Gerard Wedderburn-Bisshop Brings Light to Climate Science!

In this compelling episode of The Glen Merzer Show, environmental scientist Gerard Wedderburn-Bisshop offers a sobering yet empowering look at the climate crisis. A former principal scientist with decades of experience monitoring deforestation, Gerard joins Glen to break down the urgent—and often underreported—realities of climate change, animal agriculture, and methane emissions.

“We are destroying nature,” Gerard warns, pointing to escalating wildfires, devastated habitats, and the quiet yet catastrophic march of deforestation—all worsened by our addiction to industrial meat production.

Gerard explains that while fossil fuels often take center stage in climate discussions, methane—much of it from livestock—is a faster-acting and far more potent greenhouse gas. This shift in focus is crucial. Methane’s short atmospheric lifespan makes it a powerful lever for rapid climate recovery, if only we’re willing to act.

He also dives deep into how bottom trawling, an industrial fishing practice, is disturbing carbon stored in our ocean floors, further destabilizing Earth’s natural carbon regulation systems. But all is not lost. As Gerard emphasizes, personal dietary choices, when multiplied across communities, can shift the tides. A plant-based transition isn't just ethical—it's scientifically essential.

“We can’t keep doing this,” he says. “We must change for our grandkids.”

From flawed carbon accounting to the hidden influence of animal agriculture in climate policy, Gerard reveals how science, when unhindered by profit-driven industries, tells a clearer—and more hopeful—story. This episode is a rallying cry for truth, awareness, and collective action.

🎧 Listen now to explore how food, art, and compassion can change not only your health—but your heart.

📌 Watch the episode here: Gerard Wedderburn-Bisshop Brings Light to Climate Science!

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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: Gerard Wedderburn-Bisshop Brings Light to Climate Science!

Here's the transcript:

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Welcome to the Glenn Merzer Show. You could find us across all your favorite podcast platforms. You could find us on YouTube and please remember to subscribe. And you could find us at RealMenEatPlants.com. My guest today comes to us all the way from Eastern Australia, where they've just had a storm and lost power and now the power is back on. So hopefully it'll stay on.

We were going to speak a few evenings ago, evening my time, and I had a storm and I lost power. So the meat industry does not want us to talk, but we're going to talk anyway. Gerard Wetterburn Bishop is the former principal scientist of the Queensland Government National Resources.

and the lead scientist and founder for the World Preservation Foundation. Gerard, welcome to the show. Thank you, Glenn. And thank you for having me on the show. It's as you say, there been a few hiccups. This is the first cyclone hit across the coast for 50 years. I remember when I was 19 years old, I helped clean up from the last one, but it fizzled out before it got to us.

But yeah, it's an interesting time. These are interesting times we live in. Yeah, well, the lead industry is pulling out all the stops to keep us from speaking. Yes. Yeah, you wonder what's going on behind this. If we needed to be smacked around the head to be woken up, we're getting it. These are interesting times.

Well, and also very scary times with the wildfires. We've had terrible wildfires. I know you've had terrible wildfires in Australia. And with all the effects of anthropogenic climate change, the one I worry about the most is wildfire. Maybe in part just my fear of fire, but

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It's so destructive and it leads to a negative spiral because when you have a wildfire, that's putting more carbon in the atmosphere and removing trees that that pull down carbon from the atmosphere. So it's like a double whammy every time you get a forest fire. I worry about that even more than sea level rise and the other effects of climate change. Is that for you also the the

the symptom of climate change that you worry about the most? Yes, absolutely, Glenn. sea level rise, which was initially thought to be a big problem for the future. So far, we only had about or less than a foot of sea level rise. And it's happening so slowly. But eventually we've locked in about seven meters of sea level rise.

Maybe not for many generations to come. But the thing is that with so much more energy in the Earth's atmosphere and in the Earth's cycles and systems, there's a lot more energy in the atmosphere. There's a lot more water vapor in the atmosphere. So that when we get these disturbances, like this cyclone that's hitting us now, there's not necessarily more cyclones, but they're more intense. And the danger is

is huge. And the droughts are more intense as well. They're hotter and drier, even though they may not be more frequent, but they're starting to be more frequent as well. And what happens is when you get a big dump of rain, like the old Australian expression is, it never rains, but it pours. I didn't know that was Australian. I heard that here. good. So for the last five six years, it's been pouring. And what that's done

is it's meant it's put all of world's vegetation on steroids along with carbon dioxide fertilization. So we've had a lot more growth and what happens is when we get the dry spells with the hot winds that desiccates it, it dries it right out and sets it up for big fires. So all that extra growth has sucked down CO2, yes, but as you pointed out earlier, it's also in some areas it's going to go back up.

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in a fire. So, yes, fire and extreme weather events are going to be the norm. That's what happened in Los Angeles, because California had been in a drought for a long time. A year ago or in the last year, they got a tremendous amount of water. They then, a tremendous amount of rain. They then had a tremendous amount of growth of grasses and shrubbery in all the wrong places.

