[chrisco255]

> Nobody is saying that cattle are the sole cause of climate change.

I'm asserting they have zero effect on climate change, they have merely supplanted wild biomass that existed on a much broader scale for tens of millions of years and there is no evidence that an abundance of mammalian digestion has ever caused climate change in the 50+ million years that mammals have dominated life on earth.

> The point isn't that cows are a problem. It's that we've created a whole bunch of cows, very rapidly, without any corresponding plant life to offset the excess emissions they produce.

The only thing we've done is supplant wild mammals with domesticated mammals. In the absence of agriculture or even humans, mammals already dominated the planet.

As I referenced, wooly mammoths on one continent alone had a higher biomass than all the cows alive on the planet today. That is a completely extinct species, and there's hundreds of more extinct species where that came from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Pleistocene_extinctions

You'll have to explain to me how it was that the Pleistocene featured such a high biomass of ungulates without a corresponding increase in temperatures.

[scoofy]

>I'm asserting they have zero effect on climate change

This argument makes zero sense.

We know that the cattle produce methane via digestion. We know that methane is released into the atmosphere. We know that methane is a greenhouse gas. Thus, we know that these cattle, cattle that would otherwise not exist, are contributing to climate change.

This is a trivially demonstrable argument. The idea that you doubt it means that you are, at best, somehow deeply confused the relationship between GHG emission and climate change in general.

[chrisco255]

> This argument makes zero sense.

It makes perfect sense: the livestock methane has merely supplanted the wildlife methane that existed for 50 million years. In 50 million years of geological analysis on climate change, we have not documented one case where biological methane has triggered large scale climate change.

> Thus, we know that these cattle, cattle that would otherwise not exist, are contributing to climate change.

In the absence of cattle and especially in the absence of humans, other ruminants will naturally propagate, as they have a number of symbiotic relationships with various plant and animal species.

Ruminants have roamed the earth for 50+ million years, and they have been widely propagated in the hundreds of millions to billions of total global population for that entire time.

The Great Plains were filled with 60+ million American bison, a species which trends larger than cows themselves, but which is still so close genetically to cows that they can still breed together. Deer, antelope, elk, moose, sheep, goats, etc also have similar digestive systems and also existed in larger numbers in the wild prior to modern human expansion.