Record winter temperatures in Antarctica

 

On King George Island the landscape has changed from mostly white to brown, grey and green. Photograph: Luis Muñoz

From The Guardian

Temperatures in the Antarctic climbed above 15C this month, shattering the previous winter heat record for the usually frozen region and raising concerns about the speed of climate breakdown.  [Reminder: since this is the Southern Hemisphere, it is mid-winter now, the equivalent of December in the N.H.]

The new winter peak temperature was logged by the Argentinian Esperanza base on the Trinity peninsula on 6 June amid a protracted heatwave, when the maximum daily temperature exceeded zero degrees for three consecutive weeks.

Scientists said the high of 15.4C broke the previous record set at the same station in 1998 by 2C. “This is absolutely crazy,” said Raúl Cordero, an Ecuadorian climate professor at the University of Groningen. “It is also about 20C above normal for this time of the year. That is a huge anomaly.”

Unusually strong warm winds from the north blew across much of the Antarctic peninsula. One Chilean weather station, Boonen Rivera, registered temperatures of close to 13C, Cordero said.

On King George Island, 100 miles (160km) from Esperanza, researchers said the landscape had changed from mostly white to brown, grey and green after temperatures hit 4.6C on 6 June.

“Last weekend was very strange. The temperatures here went very high so everything outside melted,” said Luis Muñoz, a Chilean glaciologist. “Usually there is 20cm of snow and a lot of ice on the ground at this time.”

Muñoz said he and a colleague, Natalia Mestre, climbed to the 500-metre peak of the nearby Collins glacier last Wednesday and were surprised to find rain melting the ice. “There was a direct impact on the glacier, which should be receiving snow now. It should not be suffering ablation at this time of the year. This is obviously not good for the glacier.”

The Antarctic region is coming under increasing human pressure, directly in the form of resource exploration and tourism and indirectly through the burning of fossil fuels, which is heating the planet.

Scientists warn that some of the region’s biggest glaciers, such as Thwaites and Pine Island, are approaching or may even have passed a tipping point that could push up global sea levels by four metres. Antarctic ice melt has also been found to slow global ocean circulation.

Cordero said a single winter of heatwaves, no matter how amazing, would not by itself make a huge difference to sea levels, but it signified more alarming long-term trends. “This heatwave happened because of extremely strong westerlies,” he said. “This has been happening with increasing frequency since the 1980s, and that is known to be related to climate change.”

 We are doing too little to slash emissions.  We need to do it as soon as possible, not in 10 or 20 years' time.   In almost every country around the world, the combination of wind, solar and batteries is as cheap as or cheaper than coal and much cheaper than gas.  EVs, outside the US and Europe, are as cheap as petrol/diesel cars, and obviously much cheaper to run as well.  It's a marriage made in heaven: clean electricity to drive your vehicle fleet, and a huge mobile battery resource which helps stabilise the grid.  Let's just do it, instead of phaffing around.

A catastrophic climate event is upon us

Illustration by Ben Jennings

From The Guardian

The poor and middle pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the very rich pay lawyers – and the ultra-rich pay politicians. It’s not an original remark, but it bears repeating until everyone has heard it. The more money billionaires accumulate, the greater their control of the political system – which means they pay less tax, which means they accumulate more, which means their control intensifies.

They reshape the world to suit their demands. One of the symptoms of the pathology known as “billionaire brain” is an inability to see beyond their own short-term gain. They would sack the planet for a few more stones on the pointless mountain of wealth. And we can see it happening. Last week delivered the biggest news of the year so far, perhaps the biggest news of the century. But partly because billionaires own most of the media, most people never heard it. We might find ourselves committed to a civilisation-ending event before we even learn that such a thing is possible.

The news is that the state of a crucial oceanic circulation system has been reassessed by scientists. Some now believe that, as a result of climate breakdown changing the temperature and salinity of seawater, it is more likely than not to collapse. This system – known as the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) – delivers heat from the tropics to the North Atlantic. Recent research suggests that if it shuts down, it could cause both a massive drop in average winter temperatures in northern Europe and drastic changes in the Amazon’s water cycles. This could help tip the rainforest into cascading collapse and trigger further disaster.

Amoc’s shutdown is likely also to cause an acceleration of sea level rise on the east coast of the US, threatening cities. It could also raise Antarctic temperatures by roughly 6C (43F) and release a vast pulse of carbon currently stored in the Southern Ocean, accelerating climate catastrophe.

