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:
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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.”
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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.
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Per Caddyshack, I think we have a new exclamation, “Oh, dinosaur farts!”
Best not to say it during a thunderstorm climate disruption.
MarkW says:
May 7, 2012 at 10:05 am
fred houpt says:
May 7, 2012 at 9:47 am
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
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The study from PRINCETON UNIVERSITY: http://www.princeton.edu/pr/news/04/q3/0927-trees.htm
Seems all life is lethal.
Charles Dawson should have been knighted.
There are so many now following in his footsteps …
It is well known that dinosaur footprints are often found in coal mines, that is, they have a huge carbon footprint, which could well be consistent with the fact they went extinct. Need to say more?
Yeah I saw the article re Dinosaurs.
So now dinosaurs are to blame for Climate Change. Have they given up on pre-historic man for causing Climate Change? 🙂
Maybe the next research out will say all bipedal and quadrupedal carbon based lifeforms cause climate change.
Perhaps this was the origin of the dragon myth.
Dinosaurs burping and through some static electrical cause, the burp was ignited!
Yeah I know that by conventional wisdom, man & dinosaur never coincided but it’s fun to speculate as they have in this paper.
DaveE.
Pull my claw, ….
As Gallon’s link points out, dinosaur digestion was more like a bird’s, as seen from the gizzard stones found with the skeletons–one more piece of evidence that they were warm-blooded. Feathers is another. A fossilized four-chambered heart is another. The fact that they and their ancestry included the top predators is another. Cold blooded dinosaurs is a notion as good as the one that the brontosaurus was too big and unwieldy to stand on dry land. It was even suggested that it used its long neck like a snorkel, keeping its body underwater. Of course it would not have been able to inhale in that case, but these theories didn’t develop in the physics departments.
All big animals are warm blooded to some degree–body temperature is a function of mass, metabolism, surface area and insulation. The more pertinent questions pertain to metabolism and homeothermy. Here it should be recognized that exothermy or poikilothermy are not necessarily the primitive condition: in general the more primitive the fish, the higher its metabolism and temperature requirements. Sharks are primitive but relatively ferocious. Lungfish likewise have high metabolic rates, survive only in the tropics or semitropics, and chew their food! And they bark like birds and mammals (unlike modern reptiles).
The point being, the primary stock in vertabrate evolution has always been warm-blooded, while the metabolism required to retain this endothermy in ever expanding environments steadily improved due to the ever-present need to fight, chase, and escape–and fly. Frogs and lizards are not at all representive of the top gun predators that dominate the main chain of rapid evolutionary adaptation. Rather they are dropouts from the metabolic rat race, specialists that survive by not competing in the main arena. Lizards aren’t just energy efficient temperature wise, but they are inactive generally, hiding, resting, waiting for food to come to them, while existing on what would be starvation rations to birds and mammals. Likewise amphibians have metabolic rates that are a mere shadow of those of their ferocious ancestors.’ Some amphibians have even lost the need for lungs, while relying on dermal respiration.
No biologists understood this a century ago, and not too many do still. In some important respects humans are more closely related to lungfish than lizards are to either: we chew our food, we croak, we have moist skins, we have high temperature requirements, and even high metabolisms, taking into account our far superior heart and lungs. A lizard has the blueprint of a much better cardio-pulminary system than a lungfish, but like the frogs, its ancestors abandoned the top of the chain metabolism they once boasted. Lungfish have voracious appetites, totally unlike reptiles and amphibians, and they certainly did 390 million years ago.
Cold-blooded dinosaurs and CAGW go hand in hand–outlandish theories that should have been long since discarded. –AGF
But Pachauri wants us to meat less meat and more greens. What is one to do? Are beans OK?
On another matter:
http://notrickszone.com/2012/05/06/arctic-warming-has-nothing-to-do-with-co2-caused-by-sulfur-dioxide-from-russian-smelting/
To be fair to the scientist. BBC PM this evening was trying to say that Dinosaur farts caused global warming and when he was interviewed he stressed that was not the point of the paper, they were merely pointing out that dinos produced unexpectedly massive amounts of Methane.
Mad warmist science like this is exactly what we need to show the warmist slush funds circus for what it is. Bookmark it, send it to a warmist friend, ask him if he still feels comfortable about his luminaries.
All our skepticism is completely unnecessary. These ‘scientists’ continue to expose the absurdity of their own warming theories each day —no help needed from the bearers of common-sense.
Truly e-scat-alogical!
YEP @ur momisugly 1.38pm:
Sorry, just seen your post!
It is too bad that the authors have already aired this one out. It would have been an ideal submission to the Journal of Irreproducible Results (as would much of Jones’, Mann’s et al publications corpus of published work.) jir.com
Future scientists are SO going to make fun of our generation. School kids in the year 2100 will think that we’re all a bunch of morons. They’ll view us the same way we look at doctors in times past who bled patients to death to keep the from dying of viruses.
