I NEARLY choked on my rib-eye upon reading the rather bizarre letter from Tod Bradbury, Campaign Manager for Vegan Outreach, Animal Aid (who ever they are) “Turning vegan could reduce climate change” (October 12).

No, it couldn’t!

He cites the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) and its report that only suggests that lifestyle changes such as turning vegan will prevent climate change.

The IPCC is an organisation with a political agenda only, not a scientific one and as Mr Bradbury is at pains to point out, the report is only a “suggestion” by this discredited and prejudicial organisation and is most definitely not empirical, peer reviewed scientific evidence.

Mr Bradbury quotes the IPCC’s figure of, “14.5% of all greenhouse gas emissions can be attributed to animal farming”, is patently wrong and purposely misleading. The vast majority of greenhouse gas emission can be attributed to naturally occurring emissions, such as sequestered carbon.

C02 deposits which are stored, for example in the oceans, soil and limestone, that are constantly being released into the atmosphere and incidentally also are constantly being reabsorbed back.

And let’s nor forget the continuous volcanic eruptions occurring all over the globe that are endlessly releasing unimaginable amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, ‘far more than humans could ever dream of achieving’.

Not to mention the vast quantities of methane emissions that are also naturally released from vegetation, for example the tropical rain forests?

But by far the most prevalent and influential of all of the greenhouse gases that are present in the Earth’s atmosphere is not ‘carbon,’ ‘or to give it its correct title “C02”,’ it is water vapour, at between 0.4% - 1%, where as C02 appears at only 0.039% and methane comes in at around 0.00005%.

Which must be stressed, in the grand scheme of things, is not a lot.

But out of that amount of 0.039% of C02 it is estimated that humans are probably only responsible for around 3% of this total. That is well within the margins for error.

Now, I don’t really care what Tod Bradbury, or those wasters at the IPCC eat, that’s their choice, but it’s none of their business what I or anyone else chooses to consume either.

The concept that if all humans were to take up a vegan diet, (which is after all an unnatural diet for human beings) that it would stop climate change is as potty as was King Canute when he believed he could turn back the incoming tide.

Stuart A Chapman

Tralee

Ireland