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Posted on July 28, 2025 | 57 Comments
I mentioned in my previous post the recent kerfuffle about animal agriculture and climate change associated with the work of Gerard Wedderburn-Bisshop (see this podcast and this paper). I also mentioned that I’m kinda done with getting into the details of all these ‘here’s my one weird trick to save the world’ approaches. But various people have asked me to explain further why I find Wedderburn-Bisshop’s position problematic. So … oh well, here goes. See, this is exactly my problem. You’re not helping. (For those on the other hand who’ve already had their fill of this issue, do just skip this post but please come back for my next one, where I’m going to tell a story…)
I’m going to do this quite briefly and summarily, although it’s still quite a long post. I’m not a scientist, but I’ve followed the issues around this for a while and I think I have an okay basic grasp of them. Of course, I’m open to polite criticisms, pushbacks and clarifications. But, as per above, I’m not planning to dwell on this much further (thanks as ever for keeping the comments coming, which is what makes writing these posts worthwhile, but apologies that I don’t always find time to offer adequate replies).
Before I begin let me say that I think much of the global livestock industry is a horror show, and it’d be great to bring the curtain down on a lot of it. Also that cutting down wild forests or ploughing up wild grasslands are terrible ideas. And that there are a lot of good reasons to opt for veganism. That’s not what this is about. There are fewer good reasons to opt for alt-meat, but that’s (mostly) another story.
I have nineteen numbered points, in which I try to navigate what this is about.
1. The main greenhouse gases of importance are carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. They have different potencies with respect to causing climate change – ‘radiative forcing’ – and different lengths of persistence in the atmosphere.
2. These gases have sources in ‘natural’ (i.e. not human-caused) and biotic processes, and they’re also absorbed and/or chemically changed by other natural/biotic processes (sinks). What’s left at any given time is in the atmosphere, acting as baseline greenhouse gases. But over the short-term on human timescales the natural carbon and nitrogen cycles are quite stable and the climate doesn’t change much as a result of them.
3. However, modern human activities add in a lot more of these gases to the mix by either adding to the sources or subtracting from the sinks, hence potentially changing the climate. The major relevant activities that do this are (1) burning fossil fuels, producing carbon dioxide and methane from carbon that was laid down geologically from previous epochs (2) land use change, particularly deforestation and agricultural cropping (3) methane emissions from ruminant livestock (and also from rice cultivation) (4) nitrous oxide emissions, mainly from agricultural fertilisers (5) carbon dioxide emissions from cement manufacture.
4. Activities 2-5 can be undertaken without using fossil fuels, but in the contemporary world they’re largely fossil fuel dependent and downstream of fossil fuel use – it wouldn’t be possible to do them at present speeds and scales without the contemporary abundance of cheap fossil energy. Therefore, there are conceptual difficulties with claims like “animal agriculture (or whatever) causes more climate change than fossil fuels”. Directly or indirectly, there’s a fossil fingerprint behind most contemporary climate change.
5. Because fossil fuel combustion involves putting new carbon (in the form of carbon dioxide and methane) into the atmosphere that was previously stably sequestered in the Earth, with almost no sinks in the fossil fuel sector itself, the gross amount added from combustion provides the relevant measure of carbon flux from the sector. Whereas in the case of land use change there are both sources of carbon (e.g. deforestation) and sinks (e.g. afforestation). Wedderburn-Bisshop’s main argument is that we should not use a net measure for LUC and a gross one for fossil fuels, but this doesn’t make sense from the point of view of accounting accurately for the overall carbon balance.
6. The different atmospheric persistence of GHGs means there is no one single ‘correct’ way to combine them into an overall measure for the radiative forcing of current GHG fluxes – the time period under consideration matters. If we consider the immediate forcing right now, then methane – which has potent radiative forcing effects but low persistence – looms relatively larger, whereas if we consider forcing over long time periods its impact diminishes relative to carbon dioxide, which has longer persistence.
7. Anti animal agriculture activists often emphasise the benefits of cutting methane – for example, in this piece, which states “Cutting methane emissions represents a near-term opportunity for meaningful climate relief”. A lot turns on the word ‘meaningful’ in that sentence. If we cut out all ruminant livestock, then that would potentially reduce atmospheric methane and create some short-term climate relief. But if we did so without cutting fossil fuels, that short-term relief would not prove ‘meaningful’ in the long-term because it would be very much more than offset by ongoing carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels. Moreover, fossil fuel combustion also involves methane emissions of roughly the same magnitude as methane emissions from ruminant livestock. If we were going all out for climate relief, then it might be meaningful to cut out ruminant livestock at the same time as cutting out fossil fuels. It seems harder to argue that cutting the former without cutting the latter is meaningful, except as a short-term palliative whose positive impact is soon lost. The analogy I’ve used before is pouring a bucket of cold water over yourself if you’re sat in the midst of a raging house fire – possibly worth doing if you then immediately do something about the fire, but otherwise not. So, yes, if you opt for only an immediate/near-term perspective, the methane emissions from ruminant livestock loom larger as a concern (so do the methane emissions from fossil fuels), but this isn’t a particularly sensible thing to opt for. It may even be less than useless, if people take a ‘job done on climate’ attitude toward quitting their meat consumption.
8. There are different metrics for comparing the longer-term impact of the various greenhouse gases, such as GWP and GWP*. I’m not going to get too far into them here. GWP* is often criticised by anti animal agriculture folk (including Wedderburn-Bisshop) as somehow a contrivance of the animal agriculture lobby. I even saw it described recently as ‘manipulative’. Well, there are lots of accusations of bad faith flying around in this debate, but I’d like the people making these kinds of claims to look at the work of Myles Allen, Michelle Cain and others who developed the metric (like here, for example) and explain exactly what they got wrong or what’s manipulative about it.
If we assume that GHG sinks at worst stay constant (Wedderburn-Bisshop certainly does assume this), then the short persistence of methane means that the methane emitted from a constant existing number of ruminants doesn’t have much forcing effect because of its rapid removal by the sinks. If more livestock are added, it will have a heating effect. If livestock are removed, it will have a cooling effect. I don’t think this is especially controversial: constant ruminant livestock, little forcing, other things being equal.
