. And I say that no matter which portal you come to veganism, you will ultimately begin to see all four aspects of it.

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So it's like four circles, and then there is a center, is really where everyone wants to meet. no matter which angle you come to, eventually you'll see all four of them. You'll see the ethical side of it. You'll see the environmental side of it. And you'll see the spiritual side of it, and the health side of it. So for me, it happened from the environmental angle. I saw the health side of it. I saw the spiritual side of it. I saw the ethical side of it.

And now I consider myself, you know, trying to get to the center. I embrace all four aspects of it. So I said, no matter which way you come, please come. Please wake up for whatever, whatever is waking you up, please say it doesn't matter to me how you do it. Now, in India, there are many different cultures.

Some of them vegan. The Janes, for example, would their diet be considered vegan? Well, Janes, the Jane monks.

practice veganism. The ones who are really strict monks, they practice veganism. But they tend to give the lay people an out. They say, you know, it's okay to consume dairy. But most Jains, not only, I mean, they don't eat even root vegetables because they don't want to the plant completely. So they eat the fruits and the vegetables that are above ground.

And they eat leaves and things if they are plucked from the plant as opposed to chopping a whole plant. So they go to that extent, but then they consume dairy thinking that dairy, you're not hurting the cow. You're just taking a little bit extra. These days it is so far away from reality, but a lot of chains are waking up to it. They're understanding this. So it's one of the fastest growing, last May, vegan community.

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Now in the United States, the dairy industry is indispensable to the beef industry. Those cheap burgers at McDonald's are from spent dairy cows. Is it the same in India? Absolutely. So because what happens is when you pay, first of all, the dairy cow is too old to be staked.

Right. And secondly, the dairy cow is all paid for because the dairy consumer paid for the cow and, by buying milk every day. Right. So she's cheap. She becomes cheap beef. And her meat has to be tenderized, pulverized and turned into ground beef. Otherwise, it's hard to get people to eat it.

So this is where all your hamburgers and the cheeseburgers come from, in dairy farms. And India is one of the largest exporters of beef in the world. People don't eat as much here, but they send it overseas and they get in a foreign exchange, a lot of dollars and euros for the beef they're selling.

So if anyone is listening who is a vegetarian and not a vegan and having cheese and saying, well, at least I'm not killing any animals. I'm just taking the milk to make cheese, not harming any animals. Well, first of all, there's a lot of harm that comes to the animal in the process of being enslaved to give the milk. But then that animal gets slaughtered.

and the beef industry would not exist without the dairy industry. So you can't really say that you're not harming animals if you're just eating cheese. Now in India, there's a new documentary, isn't there, about the dairy industry? Yeah, there's a documentary called Ma Ka Dude, which literally means mother's milk in Hindi.

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And has it gotten a lot of distribution in India? Have a lot of people seen it? It's it's being widely shown throughout India because it is. It has the statistically, we know that 85 percent of the people who watch it in India either go vegan on the spot. There is all that they're going to look into it. Is it in Hindi?

It's a mix of Hindi and English and now they're in now they've dubbed it in a lot of languages. The original was a mix of Hindi and English. But then there is an English version of it called Mother Smell. There's a Hindi version called Marka Dhoot, in which the main character speaks in Hindi. His voice is dubbed. And now they have it in Tamil. They have it in

Marathi and the Dharathi. So there are lots of different versions of maa padut that have been produced. They've been dubbed. Is there a way our listeners could find it on the web? Yeah, it's available on YouTube. Just go and type maa padut. D-O-O-D-H. M-A-A. OK, let's spell that again. M-A-A. M-A-A. Yeah.

K.A. D.O.D.H. Makar. And is it getting a lot of press in India? Well, in the presses, it is getting press, but not in the mainstream, though in the mainstream, was a Times of India just had an article on February 1st.

reporting the economic survey of India, which is done by the Finance Ministry of India, has now asked people to nudge their friends and their colleagues and their family to go vegan.

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to drop meat and dairy consumption and to go vegan. They use the word vegan too. So it's incredible. And they said that worldwide it's causing 66 % of emissions, which you'd be surprised to find that that's my calculation now. That is 66 % of the total excluding opportunity cost. And then you add opportunity cost to that, it's just.

