What’s Really Heating the Planet?

Britain is burning. By the 12th of August, England and Wales had already recorded 1,017 wildfires in 2026, matching the entirety of last year’s record-breaking total. At least 458 happened in July alone.

The New Forest has been burning for days. More than 1.6 square kilometres of land has been affected, with firefighters battling dry conditions, difficult winds and problems accessing enough water.

Elsewhere, more than 1,400 acres burned at Tintwistle Moor in the Peak District. A Welsh mountain fire grew across an area equivalent to more than 500 football pitches. Dunwich Heath in Suffolk burned across an area the size of around 210 football pitches.

Meanwhile, drought has been declared across roughly 70% of the country and the UK has entered its fifth heatwave of the year. This is what climate change looks like when it stops being a graph. But while Britain quite literally burns, there is a climate conversation we still seem remarkably reluctant to have.

Animal agriculture.

We May Be Seriously Underestimating Agriculture

A 2025 paper published in Environmental Research Letters argues that the way we traditionally account for greenhouse gas emissions may substantially underestimate the contribution of agriculture to present-day warming. Instead of simply accepting the accounting conventions developed decades ago, the study asks what happens when land-use emissions, warming and cooling emissions, methane and lost carbon storage are treated more consistently.

Under the accounting approach used in the paper, agriculture was responsible for around 60% of effective radiative forcing since 1750, compared with 18% attributed to fossil fuels. That does not mean fossil fuels suddenly cease to be a climate emergency. The authors explicitly say quitting fossil fuels remains urgent. It means our picture of what has heated the planet may be missing an enormous part of the story.

One reason is land.

Conventional accounting treats emissions from land-use change differently from fossil carbon. The paper argues that if CO₂ emissions from land are counted consistently on a gross basis, agriculture has emitted 98% as much CO₂ as fossil fuels since 1750.

Cut down a forest for agriculture and the carbon released does not become climatologically irrelevant because the accounting system decides to treat it differently.

Then There Are the Animals

The most striking finding comes when agriculture is divided further. The study estimates that agriculture caused around 0.74°C of net global warming between 1750 and 2020. Of that, 86% was attributed to animal agriculture. Around 0.64°C.

That should be the focus of any climate discussion, but animal agriculture is routinely treated as though it were some niche environmental concern, somewhere below remembering your reusable coffee cup and turning the thermostat down.

The problem is not simply emissions from animals themselves.

Animal agriculture uses enormous amounts of land. The paper points to both historic deforestation and the carbon we have lost the ability to store because that land is no longer forest.

It estimates that land currently used for animal agriculture has around 540 gigatonnes of CO₂ in potential carbon restoration capacity. That means the climate cost is not merely what the system emits today. It is also what the land could be doing instead. Growing forests. Storing carbon. Supporting ecosystems. Instead, vast areas are occupied to breed and feed animals who we then kill.

Methane Changes the Picture Too

There is another reason the numbers shift so dramatically: methane.

The study argues that conventional 100-year global warming potential calculations can understate methane’s role in present-day warming. Using effective radiative forcing instead, the researchers estimate methane has caused about 49% of net global surface temperature change since 1750.

Animal agriculture is identified in the paper as the largest methane-emitting agricultural component and therefore an obvious target for rapid mitigation.

There is an important caveat here.

This is one study using an unconventional accounting framework. The author explicitly describes the results as indicative rather than exhaustive, particularly because estimates of cooling from aerosols carry substantial uncertainty.

That uncertainty deserves to be stated.

It does not deserve to be used as an excuse to ignore the findings.

The Fire Is Already Here

Climate change is sometimes discussed as though catastrophe is waiting patiently somewhere in the future.

Firefighters are already spending days battling enormous blazes across a country historically better known for drizzle than drought. Water restrictions are already affecting millions. Heatwaves are arriving one after another. And every fraction of a degree makes the conditions in which these events occur more dangerous.

So yes, stop burning fossil fuels.

Build renewable energy. Electrify transport. Insulate homes.

But if emerging climate accounting is showing us that agriculture, and overwhelmingly animal agriculture within it, has played a far greater role in heating the planet than conventional figures suggest, then pretending food is somehow outside the climate conversation becomes increasingly absurd. We cannot keep staring at the smoke while refusing to talk about what is feeding the fire.