Far from being ‘manipulative’, I’d say the implications of GWP* align pretty well with a sensible climate change mitigation strategy consistent with reducing the most problematic forms of livestock from a climate change perspective – viz. (1) focus on cutting fossil fuel use (which will likely result in less livestock) (2) try to augment and absolutely don’t compromise existing GHG sinks (hence, no deforestation or ploughing for livestock) (3) where appropriate, cut ruminant numbers (but keep carbon dioxide reduction front and centre of attention).
9. In his Planet Critical podcast, Wedderburn-Bisshop made quite a play for the ability of existing sinks – especially forests – to deal with fossil fuel emissions. This seems to me unwise. A forest is a much less stable form of carbon sequestration than an underground coal seam or oilfield, and we cannot expect existing biotic systems to endlessly absorb additional fossil carbon accumulated over millennia. Sinks may eventually become sources. Hence the key importance of leaving fossil fuels in the ground. Generally, I found Wedderburn-Bisshop to be worryingly relaxed about the key importance of fossil fuel emissions in respect of climate change and overly focused on livestock.
10. One reason afforestation may not be a stable form of carbon sequestration is because of wildfires, which are a major consumer of woody plants in many parts of the world. Promoting carbon sequestration through afforestation in these fire ecosystems is unlikely to work, because the woodland sink easily becomes a combusted source. Wedderburn-Bisshop doesn’t pay much attention to woodland-grassland-fire-ruminant relationships. But not every ecosystem is substantially wooded and in some ecosystems grass-ruminant relationships may select better for carbon retention or sequestration. When I said in Point 7 that cutting ruminant numbers may only ‘potentially’ create climate relief, that’s one of the reasons.
11. More generally, I find it unclear from Wedderburn-Bisshop’s paper how he construes the relationship between deforestation and animal agriculture. Not all deforestation is agriculturally related, and of that part of it that is it can be hard to allocate out the proportion that relates to animal and non-animal agriculture (e.g. with soy production). Nevertheless, animal agriculture does play a role in it and Wedderburn-Bisshop is right that deforestation for animal agriculture can’t be justified on climate change grounds – not that this is a novel or especially controversial position.
12. As previously argued in (10), not all animal agriculture occurs in places that would otherwise be forested. But some of it does. Here in Britain, for example, while the extent of original wildwood forest cover is a matter of debate, there’s unquestionably a good deal of ruminant husbandry on agricultural grassland that would be wooded in the absence of ruminants. This prompts the so-called ‘carbon opportunity cost’ argument in respect of reforesting previously cleared agricultural grasslands in places like Britain where consumption of woodland by wildfires is not – yet – a major problem. An underemphasized difficulty with this argument is that afforestation only works as a carbon sink for a limited period (in the order of decades) before it becomes essentially carbon neutral. This returns us to point (7) – in the long term, afforestation is only ‘meaningful’ as a climate relief measure if accompanied by reductions in fossil fuel combustion.
13. The relationship between livestock, afforestation and human ecology is often complex in any given locale and can’t necessarily be reduced to a simplistic ‘cut livestock’ agenda. For example, Wedderburn-Bisshop mentions in the podcast the issue of deforestation caused by sheep in Scotland. There is undoubtedly some historical truth to this, although the problem of ruminant browsing was largely a side-effect of the problem of human political power. The fact that sheep caused deforestation in Scotland does not mean that all deforestation in Scotland was caused by sheep, nor that all forms of sheep-keeping inevitably cause deforestation. Anyway, the main contemporary agent of deforestation in the Scottish Highlands is not sheep, but deer. Deer are ‘wild’ but are managed for commercial trophy hunting by large estate owners (human political power again). If you want to reforest the Highlands today, that basically means you have to kill a lot of deer – especially female deer, which are not highly valued by trophy hunters, but that produce the males which are. But this culling runs counter to the inclinations of the hunting estates – perhaps also to those of many anti animal agricultural activists?
I took the photo below in the Scottish Highlands. In the centre left of the picture you can see some afforestation, which relates to small-scale landownership by crofters, some of whom keep ruminant livestock. There is little afforestation in most of the rest of the picture, which relates to large-scale landownership where there is little livestock, but a lot of deer. In this region, afforestation could be better achieved by policies to widen access to landownership and to kill wild animals (deer) than by cutting ruminant livestock or popularising veganism. There are also questions in this biome about whether afforestation is the best strategy for improving carbon sinks. Restoring and preserving peat wetlands is sometimes a better bet, while afforestation is sometimes counterproductive. All of which is to say that afforestation can be socially and ecologically complex, and not necessarily reducible to banning ruminant livestock – a policy that often deleteriously affects small-scale pastoralists whose activities have minimal or even mitigating effects on radiative forcing. It would be good if we stopped thinking of trees as no more than carbon angels and ruminant livestock as no more than carbon devils, and started getting busier with local detail. We need to go beyond ‘trees good, ruminants bad’.
14. In the podcast, Wedderburn-Bisshop says that deforestation will stop if people stop eating meat, because “they won’t clear for clearing’s sake, they only clear to produce beef”. I think this misunderstands the nature of capitalist agriculture, particularly on extensive (neo-colonial) frontiers. Pressing the logic further, we could say “they don’t produce beef for producing beef’s sake, they only produce beef to produce profit”. If, due to regulation of livestock production or changing consumer preferences, it was no longer profitable to produce beef, then the likelihood is they would produce something else on these deforested extensive frontiers that generated a better profit, most likely also with deleterious effects upon climate, biodiversity and people, especially local people. Feedstock crops for biofuels, bioplastics or other industrial products, and for processed human foods like alt-meat spring to mind.
15. One of the best ways to mitigate against this is to allocate land in small parcels to people who are going to use it produce food and other necessities for themselves locally. I don’t think there’s any mention of this on the website of Wedderburn-Bisshop’s organisation. Why not? Instead, there’s a lot of stuff about corporate investment in alt-meat. If it’s true that people don’t need to eat any meat or dairy products, it’s also true that they don’t need to eat any alt-meat or alt-dairy products. Generally, changing property rights to improve access to land for small-scale farmers is a better way to restore ecosystems than changing consumer choices in capitalist markets wedded to high-energy supply chains like those associated with alt-meat.