And then when the winds hit and the dry weather hit, they were very susceptible. There was a lot of dry brush to the fire and, you know, nothing that destructive. I lived in Los Angeles for 30 years. I didn't used to worry so much about fire, but my wife and I moved out because we were starting to worry about fire. Now, now the fire season is 12 months of the year.

California. Now, did you grow up in a normal meat eating family in Australia? you go to the barbie? Is that what they call it? And have your barbie with meat? Yeah, barbies are a big part of the Australian culture. Australia is a beef producing nation and sheep. It's pretty unique because half of the Australian continent

just over half is dedicated to grazing animals, that is grass-fed industries. So we have a lot of land. A lot of it in the northern half of Australia is rangelands. So this is where you get the Brahman breeds of cattle and the low productivity. But because there's so much land, there's still a lot of cattle up there. This is...

This is what they call the industrial beef where most of it is ground into burgers and sold cheaply. So my job as with government was to monitor the deforestation largely for grass-fed pastures. So what we were seeing was about 2,700 acres per day being cut down. 93 % of it was for grass-fed industries.

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So that's, the native, excuse me. Was this native forest being cut down? Yes. Yes. So what you're seeing there is the, is equivalent of about two or three suburbs. We don't see what's happening out West out, out behind the, the buildup areas, but in the suburbs, we get really upset when we see trees being cut down for a new suburb. However, yeah, behind out in the bush,

that equivalent is two or three suburbs per day. And that's been happening for the last more than three decades that we've been monitoring for satellite data. So that opened my eyes to industrial scale beef production and industrial scale nature destruction. We invented the method of destroying forest here that's used a lot around the world now. This is in the forest that aren't

like the big, thick rainforest, but they're not that common now. What they do is they get two of the biggest bulldozers you can imagine, D9s to D11s, up to 100 ton dosers, and they string a chain, a 100 meter chain between the two. You can't even lift one link of these chains, they're massive. And then they charge ahead, and I've seen them ripping trees out of the ground, 30 meter, like 100 foot,

gum trees, big hardwood trees with deep roots. And these things are literally ripped out of the ground. They call it tree pulling. And the noise and the chaos and the cacophony and the wildlife going nuts. It's a real spectacle. it was my job to monitor that. seeing that up close makes you realize, hey, we can't keep doing this. We are destroying nature.

We are burning these trees, they just push them together and burn them. They don't even use the timber. So this is happening in most of Brazil, south of Brazil, the Cerrado. This is happening in USA and Africa. This method of tree pulling, as they call it, is very effective. It's industrial scale deforestation. And globally, we're deforesting areas

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the size of countries every year now. And we continue to do it. So hopefully this work that I've just done re-values forests so that maybe we'll start to think twice about it because it ups their carbon value, carbon value of deforestation by a factor of three. So this should help policy in that area. OK, we're going to talk in a moment about this work that you've just referred to. But let me ask you this.

The government had you monitor the deforestation that was going on. Was that because the government had any concern that there might be too much of it? What was your responsibility in monitoring the deforestation for the government? Yes, it was actually a really interesting project because over that three or four decades, we had multiple changes of government, conservative to progressive.

And what they did is they had this advisory committee which they kept informed. And that was right across the board. This was from the conservationists right through to the media industry. And these people used to get together in the one room. And these people strangely were our biggest supporters. Because we briefed them so often, we had them informed of exactly what was going. See, before we set up,

The conservationists were saying, we're killing up to a million hectares of forest a day. And the beef industry was saying, no, no, it's nothing like that. And so that prompted the government to set up this project. And it was a really well-funded, well-organized team. We had about 20 people in the team at one point. We used to crawl all over the countryside. We're out a Toyota Land Cruiser every year.

by the way, never buy used government vehicles and four wheel drives in Australia. They're trashed. But so we knew what was going on the ground. We did. We use a satellite monitor. We had these big file stores and we used to report yearly on what was going on. So it suited the government's purpose to keep it all above board. They were just responding to the facts. They weren't responding to claims.

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And it also suited the environmentalists and the industry. OK, this is the fact. Let's let's run with that. But this this, you know, as I said, thousand seven hundred acres per day. It's gobsmacking. It really is. It's just extraordinary destruction. And what happens is that, you know, they talk about man's impact on biodiversity.

you know, we're falling farther behind. We've wiped out three quarters of the wildlife populations on Earth. What happens is when you take away that forest, that patch, what you do is you take away the habitat of those creatures. Now, they can't just go next door. You know, the koalas rhyme a bit, but if you take away their habitat, they can't go. They have fights with the neighbouring clans.

and their population whittles down to what's left, what's left available. Some of the birds can get away with it if they replace the trees with crops that the birds can eat, some of them. But most species, most of the species in that patch of forest, they're territorial, their habitat is their food. So if the habitat's gone, they're gone, they die.