Even when the countervailing effects of generalised global heating are taken into account, a further paper proposes, the net impact in northern Europe would be periods of extreme cold – including events in which temperatures in London fall to -19C, in Edinburgh to -30C and in Oslo to -48C. Sea ice in February would extend as far as Lincolnshire. Our climate would change drastically, with the likelihood of far greater extremes, such as massive winter storms. Rain-fed arable agriculture would become impossible almost everywhere in the UK.

This shift, on any realistic human scale, would be irreversible. Its speed is likely to outrun our ability to adapt. Amoc shutdowns, driven by natural climate variability, have happened before. But not in the era of large-scale human civilisation.

The first paper proposing that Amoc might have an on-state and an off-state was published in 1961. Since then, many studies have confirmed the finding and explored potential triggers and likely implications. Until recently, Amoc collapse caused by human activity fell into the category of a “high impact, low probability” event, devastating if it happens, but unlikely to occur. Research over the past few years prompted a reassessment: it began to look more like a “high impact, high probability” event. Now, in response to last week’s paper, Prof Stefan Rahmstorf – perhaps the world’s leading authority on the subject – says the chances of a shutdown look like “more than 50%”. We could pass the tipping point, he says, “in the middle of this century”.

So why is this not all over the news? Why is it not the top priority for the governments that claim to protect us from harm? Well, in large part because oligarchic power has championed a model of climate impact that bears little relation to reality: that is, they have a hypothesis about how the world works that is completely detached from scientific findings. This model underpins official responses to the climate crisis.

It began with the work of the economist William Nordhaus, who sought to assess the economic effects of global heating. His modelling suggests that a “socially optimal” level of heating is between 3.5C and 4C. Most climate scientists see a temperature rise of this kind as catastrophic. Even 6C of heating, Nordhaus suggests, would cause a loss of just 8.5% of GDP. Climate science suggests it would look more like curtains for civilisation.

As the eminent economists Nicholas Stern, Joseph Stiglitz and Charlotte Taylor have argued, the mild effects Nordhaus forecasts are merely artefacts of the model he has used. For example, his modelling assumes that catastrophic risks do not exist and that climate impacts rise linearly with temperature. There is no climate model that proposes such a trend. Instead, climate science forecasts nonlinear impacts and greatly escalating risk. The likely impacts of high levels of heating include the inundation of major cities, the closure of the human climate niche (the conditions that sustain human life) across large parts of the globe, the collapse of the global food system and cascading regime shifts – that is, abrupt transitions in ecosystems – releasing natural carbon stores, potentially leading to a “hothouse Earth” in which very few survive. Never mind a few points off GDP: there would be no means of measurement and scarcely an economy to measure.

Bizarrely, the modelling also applies discount rates to future people: their lives, it assumes, are worth less than ours. In other words, it has taken a method used to calculate returns to capital and applied it to human beings. As the three economists point out, “it is very difficult to find a justification for this in moral philosophy.” Moreover, climate impacts disproportionately affect the poor – but under the models, their lives are also priced down.

Unsurprisingly, models of this kind, Stern, Stiglitz and Taylor note, have been seized on by “special interests” such as the fossil fuel industry to argue for minimal responses to the climate crisis. And it’s not just the oil companies. Bill Gates, who claims to want to protect the living planet, has given $3.5m (£2.6m) to a junktank run by Bjorn Lomborg, who has built his career on promoting Nordhaus’s model, thus helping to downplay the need for climate action. Nordhaus was awarded the Nobel Memorial prize for economics for his pernicious nonsense – and it is deeply embedded in government decision-making.

A billionaire death cult has its fingers around humanity’s throat. It both causes and downplays our existential crisis. The oligarchs are not just a class enemy but, as they have always been, a societal enemy: a few thousand people can destroy civilisations. It’s the billions v the billionaires, and the stakes could not possibly be higher.

UK EVs now cheaper than petrol cars

 From The Guardian

The price of new battery electric cars has fallen below petrol cars in the UK for the first time, according to the car sales website Autotrader, in a significant milestone in Britain’s transition away from fossil fuels.

The average price of a new electric car listed on the website was £42,620, compared with £43,405 for a new petrol model – making the former £785 cheaper based on advertised prices after discounts.