16. Just to press that a bit further, I think the debate about livestock often errs in imputing to animal agriculture what’s really a problem of overproduction of arable grains. The big growth story in global animal agriculture isn’t ruminants but chicken and pork, and this in turn is about adding value to arable overproduction of cereals and grain legumes, often from extensive frontiers. As just mentioned, there are other, non-animal ag ways of doing this that are also destructive. It’s a bit simplistic, I know, but basically I think we need to distribute land and let people get on with producing food, energy, fibre and fertility from it for themselves. If we do that, we’ll find that at least in the more densely populated places there won’t be an awful lot of livestock – but there will be some, and its impact will be slight.
17. I haven’t said anything yet about the nitrogen cycle in this post, but the human augmentation of it in agricultural systems has been catastrophic for wildlife. Nitrogenous fertiliser is hard to come by in low-energy peasant food systems, which in this respect are much less ecocidal than modern high-energy, high-nitrogen capitalist food systems, livestock-based or otherwise. One of the main ways that people manage farm fertility in low-energy food systems is by using livestock as vectors for it. We need to stop thinking of livestock as just sources of meat or dairy products – or, even worse, as ‘protein’ – and start thinking of them as ecological protagonists in low-energy (non fossil fuel) local food systems.
18. Much as I’m sympathetic in general to messaging along the lines of ‘let nature take its course’, rather than assuming that human meddling will do a better job, unfortunately I don’t think we can just let nature take its course to right the wrongs of our historic human meddling with the global climate. This means (1) leaving fossil fuels in the ground (2) carefully preserving and augmenting carbon sinks (3) fitting farming and human activities carefully to local ecologies, which probably means reducing livestock in the farming systems of a lot of places – but not all livestock in all farming systems in all places. As I see it, Wedderburn-Bisshop’s intervention only relates to one aspect of (3), and is therefore inadequate at best.
19. Finally, I’ve read quite a bit of stuff online that speaks up for Wedderburn-Bisshop’s paper on the basis of meta claims about the conservatism of science in general, the conservatism of government-validated IPCC science in particular, and the virtues of having challenging new voices in the debate. All these things are true enough in general, but challenging new voices do have to exhibit some baseline intellectual plausibility, or else they won’t dent the existing scientific consensus, which is conservative for a reason. Too many of us in the wider world get the wool pulled over our eyes by ‘disruptive’ voices in deep conformity to what we wish to believe rather than what’s actually true. As in the case of alt-meat and alt-dairy, these ‘disruptive’ voices are often also in deep conformity to business-as-usual ways of doing things, such as using high-energy industrial approaches funded by venture capital seeking high returns.
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That’s brief ? Thank god you didn’t go in depth…
A very good read.
#7 In the US in 2017 the EPA says 40% of methane emissions are from oil and gas leaks and 36% are from livestock. In 2022 they estimated that oil and gas leaked 220 MMTCO2e. In 2024 aerial monitoring of methane estimated that actual oil and gas emissions are 4X higher than government estimates.
Most cattle live on manure piles called CAFOs. Small scale grazing is the problem with methane emissions ?
Greg, In a global perspective the CAFO scenario is an exception, that is important to keep in mind. CAFOs are just the cattle version of chicken factories and as Chris points out, mainly a result of over production of grain (and soy as a complement).
CAFCO do not breed animals , they finish them to butchering weight , those animals come off grazing land and are grass fed until they get to a cafco , those animals don’t stay long in a cafco , between one and two months , cafco act as a buffer having animals ready every day so there is no boom and bust at the processors . I talked to the guy that bought my last two head , they were of the weight that they would go straight to processing the following day , and I received a premium price for them , they never saw grain in their life !
The guys at Texas ag have stated there were more ruminant’s in the USA three hundred years ago than there are now , Buffalo wandered around Central Park and all the way to Spokane Washington , from Canada to Mexico .
Well done Chris.
I would add to 17 that nitrogen is clearly the main driver of climate change in agriculture, see for example figure 20 on page 28 of this report. And I guess it doesn’t even include the emissions from the production of nitrogen fertilizers. https://hal.science/hal-05033353?fbclid=IwY2xjawKY7adleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHuXanDYAXVwcQrJZEysKo6btyrU96ehNumIVFrVF3MP4zQKD0aivKGpwUWf4_aem_Firb93sob-Y8waFdGCJIRA
On methane, I think we need to look a lot more into the “sink” and how the sink is affected by other human activities. Apparently N2O (among others) is also affecting the OH-radicals which in turn breaks down methane. This field is still under-researched. But essentially, the BALANCE between the emissions and the break down of methane is what determines the level in the atmosphere.
Your analysis of deforestation frontier dynamics is accurate.
One aspect that is seldom understood is how government policies drive this. In Brazil you can get land for free if you make it “productive”. The cheapest way to do that is to clear forest, sell the timber (It is not permissible to clear the rainforest for timber harvest UNLESS you are converting it – good intention, stupid result) and put some cattle there. Voila, you got land for free, wait a decade as the frontier catch up and then you can sell it for a good profit…..
Good post Chris. And you didin’t even mention the heat aspect!
Climate change is not just driven by greenhouse gasses reflecting heat back towards the earth. It is also the heat itself. For instance, 8.237 billion people generate 68.931 million gigajoules of heat every day at a base rate of 2000 kcal/day. This is the equivalent of 11.267 million barrels of oil burned up every day. The amount of heat burned up using the production of a major oil exporter – Russia in this case – is nearly the same, at 11.264 million barrels per day. In other words, the amount of heat produced by human overpopulation is equivalent to the amount of heat generated by a major oil producer – every day. It is as if we have another major oil exporter that is not even counted. If you were to add in the amount of heat generated by the overpopulation of domestic livestock, it would be even greater.
Now add in the heat generated directly by automobiles – not just the greenhouse gasses emitted. The numbers are staggering. As I have said for over 55 years, the personal automobile is the biggest problem. Not just in heat and emissions, but the power dynamics of re-orienting daily life to the automobile. But then we have the underlying problem of the System itself, as you point out. The REAL problem is the System that enables human overpopulation and domestic livestock overpopulation and automobile overpopulation. And of course, trying to reform this System is a massive fail.
On Walter’s topic of anthropogenic heat, electricity generation from a nuclear power plant supposedly gives off more heat than a coal-fired power plant, per kWh of electricity generation.
‘While 1 kWh electricity generation in a typical condensing coal-fired power plant emits around 1 kg of CO2, it also puts about 2 kWh energy into the environment as low grade heat. For nuclear (fission) electricity the waste heat release per kWh is somewhat higher despite much lower CO2 releases.”
