Winner Winner Soy Meat Dinner!

You didn't say the word manipulate, or marketing, but nobody else did that I could see. You described it to define it as such.

Tobacco Company "Tactics" come from an advertising agency staffed with people skilled in Emotional Manipulation who know what buttons to push to get an emotional response as a Marketing Campaign for their client. Self-driven and successful at their job, as evidenced by the emotions expressed in posts.

And nobody the wiser for being manipulated the beauty in it.

Granted the numbers can't be precise as it is a complex system but it isn't like imagining a foot ruler is a yardstick. You are here quoted as saying ...

I read that as you estimating "1 order of magnitude (x10)" is the lowest value and "2" (x20) is your highest estimate. My estimates are higher than yours but apparently we agree the minimum is more than 1 order of magnitude (x10). x10, x20, or x30 qualifies as "multiple" or "many" from my POV. More to the point, the fact remains that the base claim that minimizing, even erasing, the meat industry would have powerful positive effects at reducing the rate of climate change is erroneous.

Oh, I see. Under my definitions, two orders of magnitude is x100 (three would be x1000, and so on). So we mean very different things when we say "orders of magnitude". x30 does not qualify as multiple for me. I can totally understand why you saw my post as pointless nitpicking if you actually meant x20-x50 by your original "many orders of magnitude" formulation. I had read that as meaning something like a ~x1000000 ratio.

I definitely don't consider 10/20/30 as orders of magnitude.

My definition is/was "any meaningful jump", where "meaningful" depends on the units but is generally achieved by adding one or more zeroes to the number.
For example: 1 b -> 1 kb would be 1 order of magnitude, whilst 1 b -> 1 mb would be 2 orders of magnitude.

Searching for a definition provides several sources that seem to be saying that it's how many zeros you add - i.e. multiplying by 10^OoM.
With that definition, 1 b -> 1 kb would be 3 orders of magnitude, whilst 1 b -> 1 mb would be 6 orders of magnitude.

Not sure how I feel about that, doesn't seem as useful, but anyhow...


Back on the subject, Our World in Data has an article with lots of stats about this:
https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food

I haven't had time to do more than briefly scan through it - do the numbers/conclusions there agree or disagree with what people here have been discussing?

Yes, unfortunately "Orders of Magnitude" is not a specific or uncontested term. Some use "order" as "to the exponent of" while others just use the arithmetic factor of 10. It is a rather "Tower of Babel" confusion. IIRC there was a time when Brits used 1,000,000,000,000 as "Billion" while USA used 1,000,000,000... several orders of magnitude whichever definition one adheres to. I don't know if or when that changed.

That's one thing the UK and US currently agree on - since 1974 both have officially used the 10^9 definition. Along with Ireland, the UK seems to be the only part of Western Europe to currently do so...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scale#Current_usage

I'm sorry, but it completely beggars my imagination to think that "the climate engine of our entire planet" could not properly handle ... ahem ... "farts."

Not a reliable source if they can't tell bacteria from archaea! In fact, 10% of our internal flora is provided by one methanogen, Methanobrevibacter smithii. (Eckburg et al. in Science 2005.06.10)

Deceit and Denial is a great book to read about these types of tactics, mainly about manufacturers of products containing lead or asbestos. Another thing to keep in mind is the distinction between theory and practice. In theory, roundup is a pesticide less toxic to humans than table salt. In practice it is not only used as a pesticide. It is also sprayed directly on harvested wheat as a dessicant or drying agent. That kind of reckless attitude has health consequences down the line.