Ghosts with a roof. OK, so let's explain this to our listeners. When we're analyzing the extent to which animal agriculture is responsible for greenhouse gases, we could look at direct emissions, things like methane belching from cows or animal respiration or nitrous oxide.

and methane from cow manure, so forth, direct emissions. We could also look at the requirement that meat has to be frozen. We could look at the transportation of cows. We could look at the production of fertilizers to grow grain, which is then transported and fed to farmed animals.

So those are the direct emissions. But then there's carbon opportunity cost, which is the big kahuna as they say. Carbon opportunity cost is what if we could imagine a world in which people ate like human beings? I know that's a lot to ask for, but what if we could imagine a world in which people ate like human beings and only ate the plant foods that we evolved to eat? Well, then we wouldn't be grazing livestock, would we?

if you could rewild all the grazing land, and that's about half of the United States, about 40 % of the globe. If you could rewild all that and the trees come back, we're missing three trillion trees somewhere. They got knocked and chopped down mainly to accommodate animal agriculture.

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If we could rewild all that land, then the resulting trees and vegetation would sequester how much carbon dioxide that's carbon opportunity cost. And carbon opportunity cost dwarfs the direct emissions, doesn't it, Silas? Yeah. Yeah. In my paper in 2021, I had estimated it to be 56 % of the total.

and that direct emissions was 31 % and opportunity cost was 56%. And so I came up with a total of 87%. But I also said that 87 % is a lower bound. It's at least 87%. Because I said it's at least 31 % direct emissions and at least 56 % was the opportunity cost. Then in the fifth, the sixth assessment report of the UN IPCC, they increased the amount of carbon stored in

soil compared to above-ground vegetation. Because I was calculating the opportunity cost based on how much CO2 or carbon dioxide was embedded in the food that the animals were eating today. So said, if you're rewilding, you should be able to at least get that much vegetation to grow. Otherwise, you're really incompetent. So said, OK, should at least do that. So that's why it's a lower bound.

looked at the above-ground vegetation and then it took that and multiplied it by a factor to take into account the below-ground vegetation. Below-ground soil, the soil carbon. And now they increase the soil carbon from 2x to 3.5x. And what you're talking about is the IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change re-evaluating the percentage of carbon that's stored below ground.

below ground versus above ground. They realized, there's more of that than we thought. Exactly. It made me wonder, why didn't you look in the past and measure it well? measuring carbon in soil is not that easy. OK. Because you have to look at the depth of it. I mean, did you measure everything? So you look at the soil. Different soils have different depths. So it's not that hard. I mean, it's not that easy.

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So I understand why it took them so much time, but now they're saying, okay, it's three and a half times. And basically what they're saying Three and a half times below ground compared to above ground. Right, yeah. Because above ground, there's vegetation above ground, and then there is root. The root system of the plant stores just as much carbon as the above ground. We know that. then, so now, so above ground and there's root and another, so that-

literally doubled it. And then the soil around that is storing now, know, two and a half times. So two and a half times the above ground. So it's roughly the same as above ground and below ground plus some extra, right? So when you look at that whole thing, now my calculations are saying the opportunity cost itself is 87 % of our total emissions.

87 % of the total amount of gigatons of carbon that are added to the atmosphere every year. Right. How much we are putting into the atmosphere every year. 87 % of that could be sucked down if we just didn't have animals. Animal agriculture is an element, right? So then you have to also count the fact that the direct emissions are not going up. So that's how it became 118 % as opposed to 87%.

So now I have an update to that based on what Gerald Bishop published. So I'll show you. How does that cause you to have an update? Well, Gerald Bishop published based on a different way of looking at it called the effective radiative forcing.

Now, when I wrote my paper, effective radiative forcing, I had just been, they're just talking about it. We had the first set of it done in the fifth assessment report. And so I had used that, but then I was also using GWP. You understand? You know GWP explain that? The global warming potential of different gases, right? Now GWP had been done for a few different gases, but effective radiative forcing,

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looks at 12 different emission species.

So it's not just CO2, it's methane. CO2, there's methane, there's nitrous oxide, there is halocarbons, there is black carbon, and then there is non-methane volatile organic compounds. It's a multiple. They call it NMBOC, non-methane volatile organic compounds, plus carbon monoxide is added to that.