And that's exactly how we've been whittling away globally, how we've been whittling away at nature forever. just reading a book on, it's called Deforesting the Earth and they go way back in history. so we've been for 10,000 years, humanity has been deforesting the earth with stone axes originally, but the biggest thing we've been using for deforestation is fire.

Burn baby burn. It's the mantra of the beef industry across all of the world's savannas. What they do is they burn off the old long dead grass and create room for new green pick, which is the high protein that the cattle go for. And the ash has a short term fertilizing effect, but it also burns any saplings.

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that might have sprung up. So it prevents the forest from coming back. In fact, the numbers are amazing. Like before Columbus got to America, there was a population of something like 60 to 70 million indigenous people and they had deforested extensive areas, very large areas. And when their numbers dropped, when all of these new diseases took hold,

their numbers dropped to about a tenth of what they were, what happened was that these forests came back because they weren't doing the yearly burn that they need to do to stop them coming back. And this is happening in all Indigenous cultures, Australian going back tens of thousands of years, but in all the Indigenous cultures, if they want to create a landscape which is easier for them to hunt and to grow things, they burn. So...

Humans have been burning the earth and so destroying forests for tens of thousands of years. Now, when you first got that position, Gerard, to monitor the deforestation in Australia, were you an environmentalist who was concerned that there is too much deforestation or did you just take it as a job to provide the government with information? Yeah, good question, Glenn.

I was at that point in my career with little kids, as everybody is, financial pressures, the need to support a family, put them through school, et cetera. And you don't think about that. All you think about is putting food on the table and a roof over your head. So I was one of the masses, really, who didn't...

think too much about the environment. But when you're faced with massive deforestation up close, it really is unsettling, really makes you think, what is going on here? I'll just tell you a little anecdote that happened to me a few years before this. I was working for government and University of Queensland and giving a seminar up in Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea.

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And we're talking to the government up there about a joint project monitoring deforestation in PNG. Anyway, sitting on the plane just about to leave Port Moresby to come back to Brisbane, a guy walks in and sits down beside me. And this was one cool dude. He was amazing. He was a Bougainville Islander. I don't know if you... Most Bougainville Islanders are very dark skinned, but this guy was particularly dark.

You know, when you when the skin is so black, it's almost like a blue shimmer. Anyway, this goes out one cool dude. He was wearing a well tailored black suit, black shirt, black tie, black Stevie Wonder wrap around glasses, a black fedora short brimmed hat. And he was immaculately, you know, manicured. And I thought, whoa, who is this guy? Anyway, his his opening.

His opening remark to me was, I talked to the dead. And that immediately got my attention. what he said was that I talked to the spirits and the spirits, you see, at that time, Bougainville Island, which is very rich in mineral resources. So it had been this, you know, all the world's mining companies were there and they were just trashing the planet for these minerals.

mostly. And he was going flying down to Sydney. This guy owned a large earth moving business and he was going down to Sydney to get some more big gear. But what he said was that the dead or these spirits were telling him that nature is angry. That nature has, we have been killing nature's forest. We have been stripping her of her

her soil and minerals and nature is angry. And he said, he was sitting right next to me and he said, now nature is about to wake up and shrug its shoulders and he did this big movement and he said, am I all going to fall off? And I thought, whoa. And of course, that was a great dinner party story for me to tell.

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in the future, but it also was my first sort of touch with, hey, there could be some backlash. You know, there could be some way that if we don't care for nature enough, you know, there could be some fallout from that. So I guess that one thing led to another. when you're faced with the deforestation as I was,

and, and the fact that, you know, climate change, this was 30 years ago and the fact that climate change is happening big time, you start thinking, you really start thinking. And now that I'm a grandfather and retired and see my kids and my six grandkids who are in that loop where it's work, work, work, work, work, roof over your head, kids in school, food on the table.

They haven't got time to think of these things. So it needs people like me who I mean, I'm 70, I should be retiring, but I you know, it needs people like like us to continue the good fight because there aren't too many people who have the time and energy to do this. So tell us about that transformation. You told us the beginning of it with a gentleman on the plane. But

You work that job for how many years and at what point did you begin to feel this is untenable? This is too destructive. We're only doing this in order to eat meat. At what point did you begin to feel that it was a

procedure that was taking place in the world that made no sense. Tell us about that. Yeah. Thanks, Glenn. Yeah, I think that came about the same time that the deforestation monitoring started. But what I had is in my late 30s, I had a health crisis and many aspects were in crisis. So.

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I had a revolutionary change where I started eating a vegetarian diet and meditating and my health improved overnight. But that got me started looking at the literature, looking at the studies that had been done on the impact of what we eat and planet Earth. And it's pretty clear to me that

The most destructive thing that we do is eat meat, is eat animal products. I mean, just in land use alone, 37 % of the land on this planet is devoted to grazing and another 12 % is devoted to crops and two thirds of the crop production, that is biomass, goes to feed animals, not humans.

