Do people ever wonder how bovines haven’t caused the climate to go haywire in the past seeing that they have been farmed for thousands of years and when the worlds population was lower there were as many bovines in the wild.
Good question.
there's a book by a guy called Simon Fairlie called meat, a benign extravagance that has a section on climate change and ruminants.
The main greenhouse gas associated with livestock is methane, obviously, but we normally think of CO2 as the main green house gas. Methane survives in the atmosphere for a much sorter time, from memory tens of years compared to hundreds for CO2, but, it's a much more potent warming gas.
this raises several issues, first, comparing methane to CO2 is comparing apples to oranges, but scientists try to express the warming power of methane as an equivalent of 1kg of CO2, but the equivalence is not an exact science, so the figure is an arbitrary one. also, because methane is both short lived and more potent, removing methane from the equation has a potentially bigger and more immediate effect. The metaphor i heard used was that if you are warming up a room with both blow torches and hot water bottles, if the room is getting too hot, it makes sense to move the blow lamps out first, but the blow lamps go out very quickly, where as the hot water bottles stay hot for a long while, and even if you slow down the rate of warming by moving all the blow lamps, if you don't also move the hot water bottles, eventually it will end up too hot again, and this time it will be all down to the hot water bottles, and there will be no quick fix.
this is the issue with climate change, there have always been cattle, the methane emissions have not mattered because we weren't burning fossil fuels as well, now we are, and climate change is beginning to kick in, we start looking at the cows because politicians thing that people will give up their steak before they give up their cars. they're probably right.