Dear Editor.

Prof Knight says that he is humbled by my wisdom, yet has demonstrably failed to learn the lessons from our previous exchange. Had he followed up on the recommendations I gave for him to review Prof William Happer et al, all of whom are far more qualified than either of us with regards to climate science, then he would have had the opportunity to utilise his self-acclaimed critical thinking skills to consider the other side of the story too rather than blindly repeat the one-sided climate scam narrative. It’s a shame his education failed to mention that both sides of a debate need to be considered in order to weigh up and assume the correct evidence-based position. I can’t say that I’m surprised, because Andrew tries desperately hard to try to establish an evidence base for his vegan stance against all the known and emerging knowledge about carnivore nutrition that evidences to the contra. The fact that he has to rely on an equally flawed climate scam for justification says everything about the strength of his position on nutrition.

The once outspoken climate alarmist Bill Gates has now said that he no longer considers climate change to be the existential threat that he previously invested so heavily in. He now says that tackling poverty and disease are far more important. I suspect his announced position has always been entirely driven by his investment strategy. No doubt he knew that climate was chosen by the Club of Rome to justify a political agenda, so when he saw how much Government money and private investment was being thrown at net zero policies regardless of their practicality, he jumped on that bandwagon, invested heavily, and voiced his support and influence accordingly. Now, following the collapse of his frankenmeat company investment, and the fact that the climate scam is being increasingly called out, he realises that many of his non-climate investments (eg in vaccines and Pharma etc) rely heavily on the use of fossil fuels for manufacture and distribution. Consequently, not wanting those investments to collapse too he has done a U-turn on climate knowing he is now on the right side of history. He makes his vast wealth outside of his Microsoft stash by being ahead of the investment trend curve and using his wealth to influence Governments, world bodies like the WHO, and NGOs through Davos. I suspect other lesser financial whales will soon be following the switch away from net zero inspired investments if they aren’t already.

When Journals largely refuse to publish and/or then retract papers that say anything against the climate scam, it is entirely understandable that 99% of published papers are in favour. So what? Since when has truth been defined by majority vote, or was that understanding not part of Andrew’s education? He should note that shouting loudest on a subject where objection is largely vilified as politically incorrect because it goes against the chosen agenda doesn’t define truth either.

I don’t think it takes much intelligence to recognise that if meat and dairy consumption is reduced to zero as intended, that farmers will have no reason to keep their flocks and herds, even when much of their land is not of sufficient quality to successfully grow crops other than grass. Andrew answered his own question about explaining fewer animals in the same sentence when he wrote “smaller livestock sector”! The intended 15 minute cities won’t be very conducive to the mass pet ownership we have now either, especially if AI takes a vast number of jobs and people have to rely on Universal Basic Income which I doubt will include a pet allowance. Wind and solar energy have no hope of powering the AI industry the UK Government has stated it wishes to promote, let alone citizen energy consumption too. The amount of water AI consumes will likely limit what is available for the crop growth Andrew thinks can replace meat, dairy and egg consumption. He seems to have little appreciation of the bigger picture at all.

Coming back to the climate scam, we are still emerging from the last mini ice age so we should not be surprised that the temperature is rising slightly. Research based on real time figures rather than incomplete modelling shows that the temperature rise precedes CO₂ rise and not the other way around. The fact that fizzy drinks lose their bubbles in response to the drink warming might help Prof Knight understand and remember the correct sequence of events.

According to NASA, the rise in CO₂ has seen the planet increase plant growth and greening, which improves food production. This increased greening itself has been found to moderate temperature rises. As vegetation consumes CO₂ it also performs evapotranspiration - a function similar to human sweating - which can have a cooling effect on the air. Scientists say that global greening since the early 1980s may have reduced global warming by as much as 0.2° to 0.25° C. It should be no surprise that the planet has such feedback mechanisms and is more than capable of temperature self-regulation.

Meticulous measuring from the 1800s indicates that contrary to the 280ppm often quoted pre-industrialisation, CO₂ levels were on a par with what we have now. In the years from 1827 to 1829, the Geneva chemist Nicolas Théodore de Saussure took no less than 225 measurements of the carbonic acid content in the air in the vicinity of Geneva and determined the average CO₂ level to be 415 ppm.

This correlates with the work of Ernst Georg Beck, who investigated 180 years of chemical CO₂ measurements and wrote a summary meta-study on the subject. On the basis of a total of more than 90,000 individual chemical measurements, he came to the conclusion that the CO₂ concentration is subject to strong fluctuations, and that between 1830 and 1880, despite increasing industrialisation, the average CO₂ values fell continuously from about 430 ppm to about 310 ppm. This was followed by an increase from 1920 to 1945 to 415 ppm – only slightly below where we currently are.

