Rasdorf, a small town in central Germany, has just hit the headlines because of exploding cows. To be accurate it wasn’t a bovine bomb but rather a build up of methane in a poorly ventilated cow shed. Static electricity ignited the mixture, blew off the roof and severely damaged a cow.

It’s a timely reminder that carbon dioxide is not the only climate-changing gas, and among the others, methane and nitrous oxide both have a strong connection with ruminant, grass-eating and cud-chewing animals.

And there are at least three and a half billion of these walking methane factories and slurry producers – that’s one for every two human beings.

These animals are responsible for about 40 percent of human-inspired methane, emitted mainly by belching, with the rest from rice growing and landfill sites, where, as natural gas, it’s sometimes flared off or used for generating electricity.

It’s likely that the problem will become more severe in the next two decades as the growing world population and increasing standard of living means that the demand for meat is steadily increasing. The number of cattle has doubled since 1950 and is now expected to double again by 2050.

The problem with methane is that it’s a more serious climate-changing gas than carbon dioxide, but thankfully, up to now, there’s been less of it about.

Unit for unit it’s 34 times more effective than CO2 over a period of 100 years. It lasts just over 12 years in the atmosphere as methane before degrading into carbon dioxide and water vapour, themselves serious climate change gases. Methane is bad news.

While the concentration of methane in the atmosphere stabilised for a while with the move away from landfill sites, it has started to rise again with the increase in cattle numbers and the fugitive gas that escapes at each of the thousands of wells sunk to frack gas, particularly in the USA.

All this would be bad enough but there’s an even bigger threat to come later in the century when the frozen methane in the sea bed, and on land around the Arctic, bubbles out even more strongly as the area warms up. We really don’t need that to happen.

And to make matters even worse, cattle manure produces nitrous oxide, another climate change gas. It really shouldn’t be known by its other name, laughing gas, as it lasts for 120 years, and is more than 300 times as potent as CO2 – so its helpful that it’s not as abundant, though with more animals in the future there will be many more cow pats.

There’s surely a very strong case for eating less red meat.