The higher upfront cost of electric vehicles has long been one of the big sticking points preventing some drivers from switching away from cars with polluting petrol and diesel engines towards those with battery motors, which do not emit carbon dioxide directly. Total running costs for electric cars have been lower for some time.

UK battery electric car sales accounted for 22% of new car sales in the first three months of the year, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, a lobby group.

Prices in the UK have been pushed down by the electric car grant brought in last summer, offering up to £3,750 off some models. Carmakers have also been under intense pressure to drop prices to meet electric car targets, known as the zero emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate, and from an influx of Chinese competitors that have been able to undercut traditional brands.

Autotrader is the UK’s biggest automotive marketplace, although it does not cover all transactions across the country. The data suggests that the UK has reached a pivotal moment for decarbonising its road transport, as a cheaper upfront cost and significantly lower running costs combine to make electric cars increasingly attractive to buyers.

Bex Kennett, the head of new car at Autotrader, said: " ...carmakers had been forced into historically high levels of discounting earlier this year” as they tried to increase electric sales. However, their efforts appear to have been aided by the war in Iran, which has caused a rise in petrol and diesel prices. Car sales platforms across Europe have reported large increases in inquiries for electric cars from consumers keen to cut their energy costs.

Gurjeet Grewal, the chief executive of Octopus Electric Vehicles, the car division of the energy company, said the term milestone “gets thrown around a lot, but this really is one. For the first time, EVs are cheaper than petrol cars on upfront cost – removing one of the biggest barriers to switching.

“They’ve long been cheaper to run, and now they’re cheaper to buy, too. Add in growing competition and more choice, and it’s clear the direction of travel: electric is the obvious option for drivers.”

However, the transition to electric cars in the UK still faces some barriers. Households across the country who do not have driveways are reliant on the public charging network, which remains patchy in some areas.

Given the strategic risks revealed by the Iranian war, the government should regard the EV subsidies as money well spent. 

In Australia, the BYD ATTO 1, shown below, is comparable in size and performance to the petrol Suzuki Swift, and is roughly the same price (AUD $24,000, which includes a 10% sales tax), without subsidies.  An A$3,000 subsidy for EVs costing less than $30,000 would sharply accelerate EV sales in Australia, as it is in the UK.

The BYD ATTO 1, Australia's cheapest EV.

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Reading can lower dementia risk by 40%

Public investments that expand access to enriching environments such as libraries may help to reduce the incidence of dementia, the study author said. Photograph: Westend61/Getty Images

From The Guardian

Reading, writing and learning a language or two can lower your risk of dementia by almost 40%, according to a study that suggests millions of people could prevent or delay the condition.

Dementia is one of the world’s biggest health threats. The number of people living with the condition is forecast to triple to more than 150 million globally by 2050, and experts say it presents a big and rapidly growing threat to future health and social care systems in every community, country and continent.

US researchers found that engaging in intellectually stimulating activities throughout life, such as reading, writing or learning a new language, was associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, and slower cognitive decline.

The study author Andrea Zammit, of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, said the discovery suggested cognitive health in later life was “strongly influenced” by lifelong exposure to intellectually stimulating environments.

“Our findings are encouraging, suggesting that consistently engaging in a variety of mentally stimulating activities throughout life may make a difference in cognition. Public investments that expand access to enriching environments, like libraries and early education programs designed to spark a lifelong love of learning, may help reduce the incidence of dementia.”

Researchers tracked 1,939 people with an average age of 80 who did not have dementia at the start of the study. They were followed for an average of eight years. Participants completed surveys about cognitive activities and learning resources during three stages.

Early enrichment, before 18, included the frequency of being read to and reading books, access to newspapers and atlases in the home, and learning a foreign language for more than five years.

Middle-age enrichment included income level at 40, household resources such as magazine subscriptions, dictionaries and library cards and the frequency of activities such as visiting a museum or library. Later-life enrichment, starting at an average age of 80, included the frequency of reading, writing and playing games and total income from social security, retirement and other sources.

In total, 551 participants developed Alzheimer’s disease and 719 developed mild cognitive impairment (MCI) during the study, which was published in Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

Researchers compared those with the highest level of cognitive enrichment, the top 10%, with those with the lowest level, the bottom 10%. Of those with the highest level, 21% developed Alzheimer’s. Among those with the lowest, the figure was 34%.