So those are all the heating emission species. And then the cooling emission species are sulfur dioxide. There is organic carbon. There is ammonia. And then there is...

carbon opportunity costs, which is like a cooling because it sucks down. opportunity cost is a cooling. It's like a cooling. Basically it's the avoided heat.

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Alright?

So there are six of them. when we put it all together, Jared Bishop is saying the direct emissions of the direct heating from animal agriculture is 52 % of the total heating that we have experienced. OK. OK. And fossil fuels have only done 18 % of the heating. And what's the other 30 %?

Five percent is from industry. There is other agriculture that's done like. But wouldn't the industry be fossil fuel burning? No, industry meaning from hydrocarbons from other other other kinds of emissions, categories. OK, other kinds of emissions. And then so he counted other agriculture, which is eight percent. And then

Yes, forestry is about 7%, I think. And then there is waste, which is landfills, which is another 7%. So totally it becomes 100 % in the atomon. I have a bunch of slides I can show you. OK, do want to move to the slideshow? Yeah. OK, go ahead.

So let me just share this.

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Okay, what heated the climate? Yeah.

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You say it, right? Yes, absolutely. tell us what we're looking at here. So I'm showing three different pie charts. First pie chart is what hit the climate according to the official IPCC accounting. IPCC is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This is what their accounting shows. 48 % came from fossil fuels. 13 % came from industry. And then

Agriculture, animal agriculture and other agriculture is 29%. So I split that into 24 % for animal agriculture and 5 % for other agriculture. And then forestry is 5%. And then waste is 3%. And 2 % is other. So that's their estimate. Now is waste things like landfills? Yeah.

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So that's the official IPCC accounting. Now, Gerard Bishop just published a paper in environmental research letters showing that when you do complete ERF accounting, ERF is effective radiative forcing accounting.

then only 18 % of the heating that we're experiencing today is caused by fossil fuels. is it, the, his main reason for reducing that the, the cooling effects of the aerosols from the burning of fossil fuels? Yeah, I'll go into that. Basically I show you how the IPCC came up with 48 % and they're also accounting for how much of the heating is caused by animal

by different sectors. So they're trying to do the same thing that Jared is trying to do. But they came up with 48%, Jared came with 18%. And then he said 5 % for industry, 52 % from animal agriculture, 8 % from other agriculture, 10 % from forestry, waste is 7%, and other is zero.

So that's his complete year of accounting. That's his pie chart, which got published yesterday in the environmental research letters. it's now settled. was the name of the journal? Environmental Research Letters. Environmental Research Letters. Where is that published? It's published online. It's the second most referenced.

journal in climate science. Okay. So it's a top journal, one the top journals. So now on top of that, Jim Hansen did an update on the 1st of February. He published an update and I'll explain to you his update later. Basically, he was trying to explain why 2023 and 2024 were the hottest years ever.

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And he has a theory for why it was the hottest, they were the hottest years ever. what's his, what's his answer to that? Well, his answer is that the international maritime organization is the IMO, which is a UN body that regulates shipping.

So they passed a requirement as of 2021, ships can only burn fuel with less than 1 % sulfur content. So they put a restriction on how much sulfur can be in the fuel that ships burn. And prior to that, ships could burn any fuel because it was considered open seas. There's no law. You can do whatever you want.

And the ships are actually burning what is known as bunker fuel. And bunker fuel is whatever the refineries couldn't get out of, know, turn it into any other product. They just sold it to ships as bunker fuel. I think I see where you're going. Less aerosol cooling from less sulfur particles. Exactly. So there was less aerosol cooling from less sulfur particles above the ocean alone.

OK? And that had a dramatic impact on the temperature above the ocean. that could lead to wilder weather, more hurricanes and so forth, right? That's what caused 2023 and 2024 to be the hottest years ever. And it exceeded expectations because the International Maritime Organization, when they did that ruling,

They calculated that, you know, it's only going to increase temperature by 0.07 degrees Celsius or something like that. But in reality, it cramped it up. So now Hanson, Jim Hanson and his team analyze that. And they said, actually, based on what happened due to this ruling in the National American Organization, it's telling us that sulfur dioxide is much more powerful as a cooling gas than we thought.

