Who’s the bad boy of greenhouse gasses? According to the worlds environmentalists its carbon dioxide (CO2), the gas that’s going to warm up the worlds oceans and melt the icecaps. The gas that we are all pumping out into the atmosphere every time we drive our cars or get on a plane or buy a piece of pre-packed meat, that’s one step closer to Kevin Costner’s Waterworld. Good old (CO2).

But did you know that (CO2) isn’t the main Big Daddy of Doom? That accolade lies with another commonly known gas called Nitrous Oxide (N2O) - which obviously uses a better press agent! In fact Nitrous Oxide is bad, 296 times as bad to be precise. Even worse, all of us who are doing our bit to go ‘Green’ and popping in to B&Q for a few bags of fertiliser to grow our organic veggies are contributing to the increase of this gas in our atmosphere. A prime growing soil must be rich in nitrates (plants absorb (N2O) from the atmosphere where it eventually returns to the soil); spread a bit of fertiliser or even good old manure and the result is a microbial breakdown of those nitrates which generates the gas Nitrous Oxide. This may be great for speed freaks who want to give their cars an extra boost round town but not apparently for our climate. It gets worse, according to Kite Consulting, 23% of a dairy farms carbon footprint comes from (N2O). The rest comes from methane at 52% and carbon dioxide at 25% (did I mention that methane has 20 times more global warming potential than (CO2)?

Even though (N2O) is estimated to be less than one-thousandth as abundant as carbon dioxide, the gas is nearly 300 times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide and has one of the longest atmosphere lifetimes of the greenhouse gases, lasting for up to 150 years which could have a major impact over and above that of (CO2).

Scientists at the University of Sheffield have recently discovered that stifling temperatures which existed 50 million years ago contained carbon dioxide levels no different than today's. Yet the planet was incredibly hot - much, much warmer than it is today concluding the reason was much more ozone, methane, and nitrous oxide in the atmosphere.

Should we be worried? Climate change is happening, and always will. Whether we are encouraging the effect will probably still be debated as the last iceberg melts into the boiling seas. Reducing the output of these gasses can only be a good thing, the bandwagon is well and truly rolling and our governments are rubbing their hands at the taxation possibilities. Like the Millennium Bug, nothing probably would have happened if billions weren’t spent on reconfiguring two digits on all time crucial systems, and nothing did -but was that because billions was spent on reconfiguring two digits on all time crucial systems?