nitrous oxide

Zen and the Art of Dissatisfaction – Part 19

/ Mikko Ijäs / Jätä kommentti

Pandora’s Livestock: How Animal Agriculture Threatens Our Planet and Our Health

The following post explores the interconnected crises of biodiversity loss, industrial animal agriculture, and climate change, presenting a comprehensive argument about humanity’s complex role in environmental degradation. Drawing from works by Bill Gates, Risto Isomäki, and others, the text combines ecological science, epidemiology, and cultural history to examine both systemic failures and potential paths forward. The post highlights how deeply entangled environmental destruction, pandemics, and human psychology are — while also questioning whether our current cognitive limits allow us to grasp and act upon such intertwined threats.

Originally published in Substack: https://substack.com/home/post/p-166887887

The destruction of ecological diversity, the shrinking habitats of wild animals, and the rise of industrial livestock production represent grave violations against the richness of life — and profound threats to humanity’s own future. These issues go beyond climate change, which is itself just one of many interconnected problems facing nature today.

The Decline of Biodiversity and the Rise of Climate Complexity

In How to Avoid a Climate Disaster (2021), Bill Gates outlines the sources of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions. Although many factors contribute to climate change, carbon dioxide (CO₂) remains the dominant greenhouse gas emitted by humans. Gates also includes emissions of methane, nitrous oxide, and fluorinated gases (F-gases) in his calculations. According to his book, the total annual global emissions amount to 46.2 billion tons of CO₂-equivalent.

These emissions are categorized by sector:

  • Manufacturing (cement, steel, plastics): 31%
  • Electricity generation: 27%
  • Agriculture (plants and animals): 19%
  • Transportation (planes, cars, trucks, ships): 16%
  • Heating and cooling: 7%

This classification is more reader-friendly than the Our World In Data approach, which aggregates emissions into broader categories like ”energy,” comprising 73.2% of total emissions. Agriculture accounts for 18.4%, waste for 3.2%, and industrial processes for 5.2%.

According to Statistics Finland, the country emitted 48.3 million tons of CO₂ in one year, with agriculture accounting for 13.66% — aligning closely with Gates’ method. However, Finnish author and environmentalist Risto Isomäki, in How Finland Can Halt Climate Change (2019) and Food, Climate and Health (2021), argues that the contribution of animal agriculture to greenhouse gases is severely underestimated. He points out its role in eutrophication — nutrient pollution that degrades lake and marine ecosystems, harming both biodiversity and nearby property values.

Animal farming requires vast resources: water, grains, hay, medicines, and space. Isomäki notes that 80% of agricultural land is devoted to livestock, and most of the crops we grow are fed to animals rather than people. Transport, slaughter, and the distribution of perishable meat further exacerbate the emissions. Official estimates put meat and other animal products at causing around 20% of global emissions, but Isomäki warns the real figure could be higher — particularly when emissions from manure-induced eutrophication are misclassified under energy or natural processes rather than livestock.

Antibiotic Resistance and Zoonotic Pandemics: The Hidden Cost of Meat

A more urgent and potentially deadly consequence of animal agriculture is the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and new viruses. 80% of all antibiotics produced globally are used in livestock — primarily as preventative treatment against diseases caused by overcrowded, unsanitary conditions. Even in Finland, where preventive use is officially banned, antibiotics are still prescribed on dubious grounds, as journalist Eveliina Lundqvist documents in Secret Diary from Animal Farms (2014).

This misuse of antibiotics accelerates antibiotic resistance, a serious global health threat. Simple surgeries have become riskier due to resistant bacterial infections. During the COVID-19 pandemic, roughly half of the deaths were linked not directly to the virus but to secondary bacterial pneumonia that antibiotics failed to treat. Isomäki (2021) emphasises that without resistance, this death toll might have been drastically lower.

Moreover, the close quarters of industrial animal farming create ideal conditions for viruses to mutate and jump species — including to humans. Early humans, living during the Ice Age, didn’t suffer from flu or measles. It was only after the domestication of animals roughly 10,000 years ago that humanity began facing zoonotic diseases — diseases that spread from animals to humans.