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Almost double, more than double actually, the cooling. Okay. And now I see where you're going again. So if Jim Hansen realizes now that the aerosol effect of fossil fuel burning is greater than we thought, just like there's more carbon stored underground than we thought, then that means that we have to retrospectively

reassess how much warming has been coming from fossil fuel burning. And if it's less from fossil fuel burning, then it's more from animal agriculture, which is why that pie chart there shows that Jim Hansen, who is a mainstream climate scientist, not a member of the vegan movement to my knowledge,

now assesses that 66 % of greenhouse gases are being brought into the atmosphere by animal agriculture. Am I right? 66 % of the heating that we are experiencing today. 66 % of the heating that we're experiencing today is from animal agriculture. that is from the mainstream climate scientist, James Hansen, correct? Well, this is a derivation.

based on his paper. so he's not saying this. We're saying, Dr. Hansen, this is what you're actually saying, whether you realize it or not. Exactly. So I took Gerard Bishop's paper, and I added, I kind of doubled the cooling effect. And then correspondingly, have to increase the heating from CO2. Because the overall heating is

so much, right? It's 2.6 watts per square meter. And if the cooling is increased by one watt per square meter, well, the heating is also increased by one watt per square meter. So that means that CO2 is more powerful than we thought and SO2 is more powerful than we thought. So, the two are canceling each other out, you know? And when you do that, fuels drops from 18 % to 2%. Only 2 % of the heating is caused by fossil fuels.

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And industry is zero, disappeared completely. the rest is, animal agriculture is 66%, 10 % is from other agriculture, forestry is 15%, 7 % is from waste, and so on, right? So now I'll show you the details. Why did the IPCC come up with official, officially these, that's by chart. How did they do that? This is what they did. They considered four gases, CO2,

methane, halocarbons and nitrosoxane.

And they use the GWP 100. So global warming potential of 100, which is methane. For every gigaton of methane, they assume it's equal to 28 gigatons of CO2.

So see CO2 is in yellow, fuels has this much, animal agriculture has this much. It's much smaller. It's about less than half of the fossil fuels. Right. And by the way, that GWP of methane 28 times, that's under counting methane, isn't it, Exactly. that's why I'm pointing out here. The reason their pie chart is different from Derrubish's pie chart is number one,

IPCC undercounts deforestation emissions by a factor of 3.

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So this is the first paper that Gerald Bishop wrote and that got published last year. They undercount deforestation emissions by a factor of three by doing net accounting on deforestation versus gross accounting on possibilities. What do I mean by net accounting? It means that if you deforest over here, but you abandon land over there, you get to take credit for abandoning land.

in the deforestation that we did.

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Okay, so I deforested 80 million acres of land over here, but I gave away, I abandoned 50 million acres of land over here. Then I only have to count 30 million acres of deforestation. Why? Because I'm assuming that that abandoned land will become a forest, just like the forest I'm chopping down. Now, it is known

that abandoned land will become desert sometimes. Mostly it will become desert because that's why you abandoned it. It's no longer productive.

So we have been kidding ourselves that we didn't deforest when we actually did. So that's what Deirdre Bishop pointed out in the first paper. And he said, we have to do gross accounting and we shouldn't be taking credit for photosynthesis because that photosynthesis on the abandoned land, if it happens, is happening regardless of our deforestation. It's independent of our deforestation. So that's the first point.

with under-concrete deforestation emissions by a factor of three. Second thing is under-values methane emissions by a factor of three because of using GWP100. And there is another metric that IPCC uses called effective radiative forcing. And when you look at effective radiative forcing, you actually can calculate that methane is causing

the equivalent of GWP of 93, meaning every gigaton of methane is equivalent of 93 gigatons of CO2. So that's what the emissions is. Their own ERF is showing us. So they have two different ways of measuring methane. One of them is saying 93, one of them is saying 28. And I'm saying the 28 came from some arbitrary choice of 100 years.

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for evaluating methane. And so that has to be dropped and use the other one, which we know is- Right. And when methane heats the atmosphere and the immediate heating that's caused by the methane has immediate consequences. Yeah. That's more than 130.

If those consequences include, for example, a forest fire, then you don't get to say, all that carbon that went into the atmosphere from that forest fire, we're not counting that because if we just wait 10 years, some of that methane is going to turn into carbon dioxide. No, it helped cause a forest fire. And not only could that lead to human tragedy,

as happened in Los Angeles, but it brings that much more carbon into the atmosphere and we risk getting into a spiral that there's no getting out of. So you don't get to discount it. The precautionary principle would dictate, let us count methane at the maximum, if anything, because we're trying to save the planet. Am I right, Silas?