And that process is very inefficient. you could feed all the humans on Earth with far less crops than we have now. So I thought to myself, well, and I wrote this in the book, which went together with the documentary Eating A Way To Extinction. I co-authored that book. And in that book, I put up a scenario at the start of that, a sort of an introduction that looked at same

You are the head of your family and you've been living on an island that supported your family for many generations and now you're getting to the point where you've cleared out so much of your forest, you've polluted so much of your oceans, you've polluted so much of the air, you've polluted so much of the water through nitrogen, you've changed the water cycles, the rainfall on your island.

And it's pretty clear that what you're doing and how you're supporting the family and everyone's making a living, pretty clear that that's now impacting your island. So what do you do? And so you call a land council, a council of all your clan, they get together and you say, look, we're setting aside 85 % of all the agricultural land, which is most of the island.

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for animal agriculture. We could get by with, you know, 5 % more of that if we took that for crops and fed ourselves rather than feeding animals. And then you get all the facts from the scientific community and then you debate it. And some members of the family say, no, I will never give up my meat. And other members say, this is shocking.

This is going to affect our future. What about my grandkids? Will they have a life like I've had? We must change. So you get this spectrum in between. But right now we're being hit, slap, slap, slap across the face with all of these floods and fires and all of this that is now waking us up, I believe. And we humans may be slow, but not stupid. So I think that

Eventually, when we are more affected by climate change, that's when we'll realize something needs to be done. And we've done huge things in the past. We haven't been affected enough already to wake up with the fires in Los Angeles, Hawaii, Greece, Southern Europe and Australia. You would think that people would wake up already. Yeah. Yeah. And many people are.

I believe many people are, but I think a lot of them are caught in that cycle where they just don't have the time to think about it. They're, you know, they're providing for the family. So it's it's, you know, we've got to get through to government. The government will only reflect what the populace review. That's only in the democracies. That's quite right. And we have sometimes it seems fewer and fewer of those.

So let's get to your influence now on the scientific community. You have written a paper called Increased Transparency in Accounting Conventions Could Benefit Climate Policy. And this was published in the Environmental Research Letters in the UK. Tell us the general...

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theme and content of this new paper and what kind of reaction you've been getting. Yeah, thanks, Glenn. And I think I should preface this by saying that there has been a lot of literature outside the the the respected journals, if you like, that say that animal agriculture is causing

way more environmental impact than has been recognized. And that goes back to paper by Goodland and Anhang that they published in World Watch Magazine, and Salish Rao, who published in, I guess, second, you know, the non-headline journals. And so I think we've known for some time that there's a lot more impact on climate.

from animal agriculture than the official line. And I think we all know that the official line, the third agricultural organization of the United Nations, I think that line is political rather than science-based. And we know that. with the IPCC, right? Absolutely, yeah. So what I decided to do several years ago was to

get some science in the top ranked journals, the leading journals globally that have really tough scrutiny, really tough peer review, so that when published in those sort of journals, it will gain more acceptance, more traction. And that's what's happened. I've published now two papers, and the second of them looks at animal agriculture, among other things, and

and looks at climate impact of each of these sectors. But the paper, the reasoning why comes down to three issues. And I'll go into these issues in more detail if you like, but number one, we've been counting the carbon dioxide from land clearing and the carbon dioxide from fossil fuels very differently. So let's do it.

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the same. Let's do it consistently. Number two, what we use to compare gases, that is carbon dioxide to all the others, particularly methane, what we use is a metric called global warming potential. And that's been under debate for a long time. And the third thing about that is that the IPCC conventions, the guidelines, the rules by which we

account for different sectors, the rules state that we don't include the cooling emissions. And cooling emissions have had a very strong impact. So we've been counting trees differently. We've been using a metric that's debatable for methane. And we've been not including, just totally ignoring all the cooling. So those three things put together.

Right. To explain here, the cooling emissions are the aerosol emissions from fossil fuel burning. And these have a cooling effect on the climate. roughly, it is true that when you burn fossil fuels, there's a heating effect on the climate, but that is mitigated by something like 75 % by the aerosol emissions that are also attendant to fossil fuel burning, right?

So you're really getting only one quarter as much warming from the fossil fuel burning as has been attributed to it. Whereas we're getting much more warming than has actually been attributed to animal agriculture because they have managed to massage down the contributions of methane by using the global warming potential nonsense that

that averages it out over a hundred years. The reality, am I not correct, Gerard, is that when methane heats the climate and it gets hot enough to then cause a forest fire, you don't get to say to the trees, don't worry, if you had only waited a hundred years, that methane effect would have been mitigated.

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Am I right about that? That's really well put, Glenn. That's great way of looking at it. Yeah, and it's absolutely right. If you look at the warming from methane, and by the way, my study uses the latest data. It uses data from the global carbon budget on carbon emissions. It uses data from the true land emissions, land change emissions.

and it uses data from the IPCC and uses a warming metric called effective radiative forcing. Now, the best science we have at the moment on what warming each of the gases is causing is a measure called effective radiative forcing. And it's not just effective radiative forcing, it's emissions-based effective radiative forcing.

