I don’t have much comment on this, as the press worldwide has pretty much said it all. I await the coming comparisons between, ahem, human emissions, and dinosaur emissions.
Click image for the story.It’s another modeling extrapolation. From the article:
==============================================================
Scientists believe that, just as in cows, methane-producing bacteria aided the digestion of sauropods by fermenting their plant food.
”A simple mathematical model suggests that the microbes living in sauropod dinosaurs may have produced enough methane to have an important effect on the Mesozoic climate,” said study leader Dr Dave Wilkinson, from Liverpool John Moores University.
”Indeed, our calculations suggest that these dinosaurs could have produced more methane than all modern sources – both natural and man-made – put together.”
==============================================================
Something smells alright – the stench of extrapolation is overpowering.
It says the paper was published in Current Biology, but I can’t find it. Anyone know where to get a copy?
UPDATE: The BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/17953792
British scientists have calculated the methane output of sauropods, including the species known as Brontosaurus.
By scaling up the digestive wind of cows, they estimate that the population of dinosaurs – as a whole – produced 520 million tonnes of gas annually. They suggest the gas could have been a key factor in the warm climate 150 million years ago.
“520 million tonnes”, that’s all? That seems in error. They obviously mean 520 teragrams. (/sarc from the paper – they quote teragrams, which sounds much bigger for MSM scare stories, but I guess they needed some unit people could get their nose around)
Here’s figure 1 from the paper:
The paper itself is a marvel of weak extrapolation:
Link to excerpt of curent “Current Biology” issue, showing the full article:
http://download.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/PIIS0960982212003296.pdf
Could methane produced by sauropod dinosaurs
have helped drive Mesozoic climate warmth?
David M. Wilkinson1,*, Euan G. Nisbet2, and Graeme D. Ruxton3
Mesozoic sauropods, like many modern herbivores, are likely to have
hosted microbial methanogenic symbionts for the fermentative
digestion of their plant food [1]. Today methane from livestock is a
significant component of the global methane budget [2]. Sauropod
methane emission would probably also have been considerable. Here,
we use a simple quantitative approach to estimate the magnitude of such
methane production and show that the production of the ‘greenhouse’
gas methane by sauropods could have been an important factor in warm
Mesozoic climates. Sauropod dinosaurs include the largest terrestrial animals known
and exhibit a distinctive body shape, featuring a small head at the end
of a very long neck. Their diversity and geographic range suggest that
sauropods may have been keystone species in many ecosystems during
the Jurassic and Cretaceous [1]. Based in part on data from the
Late Jurassic Morrison Formation (Western USA), Farlow et al. [3]
estimated population densities for sauropods ranging from a few
large adult animals to a few tens of individuals per km2. Specifically,
they estimate that if dinosaurs had an endothermic, mammalian-style
metabolism, then the total abundance of these megaherbivores would
have been 11–15 animals/km2 with a total biomass density of around
42,000 kg/km2. It is, however, very unlikely that large-bodied sauropods
had metabolisms as high as predicted by the assumption of mammalian
metabolism [1]. If instead a reptilian metabolism in assumed, then Farlow
et al. [3] calculate a predicted biomass density of 377,000 kg/km2.
————————-
Per Caddyshack, I think we have a new exclamation, “Oh, dinosaur farts!”
Best not to say it during a thunderstorm climate disruption.
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A few years ago I read a book ” Dinosaur Heresies” by Robert T. Bakker, and in that book he detailed his theory (?) that dinosaurs are more closely related to modern chickens and birds than reptiles. If you look at the digestive system of a chicken they use a crop to break down food, instead of using multiple stomachs to ferment their food like cows do. Chickens don’t fart http://www.fartingchickens.com/dochicksfart.htm . I am not a paleontologist, so perhaps sauropods are different, and use a different digestive system. Interesting to think about, but I am not going to lose any sleep over it.
It seems that if all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. But isn’t this hitting below the belt?
This deserves the Josh prize of the month!!
I will keep it treasured with the other warmist papers that deserve the prize:
1) http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v3/n6/full/ngeo877.html
“Methane emissions from extinct megafauna” – caused the ice age to end not CO2. Shaviv is shown in error by warmistas!
But alas we humans killed the megafauna and caused the Younger Dryas.
What the paper does not solve is who started the farting end of Younger Dryas.
Willis had a take on it here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/27/anthropogenic-decline-in-natural-gas/
2) Then the europeans causing the little ice age colonising the Americas:
“A team comprised of geological and environmental science researchers from Stanford University has been studying the impact that early European exploration had on the New World and have found evidence that they say suggests the European cold period from 1500 to 1750, commonly known as the Little Ice Age, was due to the rapid decline in native human populations shortly after early explorers arrived”
http://phys.org/news/2011-10-team-european-ice-age-due.html
And
3) the green conqueror itself:
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/climate-weather/stories/was-genghis-khan-historys-greenest-conqueror
and now a new green-pearl to my collection!!
I have two questions–one directly related, the other indirectly related.
I have asked them before, but have never seen an answer (for what ever reason).
I have searched for an answer on my own, and either am just plain wrong, or don’t know how to search for it. If somebody will acknowledge here having seen the questions, I’ll stop asking.
I think I saw, withing the last month or two an article (which I little noted and dismissed at the time) saying that through some mechanism the warming could be stopped by injecting methane (dinosaur and cow and ….. farts and outgassing) and particulate carbon (backyard incinerator smoke, London coal smoke, Denver stove smoke).
Did I imagine that? I wish I’d paid more attention to it but at the time I was absolutely sure the ideas would be shredded by the people that actually know what they are talking about and that I would be tired of the subject before it left the scene.
I worry about my sanity.
I wonder if the Dinosaur Fart Extinction Theory should be taught in school along with the Meteor Impact Extinction Theory.
Something tells me Walter Alvarez’s theory remains relatively safe.
The light begins to dawn.
I mounted the search for the injected methane thing and Bing found one reference (that included mention of sulphate aerosols (“acid rain”) injections) at a globalwarmingmlight.blogspot.com that does not exist anymore.
I think I have been rickrolled or something.
I’ll just grab coat there–I can let myself out.
“Assume that animal guts will always evolve to get the maximum nutrition per pound of food eaten”
You definitely can’t do that. Only ruminants (=most Artiodactyla) have highly efficient digestive systems that produce large amounts of methane. Most plant-eaters (e. g. horses, kangaroos, elephants, birds) make do with much less efficient systems and produce much less methane.
There is absolutely no evidence that sauropods were ruminants, and their anatomy (e. g. their teeth) makes it extremely unlikely that they could have been. As already noted dinosaur digestive systems seem to have been somewhat bird-like, so ostriches or geese are probably better analogs than cows. And yes, plantreating birds do produce methane, but vastly less than ruminants like cows.
Outside of being very funny, this type of article causes me to wonder if Spike Milligan is really dead.
WTF@Reality
Heggs
And they know how many dinos lived at any given time how? We don’t even have a handle on how many animals are on the planet today.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/dinosaurs/9250060/Suburban-dinosaur-discovered-outside-Melbourne.html
Speaking of fart knockers…..
There are a couple of things I draw from this paper.
1. The contribution of Methane to temperatures would have been around 0.05 (Idso 1998 / Lindzen & Choi 2011) to 0.4 degrees (IPCC central estimate).
2. The much higher temperatures and CO2 levels lead more abundant vegetation = a much greater animal mass being supported.
http://manicbeancounter.com/2012/05/07/dinosaur-flatulence-caused-pre-historic-warming/
How? Methane is lighter than air and doesn’t hang around in the atmosphere – as a ‘greenhouse gas’ absorbing heat it becomes even lighter taking the heat away from the surface..
..just as carbon dioxide does in the water cycle.
Daddy, what do you do at work?
I measure dinosaur farts.
But daddy, dinosaurs are dead
Shhhhush…I need this grant.
Daddy, whatsa grant?
It’s what you get for counting dinosaur farts.
“Specifically,
they estimate that if dinosaurs had an endothermic, mammalian-style
metabolism, then the total abundance of these megaherbivores would
have been 11–15 animals/km2”
My Arse!
Smallest elephant herds are about a dozen animals and need at least 12k m2. I doubt very much you could support 11-15 6 ton elephants per km2, let alone 11-15 90 ton dinosaurs!
Good logic. I mean, if there were that many dino’s you’d expect to find a much larger amount of fossil bones waiting to be dug up.
I’m gonna say, whatever they might be, these guys aren’t ranchers. From the article:
Now, 42,000 kg/km2 works out to be about 375 pounds per acre. An average cow weighs about 1000 pounds. That means they are figuring about TWO AND A HALF ACRES PER COW … get real. You can get that on irrigated pastureland, but not on range land. On range land, the usual numbers are more like twenty to a hundred acres per cow. So their claim is exaggerated by more than an order of magnitude.