Absolutely. But you know, it's undervaluing the methane emissions by a factor of three. And you can see that agriculture has a bigger methane chunk than fossil fuels. Right? Yes. Which is why they undercount it, because they don't want to acknowledge that agriculture is the biggest part of the problem. Right. Third is it ignores cooling effects. There is nothing here. They only look at four gases.

It's like looking at a partial thing, you here, look at this part. Don't look at the other part. If you look at the other part, it's going to look different, right? Yeah. And the number four is, of course, it ignores the carbon opportunity cost of the land use family agriculture. So now I show you how Gerard Bishop is counting. He's counting all of them. There are six different. So this is missing in the IPCC's calculations. Black carbon is missing.

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The non-methane volatile organic compounds are missing and all the cooling effects are missing. Ammonia is missing. Sulfur dioxide is missing. Organic carbon is missing. Knox is missing. Albedo is missing. Tell us what organic carbon is. Organic carbon is carbon that, you know, there's black carbon, is soot. So it goes up as soot, which is black, which becomes a heating gas, heating compound.

It also goes up as white carbon.

Yeah. I've heard of white carbon. Like not black, but it's, it's reflecting sunlight back, you know, smoke is not all black. Some smoke is white, you know, that's what I mean by that. Okay. So that's called organic carbon, different kinds of carbon. It's not necessarily just black soot. Okay. And that when you burn it, it, it is, it has a cooling effect because it's reflecting sunlight back.

So now when you count all of them, so you see the yellow, which is the CO2, and you can see the CO2 for animal agriculture is a little bit bigger than it was for the other one. So now we are looking at effective radiative forcing. So fossil fuels also has a big chunk of yellow, but animal agriculture now has a big chunk of yellow too, because we are now counting all of the deforestation emissions, not just the net.

So what I'm showing here is now the methane is also big compared to the yellow because we are counting methane, the effective radiative forcing of methane, which is actually quite substantial.

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And then it has nitrous oxide, that's the red. It has non-methane volatile organic compounds plus carbon monoxide, which was missing in the other one. Then black carbon, a little bit. And it has all the cooling effects. So the way I'm drawing this now is I'm showing all the cooling below the line, below the zero line. And then I'm starting the heating from below where it ended.

So you can see SO2, so much cooling is done by SO2, then NOx, nitric oxides, and then organic carbon. Then I started the heating from there. So by the time you get to CO2, it hasn't even compensated for all the cooling. Then comes methane, then it goes over the zero line. And this is actually the actual heating.

So if you look at the total length of this, that's all the heating. The length below the zero line is all the cooling. And then the net above the zero line is the net heat.

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Yeah. So animal agriculture is 52 % plus carbon option, the cost which sticks in sticking about that. Then fossil fuels is 18%. Industry is 5 % does some cooling and then some heating. Forestry is 10%. Then other agriculture is 8 % of waste is 7%. So this is counting all of it. Okay. Right. And let's engage in a fantasy.

here, Silas. What if we stop burning all fossil fuels tomorrow? Don't we have to look at the speed with which these effects occur? Absolutely. is it the case that the cooling effects of the burning of fossil fuels, which are just slightly overcompensated by the heating effects of fossil fuels in the long term?

But in the short term, do those cooling effects, are they more, are they speedier as it were? So that if you stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow, you would lose more cooling effects immediately than lose more heating effects. Absolutely. You will lose the cooling effects within a few weeks.

whereas the heating effect will stick around for years.

So that's the problem. In other words, if we stop the burning of all fossil fuels tomorrow, a fantasy, theoretically, the planet would actually heat first before it cooled. Is that right? It will heat immediately within a few weeks by 50 % more than what we are experiencing today. So right now we are experiencing 2.6 watts per square meter of heating, which is

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like adding a 2.6 watt heater in every square meter of the Earth's So adding a 2.6 watt heater. Now the sun is heating us by 240 watts per square meter. So it's like adding 1 % to the sun's intensity. That's what you have done. Now, if fossil fuels are stopped today, within a few weeks,

That heating will go from 2.6 watts to 3.9 watts per square meter.

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Okay, so, and I say, and which means that within a few years, it's going to, within a few years, you're going to hit two degrees Celsius right away.