The relative contribution of waste heat from power plants to global warming
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2010.10.010
Very patient and clear rebuttal. I can see this Widder guy is a corporate stooge just one up from climate denial, successfully disrupting a coalition of positive action to curtail energy use.
It’s always good to see how it sharpens the clarity of real action; distribute land ownership, support local community provisioning that compliments the bioregion.
I’d like to hear your thoughts on the new political party that is forming in the UK and how we can help to embody it with the local agrarian ethos.
…actually, I *wouldn’t* like to hear your opinions on this …
Chris, Thanks for being rational and clearly cutting through the BS. I am too close to it to be anything but angry. The rules, well intended sometimes and sometimes not, result in more and more pressure on small producers and we slowly fail. The food safety or animal safety regulations require paperwork and just the paperwork alone means the inspectors have something to shut down a processing plant or even just one part of a processing facility , like the smoker. When a small producer has to drive his animals hundreds of miles further to get them processed because the USDA shut down one of two smokers within a five hundred mile radius , it gets harder, and the next nic means you are out of business.
The concentrated food operations for pigs ain’t pretty, they aren’t raised on a pretty pasture , nothing regenerative, but they replace small producers as we fail and regulations are why we have almost all failed, in S. Calif. there are over 25 million people and not one farmer producing 100 pigs a year,Small or Concentrated . Because you need to drive about 1500 miles to get a pig processed and smoked.
The pigs pay the ultimate price because they live in a hell created to make some enviro, or lawyer, or anti meat nut job happy to get their crap codified somewhere. Tired , angry and don’t even think of coming after the last couple animals I keep at a loss.
One thing about climate change that I learned recently:
For long-lived warming gases, like CO2, one third of the total warming happens in the first ten years (after net atmospheric deposition), two thirds happens by 100 years and it takes a thousand years for all the warming to come into equilibrium.
In my view, the best source for climate information is James Hansen’s group at Columbia:
https://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/
And one of the scariest papers by this group:
https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889?searchresult=1
Recent observations and research, particularly with regard to aerosols, tend to confirm this paper’s projections.
Thanks for the additional observations Greg, Gunnar, Walter, Joe, Steve & Diogenes – more things to think about!
Martin/Joel – herein lies exactly the dilemma of the people-pleasing blogger. I will ponder it.
Brief by my standards, Greg, brief by my standards.
I hear your anger Bruce. The regulatory environment around livestock farming in particular sucks. The so-called ‘missing middle’ in farming between homestead and industrial scale is a problem that I think will come back to haunt us.
That “missing middle” would bother me a lot less if there were more homesteads/smallholdings available, and if I didn’t think Cargill (or whoever) will absolutely come after the small, micro-scale producers when they run out of middle to squeeze.
Careful what you carry going gardening Chris A Gardner in Manchester has been arrested to having a sickle and a hori hori trowel / weeder ! in his own garden .
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2025/07/30/uk-police-arrest-gardener-in-his-own-garden-for-carrying-trowel-sickle/
https://www.energy.gov/topics/climate
US government department of energy latest climate report . Link to the full report .
“existing scientific consensus…”
Well, science as I’ve understood it since I did a degree in early 1970s can’t have a *consensus*. Please read about what the scientific method really means.
Thanks, and you might like to look at the contributions from retired experts on who is ‘cooking the books’ with regard to temperature measurements around the UK. Strong phrase but the Met Office haven’t shown any humility so far and continue to ignore criticisms.
Thanks for the long and precise work, it’s essential to read this kind of material to remember what we should aim for in the long run.
I’m looking to change career in agriculture and I have to say, reducing the fossil energy use in this sector is gonna be challenging to put it mildly. Everything relies on it and even the most environmentally conscious farmers I’ve met don’t question it. They do however focus on 0 pesticide or synthetic fertilizers which is already a daily struggle.
The social and political changes that would be necessary to drastically lower our fossil fuel usage in agriculture (and in general) are so significant that it feels demoralizing. Especially when choosing to do so personnally means fighting an entire system that urges you to give up at every step…
I’m not giving up but the challenge is certainly… intimidating !
Keep going, Barium.
Learning to produce food/fibre/fuel without industrial fertilizer or pesticides is probably harder than learning to do it without internal combustion engines. It takes time for the soil to recover and the further along in that process we can get, the better.
Finding the ” manpower ” to replace diesel will be the problem , A man with a scythe cutting a acre a day versus a 40 foot cut combine doing a acre in five minutes and thrashing it as well will take a lot of man power to replace . .
It’s true that doing anything without fossil fuels takes a few orders of magnitude more physical labour.
It’s also true that we have more people alive today than at any previous point in human history. This is not enough to replace the fossil fueled machinery, but certainly enough to do more manual labour than has ever happened at once before now.
I am selling sweet corn in my farmstand that I produced without diesel or gas . Small electrics less than 15 horsepower. Lots of work with a hoe.
Compost , no conventional NPK . FWIW $500 first picking, a 7 week succession to go. Not impossible but honestly it doesn’t even make a decent marketing pitch. I have kinda gotten used to not making money farming so that now making very little is less an irritation than when I was younger. Breaking even is easier if you can control your expenses and small electrics and hand labor at least can check that box.
Hmm well it’s possible to probe the idea of scientific consensus a bit more deeply but for my summary purposes in the relevant paragraph it’ll do. I stand by what I wrote.
Anthropogenic climate change is not very controversial scientifically. I don’t mind a bit of climate change scepticism on this website, especially if it comes along with something else more interesting, but there are plenty of other online places to indulge it, so take it easy folks…
Shifting from atmospheric physics to human psychology, it’s surprising how irritating the phrase “Please read about…” is. And self-negating. Please read about counterwill 🙂
Climate change is directly relevant to a small farm future. Over the last 40 years there has been a remarkable decline in annual precipitation where I live, from 10 a year average of around 120 inches per year to the most recent 10 year average of around 60 inches per year.
This year we have only gotten 14.75 inches so far. I know one year doesn’t make a trend, but it’s been barely enough to keep the pastures from going dormant, something I have never seen since we lived here (but something that has happened in the past).
The motto of our local water department is “Water is Life”. I don’t use their services, but I agree wholeheartedly with their motto.
This area is supposed to get 25 to 35 inches a year that’s ok if it comes when it’s needed , this year it did, last year it was late and the pastures had already given up , its better than the dust bowl years when we received less than 2_inches at one point , that averaged out to 10 inches a year for 8 years .
