August 21, 2025

Bruno Telemans
Yewon Sung
FAO Headquarters
Viale delle Terme di Caracalla
00153 Rome, Italy

Dear Bruno Telemans, Yewon Sung,

Thank you very much for your letter politely declining our request for a side event at the FAO Global Conference on Sustainable Livestock Transformation. We sent you a proposal for a parallel event, in the hope that the latest scientific research would be welcomed, particularly in the light of the recent Nature publication, “The Other Climate Crisis”; this paper identified major regional discrepancies between comprehensive climate model predictions and the observational record, with many surprises where climate signals were the opposite of what was expected [1]. This leads to the inevitable conclusion that contemporary climate science is far from settled, and that the reality is much more positive than is publicly perceived

We cannot fail to remind you that science seeks truth; and truth is discovered using the scientific method and not achieved by voting or consensus. That is why we cannot refrain from reminding you that the issues of climate change as being supposedly entirely a result of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and of the supposed livestock influence on this phenomenon are critical scientific questions, worthy of ongoing fundamental and applied research. We refer you to the attached recent paper by Professors Lindzen and Happer [2], and the Appendix to this letter. The latest climate research simply cannot be ignored.

At no point has science been a matter of majority opinion or even top-down decisions by legal authorities. We see that the FAO is running the risk of finding itself on the wrong side of history if it unethically suppresses free scientific discourse.

We therefore strongly recommend that FAO returns to its original mandate of eradicating hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition, eliminating poverty and driving forward economic progress for all, based on the latest objective climate research.

Sincerely yours,

Gregory Wrightstone, Executive Director, CO2 Coalition, expert reviewer of IPCC-AR6

Guus Berkhout, President of Clintel Foundation

Albrecht Glatzle, Asociación Rural del Paraguay

James Ferguson, VMD, MS, MAR, ACT, ACVN, Professor Emeritus Univ. of Pennsylvania, School of Veterinary Medicine

Jim O’Brien, Chair of the Irish Climate Science Forum, expert reviewer of IPCC-AR6

Donal O’Callaghan, B.E. (Elec), PhD

William Happer, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Physics at Princeton University

William van Wijngaarden, Professor of Physics, York University, Canada

Blanca Parga Landa, Foro Iberoamericano Clima y Energía

Camino Limia, President of the World Association of Sustainable Livestock

Alfred Fast, President of the Federación de Cooperativas de Producción, Paraguay

cc. QU Dongyu, Thanawat Tiensin ,Timothy Robinson, Ermias Kebreab, Michelle Cain, Jun Murase, Ariella Glinni

See the complete letter here:

Open Letter to FAO 2025 09 26