This is why stopping fossil fuels has to be done in a nuanced fashion. Cannot be done right away. So I'll show you how it has to be done. If you look at animal agriculture, animal agriculture has very little of the cooling. In fact, most of the cooling is coming from albedo, which is a change in reflectivity. So if you stop animal agriculture, then you will start sucking down the CO2 from the carbon obscenity cost.

That happens right away. You start sucking down that CO2 with the vegetation coming back. And then you take time for the vegetation to change the albedo. You're not going to immediately get a forest right away. So you can gradually remove this cooling effect of albedo. And you will then reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere.

And as you reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere, then you can dial down the fossil fuels, but slowly. You cannot do it right away. So this is systems engineering 101. So I have this bathtub model to explain this.

In the bathtub model, I'm just saying that we are adding about 50 liters per minute into the bathtub, which is like 50 billion tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year. So one minute is like one year, and one liter is like one billion ton of greenhouse gases. And I'm saying that the bathtub now has 1,100 liters of water, which corresponds to the 1,100 billion tons of CO2 equal under the atmosphere.

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takes into account all of the heating that we have added. We have added the atmosphere. So now there's a baby sitting in the bathtub. Now there are two faucets. Each faucet is putting 25 liters per minute. So I based this on the fact that, you know, both of these, the fossil fuel and the animal agriculture, sorry, oops, both the fossil fuels and the animal agriculture in this look roughly the same height.

Now this is the same height as this one. Now, so that's why they're the same, 25 liters per minute.

And I put 25, 35 liters per minute of drainage potential connected to the killing machine faucet. So I put these two faucets in place and I'm asking you, how would you help the baby not drown? That's all we are trying to do. We prevent the baby from drowning. Baby represents all life on earth.

Now this faucet, burning machine faucet, which is the fossil fuel engine, is connected to the aerosol tank, which has 500 liters of water, which is roughly half of the heating. So previously in the previous model, I had one third. Now they've updated it to half in the sixth assessment report. So half of it, 500 liters corresponding to 1,100 liters.

And so which means for every one liter per minute that he turned down the burning machine faucet, it lets 20 liters pour out of the tank into the bathtub.

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And for every one liter per minute that you turn down the killing machine faucet, it opens the drain and allows the water to flow out of the bathtub into the tank.

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So the right way to solve the problem, right way to save the baby is to first shut down this killing machine faucet as quickly as possible, open this drain, let 35 liters pour out of the bathtub into the tank below. And as 35 liters pours out and 25 liters pours in from the burning machine, this bathtub is going to reduce by 10 liters every minute.

As it reduces by 10 liters every minute, you can turn down the burning machine faucet and let the aerosol tank drain into this slowly.

So there's an exponential function that we have to put in, which means you can reduce it by 1%, one year, first year. Next year, you can reduce it by 2 % and so on, so that eventually over 27 years, you can drain it completely.

And at that time, the kid should be grown up and employed. That's true. And he should be getting out of the bathtub, right? Yes. He's going to look like a prune eventually. But this is how you formulate a systems problem, and then you figure out how to solve it. And of course, you can add more sophistication to this because there are 12 different emission species, so you can separate out the

the faucets and then you can figure out how to reduce each one of them. Now I'm going to put you on the spot, Silas. When I was writing my book Food is Climate and I relied very heavily on your research, at the time I remember using an analogy of a bathtub and Al Gore's approach to the climate bathtub. Did I help inspire your climate bathtub model? Yeah.

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You did. I did. So I can take it. Someday it will be said Glenn Merzer lived in the 20th and 21st century and he is known for inspiring Silas Rau's climate bathtub model. That'll be it. That'll be the only credit I get, but I'm going to get that credit. You get a lot of credit, Glenn, for writing the Buddhist climate, know, laying it out so that

ordinary people can understand what I've been trying to say. Now, here's the situation we're in. As your climate bathtub model proves, the solution is to slowly wean ourselves off fossil fuels and immediately end the killing machine. Exactly.

that is consistent with what is easy because it is difficult, frankly, to stop the burning of fossil fuels. Is anybody proposing that we end the airline industry tomorrow? Is anybody proposing? I haven't heard a Democrat or Republican say, let's end the airline industry, nobody fly anymore. Is anybody proposing that unless our trucks

are all electric and unless all that electricity is clean energy, let's not have any more trucks tomorrow. I haven't heard anybody propose that. That's a difficult thing to do. It would be difficult for our economy to function if tomorrow we had no more trucks on the road and no more cars that weren't electric. That would be difficult.