I typed in ‘percentage of scientists climate change’ and the first hit was
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climate_change
Climate change denial is a funny thing. Belief can affect perception but not reality.
I wonder if there is something of the naturalistic fallacy, or at least something adjacent to it, in the idea that wild forests left alone can sequester infinite quantities of carbon. In fairness, that’s not really what the “stop eating meat” people are saying.
In practice it seems like a wild forest without human intervention can only sequester so much carbon before deer or fire will release it back into the atmosphere again. I’m sure someone somewhere has run the numbers on the ideal wolf:deer ratio to maximise forest growth and minimise flammable brush, but we clearly aren’t doing that in most places; in any case it is clear that there are limits.
Despite those limits, perhaps in the absence of wild management (that is, using animals strategically to manage forest growth in order to optimise climate factors towards human habitability… which isn’t really wild in a “set it and forget it” way), there is an argument for coppiced woodland as carbon sequestration. There will be limits there, too, of course: the world only needs so much e.g. wooden furniture or fencing or what have you, and these things will also eventually either decay or burn, releasing their carbon back into the atmosphere; I suspect the only way to prevent that on, say, a 1000-year scale would be making charcoal from it and then burying the charcoal, but my understanding is that that also doesn’t actually capture all the carbon, so it could be dicey if we go too fast. But in the short term, a massive widespread return to using locally coppiced wood for semi-durable consumer goods, and then using any surplus for heating in such a way as to also produce charcoal for sequestration, seems more sensible than convincing everyone to give up meat.
It’s probably politically unachievable, though. After all, relying on locally coppiced wood for materials and fuel would require people to spread out on the landscape to be near these woods, and probably manage them with a mix of private ownership and some kind of commons, and if you’re doing that you may as well incorporate at least some deer too, and the mixed habitat provided by well-managed coppice provides a diverse range of materials, foods and even medicines to forage, though the lines between foraging and farming are (as ever) blurry here, and if you’re already managing a pruning rotation you may as well have an orchard, but then you might also want some chickens to keep the codling moths down, but if you want chickens you have to start really paying attention to local nutrient cycling, and the next thing you know your low-tech carbon sequestration future looks an awful lot like, um, small mixed farms providing for the bulk of local needs.
Oh. Maybe someone has written a book about this.
Hi Kathryn
You missed using charcoal for biochar, a soil amendment, for storing carbon. The crushed charcoal absorbs water soluble nutrients which plants can later access and provides a home for microorganisms and fungi as part of the soil food web.
I’ve been in the coppice industry as a side job for twenty five years. The majority of what is cut goes for fuel, either directly as logs and kindling or converted to charcoal. In the past there would have been a big market for faggots to fire bread ovens, which may well reappear in the future when piped gas runs out.
There are other smaller markets for coppice products in pea and bean sticks, fencing, thatching spars, treen and furniture and a lot of other items ( I have a pattern book with designs for 300 coppice products by Ray Talbot) that can be made of wood for which we use plastic or metal today because they are so cheap.
As for deer, they don’t mix with coppice which has recently been cut, they will decimate the spring growth. You either have to protect with fencing, either nasty plastic netting, which does not last long or herris fence panels which are heavy and awkward to move, but last a long time. I have accidentally found a third way, lots of dogs! A professional dog walker approach me to walk dogs in my woodland, I thought why not, I have not seen deer damage to the coppice in years now.
Any revival in small farms will also have to see a recovery of our woodlands, for fuel and for raw materials for many everyday items. I would like to see many small holdings providing subsistence for food combined with working woodland for income, others working market gardens, vineyards, nurseries, orchards, with mid sized farms producing bulk grain, legumes, fibre and meat for local and urban
markets. It is possible, and has been done in the past. Sorry gone a bit off topic
Philip — I am aware of the possibilities of biochar and so are many commenters here, I just simplified my comment for brevity. But burying charcoal without first “charging” it with nutrients would likely be a poor move for soil fertility, so I probably shouldn’t have simplified quite so much.
Great to hear that dogs are effective in reducing deer activity in your coppice.
And yes — for most of human history most people met a majority of their needs from their local ecosystem. If they had been completely unsuccessful, none of us would have inherited any of their genes, so of course it can be done. Or it could be done, with a reasonably stable climate. Whether it still can remains to be seen.
The book you suggested is “Burn” by Albert Bates –
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=burn+albert+bates&crid=1E95NOOKZG5AZ&sprefix=burn+alber%2Caps%2C252&ref=nb_sb_ss_p13n-pd-dpltr-ranker_1_10
I was actually being sarcastic and referring to a particular book that prompted me to find and start commenting on this site — it’s called “A Small Farm Future” and I think you know the author…
But thanks for the biochar book, too.
Hi Kathryn
You are correct in that biochar needs to be charged with nutrients before adding to the soil. I have a friend who produces biochar commercially using seaweed concentrate to charge it before use. I wonder if using ground charcoal with industrial fertilisers would reduce nitrogen run off and provide a sustained flow of nitrogen to the growing crop? Whoops, propping up industrial ag, not a good idea.
Where will the increased manual labour come from and where will it live in a small farm future? Well, there has never been more housing in the countryside than there is now. My mother’s village is four times the size it was when she was growing in the 50s. The hamlet I grew up in on the edge of town is now a mile inside the outer edge of that town. As for population, villages in my area are dominated by the professional managerial class and there retiree’s. Future fuel shortages and lack of amenities will see the PMC disappear back to urban centres, and a collapse in expensive/intensive health care will reduce the life expectancy of the elderly. This will leave a lot of empty housing in rural villages. A wise government would make that housing available at low rents to a manual workforce relocating from the cities that is willing to take up rural skills and crafts, either on their own behalf or a small employer. Reallocating the land into smaller units is another problem. The worst situation would be to leave rural housing in the possession of the PMC who will maximise rent extraction from it. This would lead to penury for the rural working class, as George Ewart Evans records similarly of the late 19th century in rural Suffolk. The other problem of rural housing is villages in picturesque national parks that have been ghosted by AirB&B and second homes. I dare say the demise of the PMC will solve that problem. Funny how the PMC are implicated in so many of modernisms disfunctions.