Smallpox, Conquest, and the Pandora’s Box of Domestication

This shift had catastrophic consequences. In the late 15th century, European colonizers possessed an unintended biological advantage: exposure to diseases their target populations had never encountered. Among the most devastating was smallpox, thought to have originated in India or Egypt over 3,000 years ago. Spread through close contact among livestock, it left distinct scars on ancient victims like Pharaoh Ramses V, whose mummy still bears signs of the disease.

When Spanish conquistadors reached the Aztec Empire in 1519, smallpox killed over three million people. Similar destruction followed in the Inca Empire. By 1600, the Indigenous population of the Americas had dropped from an estimated 60 million to just 6 million.

Europe began vaccinating against smallpox in 1796 using the cowpox virus. Still, over 300 million people died globally from smallpox in the 20th century. Finland ended smallpox vaccinations in 1980. I personally received the vaccine as an infant before moving to Nigeria in 1978.

From COVID-19 to Fur Farms: How Modern Exploitation Fuels Pandemics

The SARS-CoV-2 virus might have originated in bats, with an unknown intermediate host — maybe a farmed animal used for meat or fur. China is a major fur exporter, and Finnish fur farmers have reportedly played a role in launching raccoon dog (Nyctereutes procyonoides) farming in China, as noted by Isomäki (2021).

COVID-19 has been shown to transmit from humans to animals, including pets (cats, dogs), zoo animals (lions, tigers), farmed minks, and even gorillas. This highlights how human intervention in wildlife and farming practices can turn animals into vectors of global disease.

Are Our Brains Wired to Ignore Global Crises?

Why do humans act against their environment? Perhaps no one intentionally destroys nature out of malice. No one wants polluted oceans or deforested childhood landscapes. But the path toward genuine, large-scale cooperation is elusive.

The post argues that we are mentally unprepared to grasp systemic, large-scale problems. According to Dunbar’s number, humans can effectively maintain social relationships within groups of 150–200 people — a trait inherited from our village-dwelling ancestors. Our brains evolved to understand relationships like kinship, illness, or betrayal within tight-knit communities — not to comprehend or act on behalf of seven billion people.

This cognitive limitation makes it hard to process elections, policy complexity, or global consensus. As a result, people oversimplify problems, react conservatively, and mistrust systems that exceed their brain’s social bandwidth.

Summary: A Call for Compassionate Comprehension

The destruction of biodiversity, the misuse of antibiotics, the threat of pandemics, and climate change are not isolated crises. They are symptoms of a deeper disconnect between human behavior and ecological reality. While no one wants the Earth to perish, the language and actions needed to protect it remain elusive. Perhaps the real challenge is not just technical, but psychological — demanding that we transcend the mental architecture of a tribal species to envision a truly planetary society.

References

Gates, B. (2021). How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need. Alfred A. Knopf.

Isomäki, R. (2019). Miten Suomi pysäyttää ilmastonmuutoksen. Into Kustannus.

Isomäki, R. (2021). Ruoka, ilmasto ja terveys. Into Kustannus.

Lundqvist, E. (2014). Salainen päiväkirja eläintiloilta. Into Kustannus.

Our World In Data. (n.d.). Greenhouse gas emissions by sector. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

Statistics Finland. (n.d.). Greenhouse gas emissions. Retrieved from https://www.stat.fi/index_en.html

Zen and the Art of Dissatisfaction – Part 15

/ Mikko Ijäs / Jätä kommentti

The Climate Story, The End of Holocene Stability 

Throughout human history, never before has the capital of states been as urgently needed as it is today. Canadian journalist, author, professor, and activist Naomi Klein, in her book On Fire (2020), argues that the accumulated wealth of the fossil fuel industry should be redirected as soon as possible to support the development of new, greener infrastructure. This process would also create new jobs. Similarly, Klein proposes a novel state-supported project whereby citizens help restore natural habitats to their original condition.

Originally published in Substack https://substack.com/history/post/164484451

In my public talks on climate, I often present a chart illustrating climate development in relation to the evolution of our species. The climate has warmed and cooled several times during the existence of Homo sapiens. Those who justify their privileged business-as-usual lifestyles often wrongly exploit this detail, because the rapid changes and fluctuations have always been deadly. 

From the Miocene Epoch to the Rise of Humans

The chart begins in the Miocene epoch, shortly before the Pliocene, a geological period lasting from about 5.3 to 2.6 million years ago. Around the boundary of the Miocene and Pliocene, approximately six million years ago, the evolutionary paths of modern humans and chimpanzees diverged. During the Pliocene, the Earth’s average temperature gradually decreased. Around the middle of the Pliocene, the global temperature was roughly 2–3 degrees Celsius warmer than today, causing sea levels to be about 25 metres higher.