And the models that they have for this are extreme. They're three-dimensional models. In other words, they are global and they're vertical in different levels of the atmosphere, because emissions have different effects depending on where they are in the atmosphere. So the best measure we have of what has caused global warming to date is this effect of radiative forcing. So I've taken that data.

and from each of the, well, 11 different gases, including carbon dioxide and methane. And I've also taken the albedo change. When we take away forest, there's a bit more reflection. So that changes albedo a little bit. But the interesting thing is that your point about 100 year global warming, it's really interesting because if you look at the warming from

1750 until 2020. That's what my data covers. If you look at the warming from that period and the amount of carbon dioxide that has been emitted, you know, the weight, if you like, of that emission, and you compare methane with carbon dioxide, it turns out that per kilogram, methane has caused 93 times more warming than CO2.

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So the factor we use at the moment, the 100 year factor, is something like 28, 29. Now I'm saying, if you look back over 270 years, it's actually 93. So what that does is it increases the warming factor of methane by a factor of three. So methane's causing three times more warming than we thought.

than if we measure it by 100 year global warming. And really the only effective way now to reverse the crisis is to focus on methane. Let's acknowledge that I say methane, you say methane, we can still respect each other. that is really, really, methane is what should be the focus now, is it not?

Absolutely. And if you look at the numbers, you see that methane or methane has actually caused half of the current global warming. Right. Just alone. So it's huge. And in fact, if you look at the warming from from fossil fuels, as you said, most of it's canceled out with the cooling aerosols. What's left is mostly the methane warming. methane has produced all of this warming.

on planet Earth, and it's just totally not acknowledged. But the great thing about methane is that if you control it, if you control it in a big way, really serious reductions in emissions of methane, that will have a cooling impact on planet Earth, and it is the only gas that can do that. So it's a powerful, powerful tool we have. Right.

And methane comes out of both ends of the cow. So all we have to do is not have a billion and a billion and a half cows on the earth, reduce that amount significantly. And we make a huge contribution to lowering the amount of methane. Methane is the signature greenhouse gas of animal agriculture.

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Whereas carbon dioxide, you might say, is the signature greenhouse gas of fossil fuel burning. So because the IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the FAO and the other regulatory agencies want us to focus, want to divert our attention from animal agriculture, they have made the second most important greenhouse gas their focus.

and they've ignored the most important one. That's how I view it. Is that how you view it? Yeah, you've hit the nail on the head. It's so important to recognise that. And I think my paper will go partly way towards that because when you do the sums based on the IPCC effective radiative forcing data, when you do the sums on the sectors, it turns out that

Fossil fuels has only caused 18 % of global warming that we experience today. And 60 % of the warming comes from agriculture, a big chunk from forestry and waste as well. But yes, and just to give people an idea of what these cooling aerosols are, if you've ever been to a big industrial city, this used to be the UK,

a long time ago, Europe until they recognized acid rain was a thing, and North America. But it's still the case in the big Asian industrial cities. You look out and you see this gray or white fog, and it hurts your eyes and it makes your sinuses irritated. And it's not a fog, it's not cloud, it's the aerosols, it's sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, et cetera.

And these aerosols, the cooling from them, as you said, is so strong, it's canceled out three quarters of the fossil fuel warming. But the thing is that what we've been doing is we've been trying to control these aerosols as best we can. And Europe has cleaned up their act because of the acid rain, along with the UK, North America likewise, and also shipping just in the last couple of years.

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the dirtiest fuel of all. have this bunker diesel which produces a lot of aerosols. Anyway, they're cleaning up as well. And what's happening now is that now that we're cleaning up all these nasty aerosols which affect our health, by that we are also increasing the warming that was being masked or prevented by these aerosols. So you get people like James Hansen, the god...

the grandfather of climate science coming out a month ago with a paper that says global warming is accelerating because we are being too effective in cleaning up the aerosols. So we're at a point now where global warming is accelerating. So all of these things, the cyclone that I'm facing right now, the fires, the floods, the the droughts, the extreme weather, that

is going to be even more so on steroids. So more of us will be waking up to these issues, I believe. So we're focusing on the wrong thing first. We're focusing on fossil fuels and cleaning up the aerosols. And when we do that first, we actually risk heating the climate because the aerosols can be removed from the climate more quickly than

If we focus on methane, we can remove those heating effects and we don't have, we're not dealing with any cooling effects attended to, right? Yes, exactly. The carbon dioxide emitted lasts for hundreds of years, but the cooling aerosols only last for a few days or weeks, but basically until it rains and it clears the air.

So yeah, we can lose the cooling really quickly, but the heating will continue. this is the, and Hanson calls it the Faustian bargain, the deal with the devil that we've got ourselves into. And it's really interesting if you look at this experiment that we've been running on planet earth, this experiment on climate, which is by the way, a very effective

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experiment in. Yes, it does cause global warming. Within this experiment is this geoengineering project. And this geoengineering project is the aerosols. And if you look at the cooling geoengineering, that has prevented 0.9 of a degree centigrade warming. Huge amount. So that geoengineering project has been very successful.

