I will leave the health discussion aside, because those conversations often boil down to feelings, but I will disagree on the dismissal of climate impacts, because I believe those are established facts.

If you have chicken in your back yard that you decide to kill and eat, I don't think the climate is going to be bothered. But the large-scale production of meat for an increasing global appetite is causing climate harm. And as with anything large-scale, this system serves the aggregated individual lifestyles of billions of humans, including most of us.

Processing plant nutrients through animals is much more resource-intensive than directly consuming those same input nutrients, and, it's the emissions concomitant with our massive resource consumption that cause today's climate change.

I've cherry-picked the following nuggets from the peer-reviewed article "Meat consumption, health, and the environment" in Science, from 2018 (I should give it a full read!). The figures there are illuminating too. Emphasis mine.

Meat produces more emissions per unit of energy compared with that of plant-based foods because energy is lost at each trophic level. Within types of meat, ruminant production usually leads to more emissions than that of nonruminant mammals, and poultry production usually leads to less emissions than that of mammals.

Animal-sourced foods are the major source of food-system GHGs, and their relative importance is likely to increase in the future (43)

(From figure 3, you can see that red meat production alone produces more greenhouse gasses than poultry, eggs, dairy, staples, fruits & vegetables combined).

Using the composite measure of CO2 equivalents (CO2e), livestock production is responsible for ~15% of all anthropogenic emissions (51).

Meat production is the single most important source of methane, which has a relatively high warming potential but a low half-life in the environment compared with that of CO2.

Agriculture uses more freshwater than any other human activity, and nearly a third of this is required for livestock, so meat production in water-stressed areas is a major competitor with other uses of water, including that required to maintain natural ecosystems.

Nitrogen and phosphorus in animal manure contribute to nutrient loads in surface and groundwater, harming aquatic ecosystems and human health (64).

The most substantial direct way in which meat production affects biodiversity is through land conversion to agriculture (Fig. 4C)

(that would include cutting down huge swaths of the Amazon forest carbon sink to replace them with methane-producing cattle)

I personally became vegan partly due to the documentary Cowspiracy from 2014, which explored many of these trends, but it seems it received criticism for being heavily biased as a vegan activist film, misrepresenting science for that cause.

Hey, thanks for the info! Will check it out when on the treadmill. I’m not advocating for any one eating style. I have never been a big meat eater and could not imagine my life without endless vegetables. Bottom line, find what works for you and enjoy it!