I remember that about thirty years ago I read a bit about a “dinosaurs farted themselves to extinction*” theory. Is this the same theory revived, or is a new one?
(*I forbear from the obvious puns.)
Living plants emit methane.
“Looking at methane sources in the right light
UV radiation and rising temperatures increase methane emissions from plants
May 27, 2008
Plants store one greenhouse gas, but emit another. Whereas they bind carbon dioxide, they release methane – albeit in small quantities. This has now been confirmed by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, the University of Utrecht and the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute in Belfast. In two new studies, they also established that some of the greenhouse gas comes from pectin, a substance that plants use to build their supporting structure. The studies went on to reveal that UV light boosts methane production – which also explains why some researchers were unable to identify any plant-based methane: they were growing plants under light sources that did not radiate UV. (New Phytologist, May 9, 2008 Biogeosciences in press)”
If dinosaur farts warmed the planet, then why did global cooling in the late Cretaceous account for the decline of the dinosaurs? Did they finally learn to hold it in?
This self-parody by the science establishment points to the bestial idiocy of the belief that only “greenhouse gasses” and nothing else can influence and change climate, and that humans or – failing that – other animals, have to accept the BLAME.
So continental configuration, ocean currents, mountain range uplift, volcanism, cosmic rays etc can all now be ignored, since no-one can be blamed for any of these?
This has moved away from rational science deep into the territory of religion, no factor will be considered as affecting climate if there is not a direct link of moral culpability to a human or other sentient animal.
So all farting herbivores are now weapons of mass destruction?
Or, maybe, weapons of gastric ruption.
Catastrophic Dinopogenic Global Warming.
agfosterjr says:
May 7, 2012 at 3:30 pm
Cold-blooded dinosaurs and CAGW go hand in hand–outlandish theories that should have been long since discarded. –AGF
Thanks for some very interesting biological-evolutionary thoughts. The authors of this dino-fart paper try to make dinosaurs coldblooded just to increase the biomass they can argue for, but more biomass of slower-metabolism dinos would equal the same methane emission, so the attempt is as pointless, empty and self-defeating as the whole paper.
I read a nice paper in a special dinosaur edition of the Anatomical Record recently where it was shown that dinosaurs had the breathing and lung system of birds (in addition to all the other ways they are similar to birds). This avian breathing system is much more efficient than our own – principally because air travels ONE WAY through the avian lung, while our lungs are tidal, and the air has to return the same way it came in. This one-way avian lung system – which employs a complex system of air tubes even extending into bones, is approximately ten times more efficient than our own at gas exchange. All the gas exchange alveolar-equivalent surfaces are exposed to oxygen at atmospheric concentration in the one-way system, while in the inferior mammalian tidal system O2 concentration declines from the trachea and bronchi down to the gas-exchanging alveoli.
Another interesting thing about the breathing system of birds is that – due to its greater efficiency, it does not require lung deformation with thoracic and abdominal expansion that we need to breath in and out. The lungs are smaller also. This is why the body of a bird has ribs going all the way to the abdomen, they dont need the soft open abdomen that we do (ever seen a chicken with a six-pack?). And, as it turns out, the dinosaurs also had ribs all the way down the abdomen, just like birds (its actually pointless describing birds and dinosaurs separately, birds ARE dinosaurs, they are the “crown group” of the dinosaurs, i.e. the only surviving members).
Other proofs of this avian type breathing in dinosaurs include the forked insertion of the ribs at the vertebrae. If – as seems likely – the dinosaurs had avian one-way breathing, this blows out of the water for all time the nonsense about dinosaurs being “cold blooded”. (I even remember reading a book in my early teens arguing that dinosaurs were hot blooded – and that was a few decades ago!). They would have run rings around us mammals, having cardiovascular fittness equivalent of birds flying thousands of km on migration. Basically they would be “Isiah-40” type animals, they would “run and not grow weary”. (Not much fun if one of them fancies you for dinner!)
I am sure there are several comedians who would be interested in hiring these guys as writers. LOL
Does this bring new meaning to the term “farting against thunder”?
klem says:
May 7, 2012 at 11:48 am
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.
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Actually, this further support for the Meteor Impact Extinction Theory. Combining the high levels of oxygen from the plant biomass necessary to support the Sauropods with the resulting methane and one large spark (BIC lighters not having been invented) and a Great Die Off is an obvious consequence.
http://www.courierpress.com/news/2012/may/07/excuse-me-study-says-gassy-dinosaurs-helped-warm-e/
Well, Gavin has spoken and put things in perspective. Thankfully he got the info into an article that just popped up on Google News where it can be seen rather than a post on some old whipped-up “anti-climate denial” website that barely anyone cares about anymore.