After adjusting for factors such as age, sex and education, researchers found higher scores in lifetime enrichment were associated with a 38% lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease and a 36% lower risk of MCI.

People with the highest lifetime enrichment developed Alzheimer’s disease at an average age of 94, compared with 88 for those with the lowest level of enrichment – more than a five-year delay.

Researchers found people with the highest lifetime enrichment developed MCI at an average age of 85, compared with 78 for those with the lowest level of enrichment – a seven-year delay.

Researchers also looked at participants who died during the study and had autopsies. Those with higher lifetime enrichment had better memory and thinking skills and slower decline prior to death, the study found.

A limitation was that participants reported details about their early and midlife experiences later in life, so may not have remembered everything accurately. The study also did not prove that lifelong learning reduces the risk of dementia, as it only showed an association.

Dr Isolde Radford, a senior policy manager at Alzheimer’s Research UK, who was not involved with the study, said the findings highlighted that dementia was not an inevitable part of ageing.

“This new research shows that staying mentally active throughout life can cut the risk of Alzheimer’s disease by nearly 40%,” she said. “This supports what we already know about the preventive steps people can take to reduce their risk of developing dementia.”

The factors that reduce or prevent dementia are becoming more and more clear:

• Use it or lose it.  Don't just sit there like a pudding watching TV or the internet.  Read, think, learn a language.
• Social contact is important.  Loneliness is lethal.  The authorities should be strongly encouraging meet-ups for older people, like coffee mornings at neighbourhood learning centres.
• Poverty in old age makes things worse because it narrows options available---and the mind.  It might work out cheaper for society to make sure the old can enjoy a rich social and intellectual life than to cut support and face subsequent huge health expenses.
• Omega-3 unsaturated fatty acids are essential, literally.  Don't heat them; they'll disintegrate if they're cooked.  You get them from fish, nuts and seeds, especially walnuts, (ground) linseed, pepitas (hulled pumpkin seed).
• Red and processed meat is bad for dementia (I'll be doing a post on this shortly).  A healthy diet helps keep your brain healthy.
• Exercise is good.  Surprisingly, weight-training seems to help a lot, but even a daily walk makes a difference.

The root of all our problems

From George Monbiot at the Guardian

There is one political problem from which all others follow. It is the major cause of Donald Trump, of Nigel Farage, of the shocking weakness of their opponents, of the polarisation tearing societies apart, of the devastation of the living world. It is simply stated: the extreme wealth of a small number of people.

It can also be quantified. The World Inequality Report (WIR) 2026 shows that about 56,000 people – 0.001% of the global population – corral three times more wealth than the poorest half of humanity. They afflict almost every country. In the UK, for example, 50 families hold more wealth than 50% of the population combined.

You can watch their fortunes grow. In 2024, Oxfam’s figures show, the wealth of the world’s 2,769 billionaires grew by $2tn, or $2,000bn. The total global spending on international aid last year was projected to be, at most, $186bn, less than a tenth of the increment in their wealth. Governments tell us they “can’t afford” more. In the UK, billionaires, on average, have become more than 1,000% richer since 1990. Most of their wealth derives from property, inheritance and finance. They have become so rich, in other words, at our expense.

The issue affects every aspect of policy. Trump is not seizing Venezuela’s oil wealth for the sake of the US poor. He couldn’t give a damn about them, as his “big, beautiful bill” – robbing the poor to give to the rich – revealed. He covets Greenland on behalf of the same elite interests, of which he is the avatar.

When the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, helped destroy the lives of the world’s poorest by tearing down USAID, he did so on behalf of his class. The same goes for Trump’s assaults on democracy, and his war on the living world. It is the ultra-rich who benefit most from destruction, in making money and in spending it. The WIR shows that the richest 1% of the world’s population account for 41% of greenhouse gas emissions arising from private capital ownership: almost twice that of the bottom 90%. And through their consumption, another study shows, the 1% produce as many greenhouse gases as the poorest two-thirds.

Inequality damages every aspect of our lives. Decades of research by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson shows that higher inequality, regardless of absolute levels of wealth, is associated with higher crime, worse public health, higher addiction, lower educational attainment, worse status anxiety (leading to higher consumption of positional goods), worse pollution and destruction, and a host of other ills.