While I share your concerns about Ricardian rent-seeking leading to widespread penury, I’m not entirely certain the Professional Managerial Class are entirely to blame for that dynamic. And if you’re worried about rural rents being too high, I have news for you about the cities…
Similarly, there is a bit of a problem with lamenting the rise of Airbnb (which I detest) in areas (“picturesque”) where most of the economy is based on tourism, rather than on producing material goods locally to meet local needs. The reason people are relying on tourism is that other lines of work (e.g. agricultural labour) don’t pay enough; the reasons those lines of work don’t pay enough have less to do with doctors or retired civil servants or even management consultants than they do with corporations and the over-financialized nature of extractive models for farming. The erosion of any kind of welfare state also drives this,of course; PMC types who own a second home as an investment asset do so partly because they know for certain that their existing state (and private) pensions won’t be enough to pay for the care they may need when they are old, and they also know that their children may not be able to afford either to pay for that care or to provide it themselves. But that erosion of the welfare state is also driven largely by neoliberal ideology that rewards profit-seeking corporations.
The extremely rich, of course, could afford to give us all a universal basic income tomorrow and not even notice a change in their lifestyle. I think they and their lobbyists are far more responsible for the existing situation than people belonging to whatever class coding we want to give to people we perceive as having a bit more money and capital and options than we have — bourgeoisie, PMC, metropolitan liberal elites. That is not to say that the current PMC are not, in some ways, beneficiaries of this rotten system; rather that they are not necessarily the root cause and attempts to blame them may be a distraction.
Dig a little deeper and it’s more complicated. Financialized markets are a terrible way to distribute land. Other methods are politically unpopular with the very people they would benefit.
I understand human urine is quite handy for charging biochar. I suspect just about anything is better than flushing it into the sewer systems to pollute waterways before disappearing into the ocean; what a colossal waste.
One of my friends was a biochar researcher in both Hawaii and Washington state. He recommended human urine many years ago and I use this method.
As for permaculture zones, they can be vertical too. On the original Haugen farm in Norway in the Sogn area, the flat land near the river was used for grain and produce. There was an ancient mound, or “haug” down there too. (Howe or hoo in Anglo-Saxon – like Sutton Hoo in East Anglia.) Thus the name “Haugen” or “the haug,” with the definite article tacked onto the end. The land rose sharply and crawled up a 5000-foot mountain named Bryynga.
The cattle grazed up as far as they could and the goats ranged higher. So different zones based on elevation.
Thanks for the pointer to Ray’s books (it’s Tabor not Talbot) – Green Woodworking Pattern Book and also Traditional Woodland Crafts, easy to find it seems and very well priced.
Quite correct. Auto correct did it! I missed the miss-correction during the editing time slot.
I find myself pondering definitions of wild, too.
It’s my understanding that neither the plains nor the forests of Turtle Island were wild in the sense of being untended or unmanaged by humans when European settlers first arrived; the arrival of measles and smallpox changed that fairly quickly, though.
When I hear about pre-agricultural Celtic ways of life I see a lot about hazelnuts, acorns and so on. I haven’t made any kind of in-depth study, but from my own observation of how hazels respond to coppicing and what unmanaged oak trees do (there are a few I won’t walk under on a windy day in case they decide to drop their huge branches), I’m not convinced that these old forests were untended, either.
The notion that Nature can get on just fine without us — that everything will be okay if we sequester ourselves away into cities and mind our own business while we let the wilderness take care of itself instead of messing things up by participating in any way — seems to be partly based on this notion of untended, unmanaged land (and water) as somehow superior. But maybe the reality is that humans have been maintaining habitats in ways that are favourable to humans, and co-evolving with the other organisms in said habitats, for as long as there have been humans, and truly unmanaged habitats tend to only exist in places that won’t really support human life: the very far north and south, extremely mountainous regions, areas of severe aridity, seas below human diving range… and all of those unmanaged, truly “wild” areas are still impacted by human activity.
I am not trying to propose here that it is the place of humans to micromanage our habitats, to exert complete mastery or dominion over every aspect of the world around us, imposing our own order on the world. We try, but we often only achieve this by exploitative and unjust means even in how we treat other humans, never mind the rest of the living world. But maybe clearing rainforests with heavy machinery to grow soya beans with more heavy machinery to feed cattle (using, you guessed it, heavy machinery to transport the feed) is one form of neglecting our habitat, and leaving rainforests alone to do entirely their own thing with no intervention from us whatsoever is another form of the same neglect.
Maybe neither form of neglect is true to the potential role we could have: of observation, tending, and productive partnership leading to a mutual flourishing.
Hi Kathryn,
Yes, there is ample evidence of (pre)historic human management of ‘wild’ land. Maybe it’s more about what kind of horticulture is legible to northern Europeans.
It occurs to me too, that ours is not the only species that ‘manages’ our habitat. Since you mention hazelnuts, naturally I think of squirrels. Who are busily planting oaks and walnuts in our yard.
They don’t plant hazels because they eat them all before the nuts mature – there are none to bury for later. And the hazels propagate just fine by the root, without maturing any seeds.
But that’s only in town. There are far fewer squirrels outside town – some kind of squirrel predation happening. But our native hazels here are not very widespread and not productive every year. Small, thick-shelled and very flavorful nuts, though – on the very occasional years that they make more nuts than the squirrels can eat
The squirrels definitely plant hazels at my allotment!
The best yield of nuts I get when foraging for them, though, is from small stands of them in open fields/parkland without too much tree cover. The squirrels aren’t that keen on all the open space, probably because of birds of prey.
“But maybe the reality is that humans have been maintaining habitats in ways that are favourable to humans, and co-evolving with the other organisms in said habitats, for as long as there have been humans, and truly unmanaged habitats tend to only exist in places that won’t really support human life: the very far north and south, extremely mountainous regions, areas of severe aridity, seas below human diving range… and all of those unmanaged, truly “wild” areas are still impacted by human activity.”
I believe there is a lot of evidence supporting this view. Of course, it doesn’t imply that humans always have been successful in how we “managed” or “adapted” to various ecosystems. But by and large, we should view humans as a keystone species and or domesticates (plants or animals) as “symbionts”.
Kathryn – I like the way you are thinking about this. In the same vein – wild vs. tamed, structural accounting, etc. – consider the following.
In 1979, David and Marcia Pimentel contributed to and edited a very important book, Food, Energy and Society (Revised Ed. 1996, University of Colorado Press; original 1979). The Pimentels were both professors at Cornell.
