I have not compered the atmospheric effects generated by cow flatulence and radioactive effects to see which is worse for the environment, but I suspect that the radioactivity is worse.
The estimates from ten years ago seem convincing to me, see the following web site.

http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/te_1591_web.pdf

The first line trench was that there was no global warming at all, that global temperatures were either unchanging, or actually getting cooler.

The second line of defense was that it was all caused by climatologists who could only get their studies funded and papers
published if they hopped on some global warming bandwagon.

When that trench line was breached it all morphed into a leftist plot, masterminded by UN bureaucrats and liberal government agencies in order to undermine the economy and freedom of the capitalist West, particularly the USA. I call this the “black helicopter” defense.

Then came the “Natural Causes” defense, that global warming, IF it existed, was either partially or wholly the result of natural causes. I’ve heard solar variability, cosmic rays, and several other proposals made. None stood up to scrutiny.

Meanwhile, all the multiple lines of evidence, be they glacial studies, atmospheric CO2 assays, dissolved air bubbles in polar ice cores, biogeographical studies, weather records, or other lines of evidence have been systematically attacked, mostly by cherry-picking outlier studies (as exist in any form of scientific inquiry)taken out of context. This has all been masterminded by an industry with enormous amounts of money to spend to protect their interests and profits, and a political philosophy that seems to care about nothing but that their taxes might go up. Its a lot like the tobacco industry’s attempt to prove the cancer studies were all wrong; in fact, a lot of the same personalities and PR firms were involved.

This is why I have concentrated on the polar satellite studies published by NSIDC and which I post here every month. One sensor, one set of one kind of data, an unbroken yearly record which can be plotted on one set of graphs; all of them showing a month-by-month, year-by-year, gradual but undeniable drop in the N polar cap over the last 35 years. The data jumps around in fits and starts, but the trend is clear: Since the satellites have been flying the summer N polar icecap has shrunk about 40%. There are many other lines of evidence, of course, but this one is the hardest to deny with a straight face. Over the last 4 decades, the low-ice summer record is broken on the average, about every 5 years. The last time was in 2012. If this continues at this rate, we will have our first ice-free Arctic ocean summer by about the middle of this century. My guess is it will come much earlier.

The bad news is that humans are the cause. It is not “natural causes”. The good news is that it is not just about fossil fuels, much of the change can probably be blamed on deforestation, destruction of the rain-forest, ocean pollution and other causes not directly related to energy production. Cheap beef requires a lot of acreage and energy to produce, and no doubt bovine flatulence plays a role.

More good news: the end will not be an apocalyptic runaway climate holocaust that will destroy the planet. As I have argued here many times before, the earth has endured much worse what with asteroid strikes, ice ages, volcanic eruptions, continental drift and what not. Much more likely will be a continuous degradation of climate resulting in more severe weather patterns, more violent flooding, jet stream shifts and droughts, fires, more frequent storms, and changes in their inevitable result; agricultural damage which will result in hunger, industrial and economic distress, war, civil strife, political conflict, resource wars, hell, you’re seeing some of it now.

I also think it may be too late to stop this. There is no law we can pass or treaty we can sign that can turn this around in much less than a human lifetime, and the price we will have to pay is going to be stiff. But to actually fight and lobby and pretend nothing is happening simply because it might cost us some profits is unconscionable. Our posterity will never forgive us. And it won’t be because we made mistakes. It will be because we were too lazy or too greedy to admit it.

Earth will have its own built-in corrective feedback response. The mess we are making of the climate will cause our industry to sputter and fail, and the very cause of the problem will wither away.

I know that congress is filled with stupid incompetents, but even so, what percentage deny that climate change is real? Isn’t the dispute about the cause of change rather than the existence of change. The evidence of change is factual and undeniable. There are those who believe that posturing humans as the primary cause is a hoax.

I don’t think it is a hoax and I am sure that we have contributed to the change. I also believe that the change is more natural than human, and that the whole thing is problematic, but not apocalyptic.