Extreme inequality creates an “Epstein class” of global predators, exploiting the rest financially – and in other ways. It creates an ethos that no longer recognises our common humanity, that sees other people, as Musk puts it, as “non-player characters”, and believes that, “the fundamental weakness of western civilisation is empathy”.

This is the metric by which you can tell who in politics are your allies and who are your enemies: whether they support or oppose the extreme concentration of wealth. In fact, the matter should be definitional. Those who support it (let’s call them Group 1) are the right. Those who oppose it (Group 2) are the left.

As soon as you understand politics in this light, you notice something extraordinary. Almost the entire population is in Group 2. Polling across 36 nations by the Pew Research Center found that 84% see economic inequality as a big problem, and 86% see the political influence of the rich as a major cause of it. In 33 of these nations, a majority believe their country’s economic system needs either “major changes” or “complete reform”. In the UK, a YouGov poll revealed, 75% support a wealth tax on fortunes above £10m, while only 13% oppose it. But – and here’s the astonishing thing – almost the entire political class is in Group 1. You can search the manifestos of major parties that once belonged to the left, and find no call to make billionaires history.

Quite the opposite in fact. Even when politicians are forced to respond to calls for a wealth tax, they dismiss it, as UK ministers have done, with two excuses. The first is that it won’t raise much revenue. Maybe, maybe not: there’s a wide range of evidence on this matter. But revenue-raising is the least of its benefits. Far more important are two other issues. One is fairness. As the WIR reports, “Effective income tax rates climb steadily for most of the population but fall sharply for billionaires and centi-millionaires.” This undermines trust in the tax system and politics in general. The other is reducing the power of the ultra-rich over our lives. To restore democracy and create a fairer, safer, greener world, we must bring the ultra-rich to heel, cutting their fortunes until they can no longer bludgeon us.

The second excuse is that the uber-rich will flee the country. There are three possible responses to this claim. The first is that there’s no evidence to support it. The second is, if true, good riddance: they do us more harm than good. The third is to say: then the obvious solution is a global tax-avoidance measure. So guess what? While 125 nations supported this approach, Keir Starmer’s government was one of nine that opposed it. Our government doesn’t tax the ultra-rich enough not because it can’t, but because it doesn’t want to.

It’s not just politicians. Almost all the media belongs to Group 1. As the wealth and power of the proprietor class becomes ever greater and harder to justify, the views expressed in their outlets become ever crazier. Immigrants, asylum seekers, Muslims, women, transgender people, disabled people, students, protesters: anyone and everyone must be blamed for our dysfunctions, except those causing them. Ever more extreme “culture wars” (a euphemism for divide-and-rule) must be waged.

It’s also why imaginary threats (Venezuela, “cultural Marxists”, “domestic terrorists”) must constantly be drummed up. You cannot have both a free market in media ownership and a free market in information and ideas. The oligarchs who dominate the sector stifle inconvenient thoughts and promote the policies that protect their fortunes.

No one would claim that taking on extreme wealth is easy. But the battle begins with political parties spelling out this aim, clearly and unequivocally. Either they represent the great majority, or they represent the tiny minority: they cannot do both. So where, we might ask, are our representatives?

In his master's steps he trod

 By Ella Baron

Soyboy

‘While many people are now aware of how the fossil fuel industry has deceived us, there’s less recognition of the even grimmer game played by the livestock industry.’ Photograph: FORGET Patrick/Alamy

From The Guardian

Everything that makes campaigning against fossil fuels difficult is 10 times harder when it comes to opposing livestock farming. Here you will find a similar suite of science denial, misinformation and greenwashing. But in this case, it’s accompanied by a toxic combination of identity politics, nostalgia, machismo and the demonisation of alternatives. If you engage with this issue, you don’t just need a thick skin; you need the skin of a glyptodon.

You will be vilified daily as a “soyboy”, a “hater of farmers” and a dictator who would force everyone to eat insects. You will be charged with undermining western civilisation, destroying its masculinity and threatening its health. You will be denounced as an enemy of Indigenous people, though generally not by Indigenous people themselves, for many of whom livestock farming is and has long been by far the greatest cause of land-grabbing, displacement and the destruction of their homes.

You will find yourself up against those who promote paleo diets (with or without added anabolic steroids), “agrarian localists” pushing impossible dreams of feeding 21st-century populations with medieval production systems, and culinary conservatism, which ranges, in different forms, from Donald Trump to MasterChef. You will find yourself fighting not only a very modern and peculiarly vicious demagoguery, but also a very old and deep-rooted romanticism, which still portrays the pastoral life much as the Greek poets and the Old Testament prophets did. There’s a powerful, de facto alliance between the two.