So it tickles my funny bone to think that right now we're talking about geoengineering projects on a small scale, a minute scale, and being howled down. Whereas in the last couple of hundred years, we've been doing a major geoengineering project and no one's said a thing about it. So we humans, we're very strange critters, aren't we?

We have to hope that we get our act together for the sake of the other critters, at least. So basically, aerosols have been proposed as a geoengineering project to cool the Earth.

when there's a far simpler solution that you and I certainly agree upon, which is let's not turn over 40 % of the earth to livestock and let's eat something else other than dead animals, which we could do far more efficiently. It would be far better for our health. And then there are the oceans.

which need to be protected from industrial fishing. Is there any way on Earth, Gerard, that we could even measure how much carbon goes into the atmosphere from the bottom trawling of the oceans? yes. That's a good point. And there has been estimates of that. Bottom trawling is a particularly destructive practice. What they have is these nets.

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that are dragged along the ocean floor. The world's continental shelves, the shallowish water, have been absolutely stripped of their ecosystems with bottom trawling. You look at the cod banks in the North Atlantic, know, every day almost for hundreds of years, they've been stripped and re-stripped and re-stripped to harvest the cod, which...

which I think are now illegal to buy in the UK because they've been wiped out effectively. But that practice stirs up the bottom and there's a process in the ocean whereby just as on land where the forests grow, have organisms, plants growing on the floor of the ocean and they are soaking up carbon dioxide. And there's another process that

forms them into nodules and they actually sunk. They are locked down with carbon nodules as well into the ocean. So the oceans have been doing it. It's a huge, well, just, it's extraordinary. If you look back over the last 270 years, and I've got the data in my spreadsheets if anyone wants to go looking for it. If you look back at, in the last 270 years, nature,

in the forest and the ocean, nature has pulled down three quarters of all carbon emissions. And even in the last 10 years, nature has pulled down two thirds. So it's falling behind. We're getting too good at releasing carbon. But the thing is that that is huge compared to what most people believe. But on top of that, the oceans have been doing an extraordinary job.

in soaking up the actual heat, not the carbon, but the heat as well. So the oceans have taken 90 % of all the global warming and a lot of the carbon. nature, the forest basically, and the oceans have been working overtime, a gargantuan effort to soak up our human pollution. Right, which isn't necessarily good for all the life in the ocean.

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Yeah, yeah, that's right. So there have been estimates of the amount of carbon released from bottom trawling to answer your question. And that's actually in the the spreadsheets. It may be in the paper as well. No, but it's in the spreadsheets. I don't have it on the top of my head. But yes, we did look at that. But my feeling is that this estimate is lowball because

really we're just starting to understand what's going on in the oceans. And the oceans have been huge for us. Even in the time when the whales have exploded in numbers, at least along the east coast of Australia, since we've stopped whaling, the whales have increased enormously. And it's now being discovered that whale poop is a huge part of storing carbon.

You know, this is a process that we've disturbed radically, but is now starting to recover. And the more we study, the more we find that how big it is. So so these underwater processes are starting to be recognized as well. Right. And the phytoplankton get fed by the whale poop and release chemicals that actually

cause the formation of clouds. all of this interwoven aspects of nature are things that people don't think about when they just exploit the oceans.

You mentioned before the pasture maintenance fires that have been set by cultures worldwide. So many cultures around the world don't get along with each other, but yet they managed to agree on one thing, which is that they should burn a lot of vegetation. And is there any way to measure the carbon that goes into the atmosphere from pasture maintenance fires worldwide?

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Yes, that's another really good point, Glenn, because once again, the rules by which we measure emissions come into play. And that is that pasture maintenance fires, savanna fires, it's called prescribed burning of savannas. That's the term where it appears in the inventory. And we count all the emissions from that except the carbon. So that emits a lot of methane, by the way. But the carbon is neglected because it's considered

that's been taken up by growth the following year. And it's interesting because we burn a huge area, an area the size of India every year, pasture maintenance fires. lot of it happens in the tropical areas, North Australia, Africa, South America. And these pasture maintenance fires. So while there can be an argument made for not including that carbon,

because it's going to be taken up the following year. What happens is that the pasture maintenance fires are extremely effective at stopping forest regrowth. And it's the woody regrowth that stores carbon in the long term. The grass would have died, would have eventually gone back to the atmosphere anyway. But the woody stuff, no, it's stored, it's locked away. So... And particularly in the old growth forest.