The temperature target of the Paris Agreement is to keep warming below +1.5 degrees Celsius. However, the countries that ratified the agreement have failed to meet this goal, and we are now headed back toward Miocene-era temperatures. Bill Gates (2021) reminds us that the last time the Earth’s average temperature was over four degrees warmer than today, crocodiles lived north of the Arctic Circle.

As the climate cooled and Africa’s rainforest areas shrank, a group of distant ancestors of modern humans adapted to life in woodlands and deserts, searching for food underground in the form of roots and tubers instead of relying on rainforest fruits. By the end of the Pliocene, the Homo erectus, or upright humans, appear in the archaeological record. Homo erectus is the most successful of all past human species, surviving in various parts of the world for nearly two million years. The oldest Homo erectus remains date back about two million years from Kenya, and the most recent ones are around 110,000 years old from the Indonesian island of Java.

Homo erectus travelled far from their African birthplace, reaching as far as Indonesia, adapting to diverse natural conditions. They likely tracked animals in various terrains, exhausting large antelopes and other prey by running them down until they could be suffocated or killed with stones. The animals were then butchered using stone tools made on site for specific purposes.

The Pleistocene and the Emergence of Modern Humans

About one million years ago, the Pliocene gave way to the Pleistocene epoch, a colder period marked by significant fluctuations in the Earth’s average temperature. The Pleistocene lasted from around one million to roughly 11,500 years ago. It is best known for the Earth’s most recent ice ages, when the Northern Hemisphere was covered by thick ice sheets.

Modern humans appear in the archaeological record from the Pleistocene in present-day Ethiopia approximately 200,000 years ago. More recent, somewhat surprising discoveries near Marrakech in Morocco suggest modern humans may have lived there as far back as 285,000 years ago. This indicates that the origin of modern humans could be more diverse than previously thought, with different groups of people of varying sizes and appearances living across Africa. While symbolic culture is not evident from this early period (285,000–100,000 years ago), it is reasonable to assume these humans were physically and behaviourally similar to us today. They had their own cultural traditions and histories and were aware political actors capable of consciously addressing challenges related to their lifestyles and societies.

Modern humans arrived in Europe about 45,000 years ago, towards the end of the last ice age. Their arrival coincided with the extinction of Neanderthals, our closest evolutionary relatives. Archaeological dates vary slightly, but Neanderthals disappeared either 4,000 or up to 20,000 years after modern humans arrived. There are multiple theories for their disappearance. In any case, modern humans interbred with Neanderthals, as evidenced by the fact that around 2% of the DNA of present-day humans outside Africa derives from Neanderthals.

The Holocene: An Era of Stability and Agricultural Beginnings

The Pleistocene ended with the conclusion of the last ice age and the beginning of the Holocene, around 11,500 years ago. The transition between these epochs is crucial to our discussion. The Pliocene was a period of steady cooling, while the Pleistocene featured dramatic temperature swings and ice ages. The Holocene ushered in a stable, warmer climate that allowed humans to begin experimenting with agriculture globally.

The steady temperatures of the Holocene provided predictable seasons and a climate suitable for domesticating and cultivating crops. I ask you to pay particular attention to the Holocene’s relatively stable temperatures—a unique period in the last six million years. Until the Holocene, our ancestors had lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers, moving to wherever food was available. Once a resource was depleted, they moved on.

This cultural pattern partly explains why modern humans travelled such great distances and settled vast parts of the planet during the last ice age. Only lions had previously spread as widely, but unlike lions, humans crossed vast bodies of water without fear. History has occasionally been marked by young reckless individuals, brimming with hormones and a desire to prove themselves (let’s call them “The Dudeson” types), who undertake risky ventures that ultimately benefit all humanity—such as crossing seas.

The stable Holocene climate also meant reliable rainfall and forest growth. Paleontologist and geologist R. Dale Guthrie (2005), who has studied Alaskan fossil records, describes the last ice age’s mammoth steppe. During that period, much of the Earth’s freshwater was locked in northern glaciers, leaving little moisture for clouds or rain. The mammoth steppe stretched from what is now northern Spain to Alaska, experiencing cold winters but sunny, relatively long summers. Humans, originating from African savannahs, thrived in this environment. Guthrie notes that ice age humans did not suffer from the common cold, which only emerged during the Holocene with domesticated animals.