Is anybody proposing that tomorrow we get rid of all gas cooking all throughout the world? I haven't heard anybody propose that. Maybe better to move to electric cooking, but nobody's saying end it tomorrow. But here's what we can do tomorrow. Very, very easily stop the foolishness of eating dead animals. We could do that tomorrow. That's easy. not only is that easy to do,

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But then it turns out that we stopped getting fat and sick and getting heart attacks. So there are all kinds of ancillary benefits. So it turns out that the thing that's easy to do is the thing that we have to do first. And the thing that's very, very difficult to do that we have to move towards is the thing that we have to do slowly. So isn't that lucky, Silas? Aren't we lucky here? Absolutely. Nature is the perfect system design, you know?

Nature has given us everything we need to solve our problems. She's saying here you just use your head. You can solve the problem. It's not that hard. So Bill Gates wrote a book that sold more copies than my book Food is Climate, in which he seemed to acknowledge in a very, subtle way that that you're onto something, as it were, and that

that the real solution may be reforesting the world and a plant-based diet or a vegan diet. But he discounted that and he said, no, that's not doable. And why not? He said, because of traditions, because of traditions. It's a tradition at Thanksgiving to have turkey. It's a tradition at baseball games to eat hot dogs.

So because of those traditions, which are apparently immutable things, it's just impossible for Bill Gates to imagine a world in which people don't eat turkeys at Thanksgiving. Though I've gone through at least 50 Thanksgivings now without eating turkey. 52, I would think. So since it's so impossible for Bill Gates to imagine,

that you could actually have a tradition without eating a dead animal, he discounts the only solution to the problem. Isn't that extraordinary? How did that man get to be so rich? I know.

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So now the next one I wanted to show you is what happens when you put Hanson's update into the same picture. So the purple just got bigger and the yellow got bigger too.

But the yellow is split between fossil fuels and animal agriculture. Whereas the purple is mostly in the fossil fuels. This is why fossil fuels goes from 18 % to 2%. And industry goes to 0 % because cooling and heating are the same.

animal agriculture goes to 66 percent and then of course the carbon opportunity cost is sitting on top of that.

So this is with a more robust assumption about cooling effects on the climate. Right. This is the latest estimate of what is actually happening on the planet in terms of cooling. And that's Hanson's estimate. I'm using that and I'm using Gerald Bishop published paper and I'm just putting the two together. And that's what you get. Have you tried to get this to Dr. Hanson? Yes, I have.

And what has been the response? So far, none. But I'm going to pursue it more. I haven't heard back from them. Dr. Hansen, have you subscribed to my YouTube channel? If you have, please watch this episode and respond to Silas if you would. Yeah, please. And the problem is that there are six different nonlinear feedback loops that are supposed to trigger, you know,

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between 1.5 and 2 degree Celsius.

West Antarctic ice sheet collapse, low-life coral reefs die out, boreal permafrost abrupt thaw, Labrador sea ice subpolar ice collapse, Greenland ice sheet collapse, and barren sea ice abrupt loss. All six of these have the median estimate of when they're going to be triggered at 1.5 degrees Celsius or 1.8 degrees Celsius.

We are already at 1.5. And if we do what people are suggesting, which is just focus on fossil fuels and don't do anything about animal agriculture, we're just going to accelerate it. We're going to accelerate the heating. It's like the exact opposite of what we should be doing. That's what I want to emphasize to people. Please, this is just systems engineering 101.

I don't know why, but the IPCC does not seem to have any systems engineering expertise. You don't come up with pie charts using only four of the emissions gases and ignore eight of them. You don't do that. Okay. If you're a competent systems engineer, you don't do that. You have to count all of it.

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I mean, if IPCC was reporting to me as a junior systems engineer, I would send them back and say, go do your work again. What's wrong with you? know, there are many tragic consequences of a runaway overheating climate. One of them is sea level rise. One of them is just heat itself when it becomes a hundred

20 degrees in Phoenix, it's too hot for people to live. One of them is wildfire. And one of them is hurricanes and tornadoes. The one I'm most scared of is wildfire. We've we had in the last season or two more and more wildfires.