There is a saturation level of CO₂ above which further significant rises in CO₂ make very little difference to increasing temperature. We have reached that saturation point already. When we consider that CO₂ levels when dinosaurs roamed were 1500-2000ppm, the idea that we are facing an extinction event from a paltry rise above the current 420ppm is frankly laughable. It is clear that life has endured far greater fluctuations in CO₂ than we appear to be facing even using the flawed climate models. We are considerably closer to the 150ppm level below which life cannot survive. I know which direction I’d rather CO₂ moved towards.

The climate alarmism tactics that Andrew continues to use to justify his vegan agenda despite the considerable evidence to the contra is not true evidence-based science at all. His comprehension of climate is totally one-sided and far from complete. That’s understandable because it’s not his subject. What is not understandable as a Professor of nutrition is his seeming lack of appreciation of the requirements of carnivore nutrition for health which goes way beyond satisfying just proteins, carbs and fats.

Andrew failed to address my wider question, namely what is the point of the veterinary profession supporting false policies and agendas based on a non-existent existential threat that can only ultimately lead to fewer livestock and pets upon which our profession, job survival and quality of life also depends?

Yours faithfully

Roger Meacock BVSc MRCVS

References

https://www.arup.com/globalassets/downloads/insights/arup-c40-the-future-of-urban-consumption-in-a-1-5c-world.pdf    section 6.4.1,  Table 3.

Koutsoyiannis, D., Onof, C., Kundzewicz, Z. W., & Christofides, A. (2023). On Hens, Eggs, Temperatures and CO₂: Causal Links in Earth’s Atmosphere. Sci, 5(3), 35. https://doi.org/10.3390/sci5030035

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth-study-finds/

Presence or absence of stabilizing Earth system feedbacks on different time scales. Arnscheidt and Rothman, Sci. Adv. 8, eadc9241 (2022) 16 November 2022

 Kubicki J., Kopczynski K., Mlynczak J..(2024). Climatic consequences of the process of saturation of radiation absorption in gases. Applications in Engineering Science 17 100170.

https://scienceofclimatechange.org/wp-content/uploads/Beck-2010-Reconstruction-of-Atmospheric-CO2.pdf

Dear Editor

In answer to Revecca Brociek’s letter (“Engage withy evidence – not ideology” in pet food debate), the sustainability of ingredients in the manner discussed is irrelevant when a vegan diet is not species appropriate for carnivores. To give an analogy, diesel requires less refining and burns more efficiently than petrol, but that doesn’t justify putting diesel in a petrol engine. There’s no point advocating something on one basis alone that causes harm in multiple other ways.

To refine her statement on what a diet should provide further, carnivores require nutrients derived from animal sources because they don’t include the anti-nutrients that plants also supply and because animal nutrients are in a more utilisable bioavailable form. Plant ingredients do not contain the full spectrum of required nutrients for carnivore health either. That should be the foundation of carnivore nutrition. At a much deeper level, the deutenomics of nutrition is incredibly important but seemingly not understood at all in veterinary nutrition from the evidence I’ve seen, or else plant-derived ingredients wouldn’t be advocated, assuming that as veterinary surgeons we should be promoting optimum health rather than just survival with consequential disease.

It is well known that the figures used to calculate plant sustainability do not include the diesel used in farming them, which is instead lumped in with transport so that plants appear considerably more sustainable than they are. I don’t care how many studies utilising how many farms from how many countries have been analysed, but when they are all based on twisting the foundational data upon which calculations are made, the result can never be right.

Government policy that forces farms to stop farming food on their productive land is certainly one way to ensure that insufficient animal food sources are being produced. The answer is not to ship/fly in plant crops from the other side of the planet so that the UK can claim improved sustainability whilst polluting the environment and using considerably more fuel to get them to the UK. Why is the veterinary profession as a whole not standing up for self-sufficient farming here?

Coming back to the impact of inappropriate ingredients and nutrients within a diet, I doubt the sustainability calculations took into consideration the excess methane that plant-fed carnivores produce, the carbon footprint of extra visits to have their diseases treated and whatever other environmental impact inappropriate feeding will have. If you rely on modelling which is a fundamentally flawed approach anyway because it very rarely if ever covers all variabilities and uses very generalised data, and stop at a point which delivers the desired favourable outcome instead of looking at the whole picture, then that is cherry-picking and only doing half the job.

I have addressed the climate scam in my reply to Prof Knight, so won’t repeat that here. The evidence when correctly assessed says that the diet a species ate when it was evolving is the optimal diet for health. Anything else is ideology.

Yours faithfully

Roger S. Meacock BVSc MRCVS