The Anthropocene: Human Impact on Climate

The world as we know it exists within the context of Holocene. It is difficult to even imagine the conditions of the Pleistocene world. It is quite impossible for humans to even imagine what would the world be after the Holocene – and this moment is right now! Looking at the chart of global temperature history, we see that at the end of the Holocene, the temperature curve rises sharply. Since the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, global temperatures have steadily increased. Because this warming is undoubtedly caused by humans, some suggest naming the period following the Holocene the Anthropocene—an era defined by human impact.

There is no consensus on how the Anthropocene will unfold, but atmospheric chemical changes and ice core records show that rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels are a serious concern. Before industrialisation in the 1700s, atmospheric CO2 was about 278 parts per million (ppm). CO2 levels have steadily risen, especially since the 1970s, when it was 326 ppm. Based on the annual analysis from NOAA’s Global Monitoring Lab (Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii), global average atmospheric carbon dioxide was 422.8 ppm in 2024, a new record high. Other dangerous greenhouse gases produced by industry and agriculture include methane and nitrous oxide.

Greenhouse gases like CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide act like the glass roof of a greenhouse. They trap heat that would otherwise escape into space, reflecting warmth back to Earth’s surface. Industrial and agricultural emissions have altered atmospheric chemistry, causing global warming. This excess heat triggers dangerous feedback loops, such as increased water vapour in the atmosphere, which further amplifies warming by trapping more heat.

Monitoring atmospheric changes is essential for understanding our future. Because of climate system lags behind, temperatures are expected to continue rising for decades as ocean currents release stored heat. Eventually, temperatures will stabilise as excess heat radiates into space.

Climate Change, Food Security, and Global Uncertainty

A peer-reviewed article published in Nature Communications by Kornhuber et al. (2023) explores how climate change affects global food security. Changes in the atmosphere’s high-altitude jet streams, known as Rossby waves, directly impact crop production in the Northern Hemisphere. Climate change can cause these jet streams to become stuck or behave unpredictably, but current crop and climate models often fail to account for such irregularities.

The disruption of wind patterns due to ongoing warming could simultaneously expose major agricultural regions—such as North America, Europe, India, and East Asia—to extreme weather events. Global food production currently relies on balancing yields across regions. If one area experiences crop failure, others compensate. However, the risk of multiple simultaneous crop failures increases vulnerability. Since 2015, hunger in the Global South has grown alarmingly, with no clear solutions to climate-induced risks.

The greatest threat to humanity’s future may not be warming itself or extreme weather, but the uncertainty and unpredictability it brings. The Holocene was an era of safety and predictability, much like the Nile’s reliable flooding assured stability for ancient Egyptians. This stability provided a secure framework within which humanity thrived. Although crop failures have occurred throughout history, nothing compares to the potential loss of Holocene-era climatic reliability–nothing.

Conclusion

The climatic history of our planet and our species shows that we have lived through dramatic shifts—from the warm Miocene, through ice age Pleistocene swings, to the uniquely stable Holocene. It is this stability that enabled the rise of agriculture, settled societies, and civilisation. Today, human activity is destabilising this balance, pushing us into the uncertain Anthropocene.

Understanding this deep history is crucial for grasping the scale of the challenge we face. Climate change threatens the predictability that has underpinned human survival and food security for millennia. The future depends on our capacity to respond to these changes with informed, collective action, such as those Naomi Klein advocates: redirecting wealth and effort toward sustainable, green infrastructure and restoration projects.

References

Gates, B. (2021). How to avoid a climate disaster: The solutions we have and the breakthroughs we need. Penguin Random House.

Guthrie, R. D. (2005). The nature of Paleolithic art. University of Chicago Press.

Klein, N. (2020). On fire: The (burning) case for a green new deal. Simon & Schuster.

Kornhuber, K., O’Gorman, P. A., Coumou, D., Petoukhov, V., Rahmstorf, S., & Hoerling, M. (2023). Amplified Rossby wave activity and its impact on food production stability. Nature Communications, 14(1), 1234. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-XXX