Canada. We had those tragic fires in Hawaii and in Los Angeles. And every time we have these fires, in addition to the human tragedy, which is immense, that's more carbon going into the atmosphere and more pollutants going into the atmosphere when it's in an urban area. And you can't, you know,

That is at risk of becoming a tipping point and a spiral that you can't control. And I think one of the things we have to concentrate on, along with immediately ending animal agriculture, is doing everything we can to prevent fires. Do you agree, Silas?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. It's not, it's not good for anybody. might have more fires. So we have to, we need to bury electrical, don't we need to bury electrical lines wherever possible and convenient? Yeah, of course. it's also treating all photosynthesis as precious, you know, whatever, because nature is still doing photosynthesis.

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Yeah, it's it's still nothing is broken. Nature is still working so hard. the photosynthesis should not be just chopped up and burnt. Right. And a mistake that Canada made and not only Canada, but they chopped down old growth forest and said, no problem. We'll just plant new trees. Well, those new trees are more likely to burn.

than the old growth forest. Yeah. And that's, that's the lesson they're learning in Canada. And unfortunately that smoke goes all over the world. Not just, not just there. Well, old growth forests are cut down or soft, cottony toilet tissue.

And that's what we have turned our old recent.

Such a tragedy.

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Well, on that note. Yeah, but but you're the avatar of optimism. So so let's get back to some optimism, Silas. And the show some some good news anywhere. We are going to wake up. We are waking up everywhere. And to me, you know, it's an article of faith. This is not about hope. It's about faith. Hope comes from a position of fear. Faith comes from a position of love. And

Faith is recognizing that the transformation is already happening.

more and more people are going vegan. More and more people are eating this way. More and more people are getting healthy. And that nature knows what she's doing. And she's going to wake us up one by one by one by one by one. And we are part of nature. This is why I'm talking to you. This is why we are talking out into the world. And people are going to hear us. And more and more people are speaking about it. So spread the good word.

Let's make this happen because you know the solution is quite easy. It's simple. Just eat like a human being. You know, I I can't. I know that there are some people who don't believe in evolution. But even if you don't believe in evolution, surely you can see that we resemble the chimpanzee more than we resemble the tiger. mean, I think we can all agree on that.

I do. And most, well, all scientists, think, understand that evolution was real and is happening and has happened. And so when you compare us to our primate cousins, and we are considered great apes, they don't get up in the morning and have bacon and eggs. Not one.

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Does the orangutan have bacon and eggs for breakfast? Silas, have you ever known an orangutan to have bacon and eggs for breakfast? Absolutely not. So why don't we eat like our cousins? And we get to have some advantages. We can have baked potatoes. I've never seen an orangutan have a baked potato. So we can eat.

You we evolved, we've moved north and we evolved to eat starches. But fruits and vegetables are the basis. And then you add whole grains, starches, mushrooms. This is the food we evolved to eat. It's so patently obvious. And I say as somebody who is now in my late 60s,

I became vegetarian at 17, vegan in my mid-30s, have never taken a pharmaceutical drug in my life. I go to the doctor once a year, religiously, to ask him how he's feeling because I'm fine.

And it's obvious that most diseases and the extraordinary obesity in this country, which is now I think at 42%, I when I was a kid, silage obesity was something like 8%. Now it's 42%. And people just see this as normal. No, it's because of all these animal foods people are eating and the sugar, and the sugar, that's not good either.

But all these animal foods that people are eating, can't people see that this is making them fat and sick? When does this end? Silas, some optimism about when the obesity is going to turn around. Well, until it turns around and then, you know, you're going to see obesity turn around when the CO2 level in the atmosphere turns around. It starts coming down instead of going up.

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So as we restore the climate by going vegan, then Americans are going to drop a lot of weight and get healthier and won't have to spend all their money on health insurance. So Silas, I'm trusting in you that nature knows what it's doing, what she's doing. Nature knew what she was doing when you were born, Silas. So thank you for.

Thank you for enlightening us. hope everybody out there who is concerned with the climate will watch this and spread this video around. And Silas, I'm going to see you the next time I'm starting to get depressed. I'll give you a call. Sounds good, Glenn. Anytime. Thank you all for watching. Please subscribe and see you soon.