[From pages 13-14]
“Thus, the net energy fixed by plants in the temperate zone averages about 10 million kcal/ha per year. Expressed as dry weight of plant material, this amounts to an average yield of 2400 kg/ha per year, ranging from near zero in some rock and desert areas to 10,000 kg/ha in some swamps and marshes (Whittaker and Likens, 1975).”
Here are the numbers at work. As people who have lived in swampy areas know (like northern Minnesota, USA for me), swamps and marshes are supermarkets for wild foods compared to deserts, uplands and dry lowlands. Thus the 4-fold increase in biomass in swamps vs. the average of 2400 is not surprising. Also, 2400 kg/ha is equivalent to 972 kg/acre or 2138 pounds/acre. This is the base rate of biomass for a “natural” ecosystem that has not yet been exploited by humans. Compared to the 10-15,000 pounds of actual produce I can grow per acre (especially with squashes, sunchokes and potatoes), the “natural” ecosystems have a low yield of biomass. Now consider how much extra biomass I put in the compost bin or till in that is not accounted for in the actual weight of produce grown, sold and/or consumed. The actual biomass number is considerably higher. Therefore, agriculture is a quantum leap over “natural” ecosystems. There are two conclusions here: 1) going back to more natural ecosystems reduces yield significantly, and 2) the soil microbes are able to increase their output in an exponential fashion, like yeast. This requires feeding the soil microbes so they can increase exponentially and provide the nutrients, sugars and other necessaries for the domestic plants to live up to their potential. Of course they also need oxygen and space. You get this by tillage. I call it “the churn.” One can shortcut tillage by purchasing compost or purchasing materials to make compost, but then the capital and energy costs are much higher than just using a bullock or a shovel to turn the soil.
Applying the same sort of logic to the questions of rewilding, regenerative agriculture and forest management practices like coppicing, one should expect much lower yields in a return to more “natural” ecosystems. This is not to say you shouldn’t do it. But you cannot expect to grow as much food in rewilding or regenerative agriculture, especially with animals. I certainly prefer grass-fed local beef to mass-marketed supermarket beef, but I recognize that the yield is exponentially smaller per acre and per labor hours to produce. The same conclusion for coppiced firewood. The people I buy wood from in France are taking trees that have grown for many years and getting paid centimes for their labor (pennies for the Brits and Americans). If they didn’t have chainsaws, tractors, skidders and trucks for transport, they wouldn’t be selling wood at all.
Yes, people will have to spread out over the landscape after collapse. Coppiced wood will likely become more of a “thing” than it is now.
Oh, I’m not suggesting that we adopt a foraging-only lifestyle, rather that coppicing seems like a better bet for mitigation of carbon emissions than leaving the same woodland to be a) eaten by deer or b) burned in a wildfire.
The Pimentels expressed biomass yield in dry weight but you are measuring squashes, sunchokes and spuds — how does your dry weight yield compare?
Dry weight is just the weight that is “normal” or self-contained. That is, without being soaked by rain or dew. My weights are dry weights. There is no trick here.
The point I was making is that the biomass is increased dramatically by the artificially-increased activity of the soil microbes which provides more nutrients for plants.
Let’s back up a little bit. I looked at the Whittaker and Likens table from 1975 that the Pimentels used in their original chapter and it just lists dry weight without mentioning how dry weights are calculated. [You can google “The Biosphere and Man Whittaker and Likens 1975” and get the table.] Some research on the Web makes a distinction between added water (as I was doing) and calculations using a dessicated plant with minimal water retention. This then leads to a question of how low the water percentage has to be. Nevertheless, Kathryn’s point about dry vs. wet weights is a good one, as potatoes are 79% water raw and 77% water cooked. Then there is the moisture content of wheat, which has to be 14% or less in order to be stored. So my wheat that has been sitting around for years is <14%. Squashes are mostly water too. So it is a fun game to nit-pick.
However, in case anyone missed my point, let me make it again. The "natural" ecosystems have a limited amount of biomass that they produce and this can be measured. If you till the soil and incorporate the existing biomass into the soil with adequate moisture, the extra oxygen allows the aerobic soil microbes to increase exponentially, producing more nutrients that plants can then use to increase the amount of biomass produced. This is why tillage is so popular. So if you want more food per acre or square meter or square foot, you are going to have to do something to increase the amount of nutrients the soil microbes produce. As a side note, this process also increases the methane the soil microbes produce, but this is minimal compared to landfills and ruminants.
Bottom line. Let us assume my 10-15,000 pounds per acre is 75% water, which is a very conservative figure for the variety of vegetables, fruit, beans and grains in my garden. Then the amount of dry matter by the most stringent definition would be 2500-3750 pounds. Now, let us also assume that there is an equal amount of stover and sticks and leaves to the actual vegetables harvested. As any gardener knows, the amount of "debris" is well over the amount of vegetables harvested so this is a very conservative measure. This then calculates to 5000-7500 pounds of dry matter biomass per acre. The temperate average of 2400 kg/ha = 2138 pounds/acre, so my numbers are still well above what a "natural," i.e. untended ecosystem would produce.
I assume everyone gets my point. If you want to produce more food, you are going to have to increase the soil microbes by giving them more biomass that is incorporated into the soil. Without using fossil fuels to make and transport commercial compost, this means tilling. If you are willing to stay with lower yields, you can stick with grazing, rewilding, extensive pastoralism, etc.
I see my soil get better and produce more food every year that I till. I have used both BCS and Grillo tillers and my data base is western Washington and southern France.
I don’t do huge amounts of tillage — the allotment was managed largely with chemical fertilizer before I arrived, with minimal organic matter added back, to the point that the beds were about a foot below the level of the access paths. I do have free access to ramial woodchips from local tree surgeons, spent coffee grounds from a local coffee chain (… the chain is local, obviously coffee does not grow in England), a certain quantity of fallen leaves in autumn, and limited amounts of horse manure and bedding, so I compost a lot. This summer I have nine pallet-enclosed compost bays, which are currently growing my cucumbers, winter squash, summer squash, outdoor musk melons landrace (sortof), watermelons, and an overoptimistic bottle gourd. In autumn and winter the compost will go into my spud pots, for next year, and the compost from the spud pots will go to top up my various beds. I use raised beds partly for the structure and partly because they reduce crop losses in wet years, when the site sometimes floods.
