A new report examining more than a dozen of the Earth’s life-sustaining systems paints a pretty bleak picture. Published last week in BioScience, the seventh annual State of the Climate report shows how global warming is producing significant shifts in the planet’s overall health and destabilizing the climate as a whole.
Key climate indicators are going in the wrong direction: greenhouse gas emissions, sea level rise, glacier thickness, ice mass, and more. These shifts should no longer be taken as warning signs about some distant future, the authors write; instead, they amount to a “diagnosis” of how climate change is impacting the planet today — and where things will go if human behavior doesn’t change quickly or sufficiently enough.
Concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, stemming primarily from the burning of fossil fuels, hit record highs this year. Meanwhile, glacier thickness and Greenland ice mass are at record lows. Things are also not looking good for the Earth’s energy imbalance, a measure of how much energy the planet absorbs from the sun versus how much of that energy exits the atmosphere. This measure has been rising, a sign of how the planet, essentially, is heating up.
Of the 16 climate indicators examined by the authors, seven — or 44 percent — are at record extremes. The paper also discusses worrisome feedback loops, or how existing warming might be further accelerated by phenomena like wildfires or permafrost melting that release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and are themselves made more likely by climate change.
But the authors also wanted to delve into how human activities like agriculture, transportation, and energy usage — in other words, things within our control — contribute to climate change. Changes within our food system in particular present some of the easiest opportunities for individuals to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, especially methane.
That’s because some animals raised for human consumption — such as cattle, sheep, and goats — emit methane as part of their digestive process. These animals are called ruminants, and in 2024, there were more ruminant livestock than at any other point since the 1960s, according to the study. Per capita meat production also hit a record high in 2024.
These two figures reflect “important pressures from the global food system,” said William Ripple, professor of ecology at Oregon State University and one of the report’s lead authors. They point to meat’s growing role in our global diet, as well as the environmental cost of that shift. Ripple said they looked at ruminant livestock populations because methane is such a powerful greenhouse gas; it only stays in the atmosphere for roughly 10 years, but it is 28 times better than carbon dioxide at trapping heat. There is a silver lining to that, though: For these same reasons, reducing methane emissions is an effective tool to curb warming in the short term.
One way of doing that, clearly, is producing and eating less meat. “I think this is an important opportunity for climate action that sometimes gets overlooked,” said Ripple. “Shifting toward more plant-based diets, especially in countries with high meat consumption, could make a meaningful difference.”
Raising cattle for human consumption is also one of the main drivers of deforestation, which contributes to warming by eliminating carbon sinks. Timothy Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton University who studies the relationship between agriculture and the climate, noted that “we can’t solve climate change unless we stop” such clearing of carbon-rich habitats, “and we probably cannot stop that unless the world’s wealthy eat less meat, and particularly less beef.” (Searchinger was not involved in the report.)
He added, “Just eating 1.5 hamburgers a week on average instead of 3 is one of the basic ways Americans can help address climate change.”
Ripple and his co-authors also point out that such high levels of meat production create a wildly inefficient agricultural system, since cattle need so much land to graze and farmers are compelled to dedicate land to grow crops like corn and soy that ultimately go to feed cattle. That land could be used instead to grow carbon-sinking ecosystems or food that feeds people directly.
“At a time when climate change is threatening food security, we can hardly afford a food system that uses so much of its productive capacity inefficiently,” said Ripple.
The bottom line, he said, is that there is no way to address global warming without also making changes to what we eat and how it’s produced. “Our growing demand for meat is putting enormous pressure on the climate, land, and water at a time when all three are already under stress,” he said.