Right. Absolutely. Yes. The younger forests are more susceptible to fire. Yeah. Yeah. As an interesting aside to that, which is really fascinating, what's been happening is that nature has been working like blazes to soak up our carbon. And so as the fossil carbon increases and the deforestation or land use carbon is the same, that means that

the carbon it's been soaking up is becoming more and more fossil. So at the moment, the atmosphere contains about 70 % fossil carbon. So, and that's been going back a decade or two actually. So if you look at any growth, any woody growth even in the last two decades and trees can grow a lot in 20 years, most of the carbon stored in those trunks is fossil carbon. And this is what the Australian

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beef industry is arguing for at the moment. saying, no, this was cleared in the past, therefore it's agricultural land. Therefore, you Europeans who want deforestation free products, look away because where this is already agricultural land, so forget it. But the trouble is most of that carbon emitted on that recent regrowth, like 20, 30 years, is fossil carbon.

So what they're doing is they're really... fossil carbon for us. Oh, from fossil fuels. Carbon from the burning of fossil fuels. Yes. OK. Yeah. So and they can tell the difference by the... from the burning of fossil fuels any different than carbon from a decaying leaf? Yeah, they can measure... They can tell which is which by the carbon 14. Carbon that's been buried for thousands of years has...

it's effectively lost its radiation, whereas new carbon, which is affected by the sun's rise, still holds some some sort of radioactive elements. So they can tell recent biosphere carbon from fossil carbon. And why should we care whether trees are composed of fossil carbon or or more recent carbon? Well, in a way, it doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. But.

But I'm just looking at the Australian beef industry's argument that, it's already been deforested, therefore we should be able to do it again without affecting anything. But what they're saying is that by clearing that recent regrowth, they're re-emitting mostly fossil carbon. So, I mean, it doesn't matter to the environment whether it's fossil or not. But it punches holes in their arguments. I see what you're saying.

Yeah. And when they say not to count the carbon because it's going to be absorbed by photosynthesis, they are effectively engaging in what's called the net accounting, right? Basically giving humans credit for photosynthesis instead of what you're arguing for, which is gross accounting. We shouldn't get credit for photosynthesis.

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Absolutely, yeah. And that comes back to the first paper that I wrote, which is the fact that we measure them differently. And it's exactly what you said. Up until now, we've been measuring carbon dioxide as the full emission, but we've been measuring land clearing emissions as the net emission. That is the emission minus the drawdown by other vegetation out there. So we'll subtract that.

from our emission and it brings it down by two thirds. It's a huge discount. So we've been measuring a hundred percent of the fossil fuel carbon and about a third of the land clearing carbon. And the reason why we shouldn't measure them differently is this. See, they reason that biosphere carbon is a pool of carbon that

it goes up into the atmosphere, it comes down again in new regrowth. Therefore, that's a self-contained system. Therefore, we should only measure the net amount, and it's the net amount that stays in the atmosphere that affects the climate. So it's what affects the climate really counts. So we'll take that amount. And actually, that's reasonable argument. But the same thing, the exact same thing happens to fossil fuel carbon. We emit the full 100 %

But two thirds of it is soaked up by vegetation. So what do we count? Do we count the whole 100 % or do we count the one third that's left? Let's do them the same, is what my paper says. Let's do them the same, either through net accounting or through gross accounting. Whichever way you do it, as long as you're consistent, my figures stand up. So it makes a big difference to, in fact,

It proves that land clearing carbon since 1750 has been greater than fossil fuel carbon. Now that turns the carbon budget on its head because up until now we believe that fossil carbon is way greater than land clearing carbon because of this dodgy accounting that we've been using. If we do it the same, land clearing carbon is greater than fossil fuel.

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And that upends sectors like we said in the paper, upends a lot of things. Well, you've now done humanity the service of making this argument, which frankly is pretty clear and pretty should be pretty obvious. You've made this argument in a highly respected journal, the Environmental Research Letters.

Your paper is called Increased Transparency in Accounting Conventions Could Benefit Climate Policy. So now that this is published, what kind of reaction are you getting from other scientists? Yeah, good question, Glenn. We've been getting good reaction from the global carbon budget scientists. These are the guys who are the point of truth, if you like, on carbon emissions. And up until now, they've been using the IPCC

guidelines on how to measure things. And the feedback I've been getting is that, well, yes, we agree with you. We should use gross accounting for all emission sources because it's consistent. And we'll take it. They're going to discuss that as a group for the next global carbon budget. Might be too late for this year, but maybe for next year. But I gained a lot more traction there than I was expecting.

That's good. is really good news. The second paper which came out two weeks ago that looks at the sector contribution of animal agriculture, by the way, the paper finds that animal agriculture is the leading cause of climate change. That's the bottom line. That has yet to get the reaction from the top scientists. I haven't had strong reaction, good or bad, yet.

But I do expect it, I'm emailing a lot of prominent authors of various publications who this will impact. So what happens is that the science comes out, it's debated, it's then gains traction or acceptance by different groups and they move forward and then you get a consensus. So we're still a way off consensus. At the moment, it's debating time.

