The Wall Street Journal
05/08/12 Robert Lee Hotz
“Dinosaur Gas Emissions May Have Warmed Air”
Gassy dinosaurs may have spewed so much methane into the air
that it could have helped warm the climate tens of millions of years ago, when
temperatures were much higher than today, a team of U.K. scientists reported
Monday.
The stomach gas released each year by a group of long-necked, plant-eating dinosaurs,
which included the world's largest known land animals, may have equaled the
total amount of methane produced every year today from all natural,
agricultural and industrial sources, the researchers said Monday in the journal
Current Biology. Methane, a greenhouse gas, is 23 times as effective at
trapping heat in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.
The new scientific work highlights the importance of
wildlife, livestock and other natural sources of greenhouse-gas emissions in
shaping the global climate.
Cattle belching and
gas account for about 20% of U.S. methane emissions, according to the
Environmental Protection Agency.
The sauropods, which roamed the planet for about 140 million
years, included such creatures as the 100-ton Argentinosaurus, which was about
120 feet long, and Sauroposeidon, whose neck alone stretched 40 feet.
The researchers deployed a standard formula used to measure
emissions from modern livestock based on their numbers and eating habits. They
gauged the extinct creatures' prodigious appetites and gas-producing capacity
based on theories of dinosaur biomechanics and lifestyles.
By their estimate, these dinosaurs generated 520 million
tons of methane each year, the same as the total amount produced today from all
sources. In comparison, cattle, goats, giraffes and other such grazers that
rely on microbes to aid digestion today produce between 50 million and 100
million tons of methane each year. The remainder of today's output comes from
natural and industrial sources.
Common Sense Review
Ladies and Gentlemen you can buy SUVs without worry. Our glorious government has found the true
reason for global warming (and it is not George W. Bush’s fault… for now). Yet the massive gas output by the dinosaurs is
not a stop the presses moment. Even children
who have eaten too much baked beans at the family gathering could tell you the
bigger the animal the greater the gas is released.
But thousands of years later, are the dino emissions
responsible for today’s theories of global warming? I doubt it. This flawed theory of climate
change completely misses the main factors:
The Sun and (wait for it..) Oxygen…
As we learned in 4th grade science, oxygen and
carbine dioxide are dancing partners in our world. So why don’t we ever hear about oxygen in
the theory of climate change? How can
they blame the one matter that keeps us alive to be the one matter that will
bring impending doom…
In this circle of life all matter effects life...I am so glad
that The Wall Street Journal has taken the time to cover the research on the
gas output of an extinct animal.
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