Perhaps most often, you’ll be denounced as a puppet of the World Economic Forum (a target of multiple conspiracy fictions), or a stooge of corporate or institutional power, in the pay of plant-based meat, precision fermentation, Big Lettuce or Big Bug, which are depicted as monstrous behemoths stamping on traditional businesses. As usual, it’s pure projection. Between 2015 and 2020, financial institutions invested $478bn (£380bn) in meat and dairy corporations. But from 2010 to 2020, only $5.9bn was invested in plant-based and other alternatives. Astonishingly, the livestock industry also receives, across the EU and US, about 1,000 times more government funding than alternative products. This includes massively more money for research and innovation, even though meat and dairy are well-established industries, while the alternatives are at the beginning of their innovation phase. Why? Because the livestock industry’s political connections are umbilical.

Tempting as it is to turn away, we simply cannot afford to ignore this sector. A remarkably wide and intense range of impacts – from global-scale habitat destruction to the mass slaughter of predators, river pollution, air pollution, dead zones at sea, antibiotic resistance and greenhouse gas emissions – reveal livestock farming, alongside fossil fuels, as one of the two most destructive industries on Earth.

The chances of a reasoned conversation across the divide are approximately zero. That’s not an accident. It’s a result of decades of the meat industry’s tobacco-style tactics and manufactured culture wars. Clever messaging triggers men who are obsessed by (and anxious about) their masculinity, generating paranoia over “feminisation” and a loss of dominance. The industry amplifies popular but false claims about livestock healing the land and drawing down more greenhouse gases than it produces. These efforts are reinforced by a tidal wave of disinformation from far-right influencers on social media. While many people have now become aware of how the fossil fuel industry has deceived us, there’s less recognition of the even grimmer game played by the livestock industry.

This came to a head at Cop28, which was meant to be the first climate summit at which the impacts of the food system were properly considered. But by the time 120 meat and dairy lobbyists had done their worst, nothing meaningful came of it.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) unveiled a report at the summit that was shocking even by that organisation’s notoriously pro-corporate standards. It greatly underplayed the impacts of the livestock industry and proposed nothing but a series of feeble technofixes to address it, including some that have been wildly overhyped, such as feeding seaweed to cows to limit the amount of methane they produce. I call this approach guillotine syndrome. There might be a slight improvement in efficiency, but it’s still decapitation.

Where was the discussion in this report about reducing livestock production or consumption? On the contrary, it proposed that, for nutritional reasons, the poor world should be eating more meat and dairy. It’s true that many of the world’s poor should have access to more protein and fat, but new approaches, such as microbial proteins, could deliver them to everyone without the import dependency, environmental disasters and health problems caused by switching to a western diet.

So where, in the FAO’s vision, would these extra livestock products come from? Hold on to your seats, because the answer is truly gobsmacking. As the Financial Times reports, the organisation’s chief economist, Maximo Torero, explained that “the way forward was for countries that are ‘very efficient in producing livestock’, such as the Netherlands and New Zealand, to produce more meat and dairy and then ship those products across the world”. Could he really be unaware that both these countries have been thrown into severe ecological and political crisis by the scale of their livestock industries? Yet now he wants them to produce even more – and for poorer nations to become dependent on these imports? Greetings to our visitor from Planet Meat.

The FAO, as the Guardian has documented, has a long and shameful history of suppressing awareness of livestock’s massive impacts. The scientists at the organisation who tried to raise the alarm about the environmental impacts of livestock production in 2006 and 2009 were vilified, censored and sabotaged by senior management. Following the report it published this week, I feel I can state with confidence that the FAO is a major cog in the meat misinformation machine.

The meat industry also nobbled the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Earlier this year, delegates from Brazil and Argentina – major meat exporters – managed to block its recommendation that we should shift towards plant-based diets.

Huge and powerful as these forces are, we need to be brave in confronting livestock production and the dark arts used to promote it. Those of us who do so don’t hate farmers, however much some of them might profess to hate us. We simply seek to apply the same standards to this industry as we’d apply to any other. But when we raise our hands in objection, they are met with fists raised in aggression. That’s the strategy, working as intended.

[George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist]