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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fred houpt says:
May 7, 2012 at 10:22 am
@ur momisugly MarkW: You wrote “The only difference is that Reagan was right. The hydrocarbons released into the atmosphere by trees, was much larger than the amount released by autos.” It is so long ago I forget the nitty gritty of that argument. I am assuming here that the hydrocarbons released by trees is mostly when they die and decompose. For me that insanity of his comment…
__________________________
Your assumption is incorrect.
The rest of your post is a screed of similar bent.
Thus, you are presented with an opportunity to reflect on how political bias can color one's perception of reality.
Al gore has got to stop talking out of his “A” two snakes, or we are all doomed.
fred houpt says:
May 7, 2012 at 10:22 am
Pine trees release hydrocarbons every day that they are alive, in copious amounts. Other types of trees do as well, just not as much.
The contras were not terrorists, though the real terrorists, the Sandinistas loved to label them as such. The usefull idiots on these shores loved to repeat the left wing propadanda.
Do I smell an attack on our carnivorous habits?
Sorry to continue the off topic dialog, but bad information has to be countered.
It’s funny how the people of Nicauragua voted for those so called terrorists in large numbers, once the Sandinistas were forced into allowing real elections.
fred houpt says:
May 7, 2012 at 12:40 pm
As Reagan once said, there you go again.
Reagan made this statement in the middle of a debate regarding massive changes to cars in order to get them to emit fewer hydrocarbons. Reagan was just pointing out that it was useless to go to such extremes to regulate auto emissions while ignoring the much, much, bigger emissions from trees.
You are so invested in the Reagan was an idiot myth that it is causing you to say stupid things in defense of it.
It is easy to debunk this article by proxy global temperatures during the time and when these large dinosaurs walked the Earth. These large dinosaurs wondered the lands during the Jurassic period, roughly between 145 million and 200 million years ago.
There was none of these species found during the Triassic, so whats the problem you might be thinking here?
Well during the Triassic when none of the species lived, proxy global temperatures were shown to be slightly higher than the Jurassic period (at least at the beginning). So in fact temperatures cooled from the beginning of the Triassic until the end of the Jurassic. This occurred at the same time while CO2 levels were increasing.
Therefore this was no evidence these dinoasuars affected climate because during their presence on Earth global temperatures continued to decline. Between the beginning of the Triassic and the end of the Jurassic, global temperatures roughly declined 6c. The much warmer climate was obvious when the placement of the continents were considered.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/76/LateJurassicGlobal.jpg/240px-LateJurassicGlobal.jpg
Starts around the 27 minute mark on the PM programme on radio 4:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b01h646c
I heard that the vegetarian dinos tried to convince the meat eating dinos that eating meat caused warming that could lead to extinction. 🙂
The big problem I see with this study is it ignores the fact that if the sauropods were cold blooded they would eat less and produce less gas, and if they were warm blooded there would be fewer individuals. And last but not least we have no clue how many sauropods were around at a given time due to the nature of fossils. Basically had they consulted a paleobiologist, they would have been told how impossible this study was.
I Have two comments to this paper
1. This is whydinosaurs are ex Stinked.
2. I don’t know what university this person is from, but he needs to be expelled.
“And then one day one of them published a story about dinosaurs breaking wind. And that boys and girls, is when people stopped reading Newspapers altogether.”
The End
I rather like the idea of the Earth farting it’s way out of the Mesozoic into the Cenozoic. It certainly explains the current stench!
Warmists are sooooo desperate to keep the methane scare alive, so sad, so desperate…
Someone talked of “sauropod scatology.” But since we are talking about extinctions, it’s also “sauropod eschatology.”
(sorry, can’t help being Greek)
I can’t see the problem here, probably because I don’t understand the biology. If there were no dinosaurs, what would happen to all the plant material they would have eaten and turned into methane? Aren’t there plenty of other critters — bacteria and termites, for example —- which would have consumed the same plant material and converted it to methane? Wouldn’t these two methane producing life forms end up producing about the same amount of methane?
HA, HA,HA, HA, HA, HA,HA, HA,HA, [&etc. ~mod.]
We would need to quatify the total mass methane of that period with the modern area of nearly 7 billion humans and the sum total of all methane producing processes, before even attempting to exprapolate that dinosaur farts caused global warming, by over 10C more than today. Pumps (as they call them in northern England) are mainly nitrogenous anyway -over 85%. Methane is the least gas in passing wind
@Someone talked of “sauropod scatology.” But since we are talking about extinctions, it’s also “sauropod eschatology.”
That be me … I suppose to extend the alliteration we could go with:
Sauropod scatology eructs eschatology.
Kids, so the next time your mother tells you to eat your vegetables, you can tell them no because you’re trying to save the planet!
Stick around long enough and one recognises that all these stories keep being recycled. Here’s a news item from the year 2000
Friday, 28 July, 2000, 16:04 GMT 17:04 UK
Ill wind ‘killed dinosaurs’
The dinosaurs were not wiped out by a comet or asteroid impact or some other planetary catastrophe but by a serious flatulence problem, according to research quoted in a Chinese news report.
Dinosaur wind contained a high proportion of methane gas – powerful enough to damage the ozone layer, said the China Youth Daily quoting a French scientist.
“The animals, weighing from 80 to 100 tonnes, would eat on average between 130 and 260 kilos of food every day. They would fart non-stop,” said the traditionally austere paper.
snip
China Youth Daily did not identify the French scientist behind the latest theory.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/855813.stm
At least now we finally know the cause of man-made global warming.
Jurasic Park!
The “Brontosaurus” didn’t exist. It was an error made by putting the skull of a Camarasaurus, upon the headless skeleton of an Apatosaurus.
http://www.unmuseum.org/dinobront.htm
However, a we seeing a shift away from CO2 being the bogeyman, to Methane?
This could finally explain how the Pterodactyls became airborne. I wonder if they had afterburners? This bright crew should be encouraged to study this.
When useful idiots are making mistakes I never correct them. I encourage them to do more of the same.. Some eventually figure out that they are being used, but generally they are the last to figure out what is going on. They are cruelly surprised when their masters dump them after they have become a laughing stock.
Louis says:
May 7, 2012 at 9:40 am
”Indeed, our calculations suggest that these dinosaurs could have produced more methane than all modern sources – both natural and man-made – put together.”
—
Are they claiming that methane producing bacteria can’t exist outside of dinosaur stomachs? What happened to the plants that were not eaten by dinosaurs? Did they never ferment or decompose and produce methane unless they were eaten?
______________________
The plants got squashed into coal (along with the methane) and that is why our kindly Green leaders like the EPA say we mustn’t play with the black rocks called coal because we could release all those unused dinosaur farts….
Well it makes as much sense as a lot of the stuff I have read including this bird cage liner and recent EPA regs.