Also, they say that a given area can sustain nearly ten times the weight of lizards as it can of cows … what is the theoretical justification for that? I mean, I know that it takes energy to stay warm, but that would mean that 9/10ths of our energy is expended keeping warm … does that make sense? Seems high …
w.
fred houpt says:
May 7, 2012 at 10:22 am
“I am assuming here that the hydrocarbons released by trees is mostly when they die and decompose”
Contrariwise. Living and healthy trees (especially conifers and eucalypts) release large amounts of volatile hydrocarbons, particularily in warm weather, Ever notice the smell in a pine forest in summer? Some of that stuff really is toxic by the way, but mostly to other trees since plants engage in extensive chemical warfare with competitors.
Back in the 80’s when I was working on the environmental effects of aircraft I heard that the Swedish environmental authorities were thinking of simplifying the rules on organic pollutants and were considering a general rule prohibiting organic aerosols above a certain level. However any level that would work for reasonably toxic organics would also make pine forests illegal, particularily after a rain, so they had to give it up.
Personally I don’t worry about how pines smell (I rather like it), neither do I worry about these deadly particles EPA is so excited about. My ancestors have lived for millions of years in envronments that were both dusty and full of smelly trees, so if they did not adapt to it I wouldn’t be here.
.
We were told that animals were to shrink with global warming. Did these animals shrink after their fart induced, permanent heatwave?
I guarantee you that bovine burps are far more voluminous than their farts. If you stand with cattle when they rest from feeding and are chewing their cuds, you’ll note a gentle, near-continuous flow of grass-flavored gas from their mouths from the fermentation taking place in their rumens. It’s like the primary fermentation of beer. Cattle live mostly on the fatty acids from the bacteria that ferment the fodder.
I’ve never heard a cow fart unless it had the scours.
UK BBC Radio four had this on when I was driving home from work today. I don’t normally listen to that pile of sh*te government propaganda station but I mistuned my radio. It actually had the Professor guy on, spouting his nonesense. This is publicly funded radio and if I hadn’t become outraged at the mass deception and lies some years ago this probably would have pushed me over the edge, causing a shouting-at-the-radio moment, while driving (never good).
A lot of people like radio 4 because it’s more in-depth, more intellectual. I used to like it. But it’s full of the same sh*t as the rest of the so-called media. This is a good example of how various different media outlets all run with the same story on the same day, but if you look at how many hands are behind that, it is not many.
It really shows how badly ‘science’ and media and banking and politics and industry have become tied in the terrible tangle that Eisenhower warned us about. And what does it say about ‘their’ estimation of our intelligence, these eliteists who push this stuff? But hey, they might be right (about our intelligence):
Conversation on bus next day:
Man 1 – “Turns out the dinosaurs caused their own extinction by farting too much and causing global warming – saw it in the Sun/Daily Mail/Express/Telegraph”.
Man 2 – “Yeah, I saw/heard that on the BBC/Sky/Whatever”.
Basically both men go away having had their opinions ‘confirmed’. See what the controlled media have done there?
Full dislosure: I did light my own farts at scout camp. Did I mitigate my emissions? 🙂
Kid next door: Whats your dad do?
He gets grants
Whatsa grant?
I dono but I stand upwind from him now.
“Dr Wilkinson and colleague Professor Graeme Ruxton, from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, began to wonder about Mesozoic methane while investigating sauropod ecology. ..”
as they helped their eighth grade children with a class Climate Change Research project.
Anyone know what the approx animal population of the word was say 5000 years ago when the human population was tiny? Many milions of bison and billions of other animals, together with nature prodcing just as much co2 as today-probably more-could have a similar effect to the dinosaurs.
Whether or not it is true is another thing of course, although to be fair the scientist involved in the dinosaur study when interviewed by the BBC said illustrating the amount of methane produced was a very different thing to proving it had any effect on the climate.
tonyb
fred houpt says:
May 7, 2012 at 10:22 am
This lopsided logic also came from the same man who felt it his mission in life to liberate the people of Nicaragua by funding a band of terrorists squads (aptly named ‘freedom fighters’).
Ya I agree fred liberation, freedom and all is a bitch. Not worth fighting for. NOT.
Get your facts right.
One is sorely tempted to fight fire with fire (or, as it were, dino poo with BS) and subject these guys to Freudian anal(!)ysis: “Climate alarmists seem to be mentally arrested at the anally-fixated state…”
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Trees_cause_pollution
“Reagan’s statement was disingenuous because volatile organic compounds produced by trees do not cause pollution any more than the sun causes pollution. Reagan might as well have said, “the sun causes more pollution than automobiles do”. Photochemical ozone pollution is created when automobile and power plant pollution is broken down by strong sunlight in the presence of any number of volatile organic compounds. “