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Well, have you been getting blowback from. I don't know, some scientists who might be compromised by the animal agriculture industry. Yeah, strangely, no blowback. but but a lot of please help me understand this. Why do you say this? Why do you say that? How come? You know, so so it's it's like it's questioning. It's not.

You know, you're speaking. It's not It's hostile. That's good. It's it's, you know, why? Why is this? Has this not been discussed before? How come we we haven't recognized this to that? The other thing. So at the moment, I've been most of my days have been taking up in debates, if you like, or me justifying my work.

So it's in time. Hopefully that phase will merge into more informed discussion, which will lead to consensus. When that is, I don't know. But I'm hoping it's be quick because I'm, know, cyclones like this on my doorstep, I'm not impressed. We've been batten down for two days now and we lost a few trees.

We had a blackout just at the time this podcast was scheduled, but it's very inconvenient. I'd rather we didn't have climate change. Well, in Australia, you've had terrible, excuse me, terrible fires that you didn't have 30, 40 years ago on this scale, correct?

Yes, absolutely. And because of what we spoke about before, you get a few wet years and the vegetation growth blossoms. And then you get the conditions are hot and dry and windy. When those three things happen together, it desiccates the vegetation and it's hot, ready for a spark.

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that spark can come from anywhere and it'll just take hold and run. So Australians have seen this happen. What percentage of your countrymen have started to wake up and say, well, maybe this is related to what we've been eating and how we've been using the land.

Yeah, no, very few. I think the last estimate I saw was that 70 % of the population believe that climate change is real. I mean, that's the first step, I guess. But the debate that's been happening in the UK and Europe, for example, on the impact of animal agriculture is just not happening in Australia. You've got media that is so biased that it's just not happening.

Even the national broadcaster, they support the farmers and they believe that by muting the animal agriculture button, they're supporting the farmers. But actually, the reverse is the case. By not debating these things, they're actually harming the farmers in the longer term.

Now, when you were one of, guess you said about 20 or so scientists who were monitoring the raising of the forests for animal agriculture, you got sick to your stomach watching it and began to ask questions. How about your other 19 or so colleagues? Did any of the others begin to question what the purpose was of all this destruction of the trees?

Yeah, that's a really good question, Glenn, because it, but the problem is, and we had a revolving door. Okay, my group was formerly Department of Primary Industries. And in the old days, DPI saw its role as a role of supporting industry. So its whole purpose of being was to support industry. So that culture runs thick. And so,

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Our group was in bed with meat and livestock Australia, the red meat industry. We get about half a million dollars a year from them in grants for projects to work on projects for that industry. excuse me, what sort of projects would you be doing directly for the industry? Well, my group started off as a drought awareness sort of thing using satellite data and projections, you know, climate change work.

looking at ground cover estimates. So how much grass is going to be there? What happened with the rain? How much is predicted, projected for the next X amount of months, et cetera. So we were the drought research group that then became, you know, the remote sensing group. And we still had that function. There's probably still a website that you can look at. It's called the Long Paddock. That refers to the road reserve where there's usually long grass.

It's a pasture of last resort for the farmers. Anyway, so there was a revolving door between my group and the Meat and Livestock Australia, the researchers with the industry. And our best brains, our good scientists were going and having a term, 12 months, two years, with the industry and then coming back. So that, it's a bit hard to untangle that knot.

It's a bit hard to criticise the hand that's feeding you. So, you know, this influence, I deeply respect all of those scientists who were doing that work. You know, they're top notch, know, great reputation scientists, but they didn't see it. They didn't see that their thinking was influenced by industry because they were too close to industry.

They relied on that funding and they saw themselves as uninfluenced, but they definitely were. And also, why didn't they do what I did, as resigned in protest against a, well, some of my staff were working on a report that was a greenwash of the beef industry. So I resigned in protest. Why didn't they follow me? They all had families.

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basically. They love their job and they're doing great work, but they're just blinkered. That's all I can say about that. But I think that applies to most of the population. They'll leave that to other people to think about. Right now, I've got to feed the family, etc. So, yeah, it's an interesting time in history. But I think that

The writing is now on the wall and it's been there for long enough for us to recognize that by golly, we've got to change a lot of things and quickly. Yeah. Well, Gerard, thank you for doing the good work you do to make the scientific case to the scientific community that hopefully will then influence policy and and and influence the

the general consensus inside the public or how we have to change. Something seems so obvious and yet have to be proven scientifically that when you burn forests in order to graze animals and then you eat the animals in order to give yourselves heart attacks,

Maybe it's not the wisest use of the planet.

But we need scientists to make that case.

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Absolutely. Thank you, Gerard, for joining me. And thank you for writing those two recent papers. And let's hope that the scientific community begins to scratch their head and keep asking you questions and maybe join the cause. Yes. Thank you, Glenn. Thank you so much for having me. It's a little by little, I think we're going to get these messages out.

that will change humanity's view on many things that we take for granted right now. Right. Well, keep up the good work, Gerard. Take care. Thanks, Glenn. All the best. To you.