There are still one or two spots on my plot that haven’t had a thick application of my
compost from this system; they consistently have the worst yields, and are much harder to weed. I can well believe tillage would help with this, but while I have access to the various waste streams I am working on building up the soil with that added biomass as much as I can. It would not surprise me if the decades of tilling without adding biomass, but repeatedly removing crops, had led to substantial depletion of various minerals, some of which are difficult for bacteria to scavenge from the air or deeper soils; part of my hope in all the composting is to add some of them back and create a healthy soil biome that will be able to hold onto them now that the site doesn’t get a cyclical addition of river silt. But using the winter’s compost heaps to direct sow my cucurbits in spring while the heaps are still warm is quite a useful season extension, too, as the site does get hard frosts right up until the beginning of June.
And those numbers do make sense.
Last year I tracked the fresh weight of all the allotment-grown and foraged produce I brought home, and the allotments provided around four times the weight of the foraged food, even though I have about a tenth of an acre of growing space and forage a much wider range (which, in fairness, is almost entirely from managed/tended urban spaces like parks). I’m not really sure how to calculate the foraging area though, because most of it is incidental to journeys on foot or by bicycle I would make anyway; going out specifically to find food is something I do but usually only when I know that e.g. there’s a particularly good greengage or the conditions are right for shaggy ink caps or whatever. And even then I usually just make a little detour on my way home. Twenty five years in London and sixteen in this area means I have enough knowledge that there’s usually something.
Some of my foraged produce (greengages! Walnuts! Apples!) is stuff I could and would grow [more of] at the allotment if I had the space and if I were allowed giant nut trees; some of it (most of the fungi, semi-invasive herbs like alexanders or three-cornered leek) would be impractical to grow there. Bht it’s hard to beat winter squash and spuds for sheer volume, and sometimes quantity has a quality all its own.
Hi Kathryn and Walter
I took on my main allotment three years ago and another to this year. Both where very compacted. I started this year using a broadfork to deeply aerate the soil and greatly improve rain penetration. Just on its own this has improved growth. I no dig the rest of the time, just using shallow surface cultivation with a digging hoe, and compost mulches. Yes, you can never have enough compost, and I am trying to source more compostable carbon.
Hi Kathryn
On wilderness, past cultures did value it for its otherness from human culture, but the land left for wilderness was that which human culture had little use for. As an example I will use permacultures zoning system on a village scale. The best land is close to the village and used for vegetables, fruit, and poultry. The next best for grain crops in rotation. The third best for pasture and coppice. The fourth best for rough pasture (the common) and high forrest. The fifth best for hunting, though hunting can occur on other zones as well as foraging. There is a graduation of intensity of use, between intensive cultivation and the harvesting of wild resources. Neither end of the scale is bad, just what is appropriate for the locality. What is wrong is to push that locality to produce/give more than it sustainably can, at that point society has questions to answer to itself.
Thanks for a bunch of really fascinating additional comments. I’ve been mostly offline, among other things reprising my Glastonbury talks at the Green Gathering in Chepstow. More on that soon.
I won’t wade too far into the threads that have opened up. Maybe just four quick points in relation to a few of them.
First, thanks for the discussion about land productivity. What emerges for me is the benefit of intensive horticultural systems on small scales and as little as possible, supplemented by woodlands and grasslands of various kinds. Yeah, somebody really should write a book about that. Wait a minute…
Second, Bruce – you’re doing a lot better than I did with sweetcorn in my commercial growing days. The first year, the badgers ate or trampled almost my entire crop the day before I planned to harvest it. The second year I put up elaborate electric fencing around it and cleared a few hundred pounds. In the third and subsequent years I grew other stuff.
Third, Bruce’s points about controlling your expenses and finding ways not to be irritated about the financial returns are right on the money, so to speak. The cost of land, housing, mortgages and money figures into this, of course. Hence the ever-present need to talk about access to land/land reform.
Finally, re the discussion about the professional managerial class, I agree with Kathryn that its economic behaviour isn’t the fundamental driver of the mess we’re in – although, as per Philip’s examples, this behaviour is often more locally visible to ordinary people than that of the truly rich. As I see it, the real failing of the PMC is the way that, ironically (and unwittingly, often enough), it helps to conceal from people the true extent of the contemporary crisis in its day jobs. I came across a striking example of this in the panel I was on at the Green Gathering today, which I will try to lay out a couple of posts down the line.
On PMC visibility — I suppose it depends where you’re standing and what direction you’re looking. There’s an awful lot of anti-migrant sentiment about from people who would describe themselves as “ordinary people”.
Meanwhile, one of the things I do enjoy about the comments section here is that sooner or later a bunch of us end up talking about crops we’ve tried, what worked and what didn’t, and so on.
I am still overwhelmed by plums..I have 10l of plum wine on the go, greengage jam, plum chutney, plum fruit leather, stewed plums in the freezer (I could bottle them but was using that equipment for the chutney at the time) , we’ve been eating fresh plums by the handful…. and more keep coming. It’s faintly ridiculous. The early season ones were pretty early; the late season ones aren’t ready yet. It’s a good thing we quite like plums.
Agreed, much always depends on where we stand and where we look, and also that there’s a lot of anti-migrant sentiment among ordinary people, but I don’t quite get the point you’re making in relation to my one…?
One quick response to the recent DoE report linked above that came across my desk – https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2025/08/03/the-new-doe-climate-report/
So, John Christy & some other usual suspects … about as far from ‘scientific consensus’ as you can get!
Whether pundits like it or not its a official report by well known and qualified scientists and will become official US government policy for the next 3.5 years .
I don’t disagree with any of that. However, given the ‘nearly unanimous’ scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change mentioned by Greg, the fact that the US government chose its report authors from the handful of dissenting scientists suggests it may have something of an agenda.
Its easy to get a ” unanimous ” result when you do not ask everyone involved .
I have read the no meteorologist says there is no warming , there has always been warming and cooling, they just argue that its not man made .
If you read the report it states that the UN takes the highest possible numbers and run with them , the UN numbers from the year 2000 are now 2.5deg C higher than actual measurements on the ground yet no-one alters the programmes to include the actual weather stations numbers , only one of the plethora of weather projections is running close to the real numbers taken by weather stations and that one is 1/2 a degree high .
Its time the climate models were reprogrammed so their results agree with real on the ground numbers. .