Did dinosaurs cause climate change?

[BlueStateSaint]

I saw this referenced from The Blaze, Glenn Beck's site.  I knew that this would eventually be the conclusion--especially because the dinosaurs aren't around to defend themselves.

Did dinosaurs cause climate change? Huge creatures may have contributed to their own demise because they produced so much flatulence, say scientists

By Pamela Owen
PUBLISHED: 10:01 EST, 6 May 2012 | UPDATED: 02:06 EST, 7 May 2012

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Dinosaurs may be partly to blame for a change in climate because they created so much flatulence, according to leading scientists.

Professor Graeme Ruxton of St Andrews University, Scotland, said the giant animals spent 150 years emitting the potent global warming gas, methane.

Large plant-eating sauropods would have been the main culprits because of the huge amounts of greenery they consumed.

(Go vegan and destroy the planet!)

The team calculated the animals would have collectively produced more than 520m tons of methane a year - more than all today's modern sources put together.

It is thought these huge amounts could easily have been enough to warm the planet.

The link is here:  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2140323/Dinosaurs-produced-flatulence-force-climate-change.html#ixzz1uBAFwJzL

 

I can't wait to see how the DUmb****s respond to this--if at all!

[JohnnyReb]

It's a right wing conspiracy because we all know Hitler had a "gas" problem. ...and it's all the fault of the Bush family because they taught him how to make chili beans.

Actually, dinosaurs ate themselves out of house and home much like our welfare/foodstamp banker/speculators group is doing to us now.

One more cup of coffee and my DUmmie logic mode machine will really kick in.

[TVDOC]

I guess that they forgot about this:

David Braun
National Geographic News

February 26, 2002

 Dinosaurs may not have been killed off by asteroid impact dust blocking out sunlight, a geologist says. Instead, the mass extinction associated with an asteroid impact 65 million years ago might have been caused by soot from global wildfires or sulfuric acid clouds that were a consequence of the collision.

Whether ash, soot, or acid clouds from the impact, what difference does it make how the dinosaurs and other life forms died in the mass extinction event?
 
"It probably doesn't seem important what mechanism was triggered; either way it still seems that the impact caused the extinction," says Kevin Pope from Geo Eco Arc Research in Aquasco, Maryland. "But the difference is important because it may have implications for the predictions of the consequences of future asteroid impacts, as well as explain why impact extinction events are so rare."

To understand the difference, consider some of the mechanisms triggered when a large object from space hurtles into the Earth.

A large asteroid enters the atmosphere at extremely high speed, glowing red hot as the friction of the air turns it into a fiery cannon ball. Its impact with the ground results in a massive explosion, vaporizing the space object and launching perhaps over a trillion tons of gas, ash and rock dust into the atmosphere.
 
If the asteroid is big enough— Pope says about three kilometers (two miles) in diameter— the energy released by the impact would hurl enough debris into space to envelop the Earth in a rain of fire.
 
The ejected debris would re-enter the atmosphere like billions of meteorites, raining burning balls of fire back to Earth in a giant display of planetary fireworks. The brilliant glow from these billions of fireballs would ignite forest fires across the globe, generating vast, thick clouds of smoke and soot.
 
The asteroid that is associated with the mass extinction of the dinosaurs is believed to have been the one that created the Chicxulub crater in Yucatan, Mexico. It was certainly bigger than three kilometers across (more like ten to 15 kilometers or six to ten miles) and it would have caused global fires, Pope says.
 
"Another important factor is that the Yucatan, where the giant asteroid hit, was especially rich in sulfur-bearing rocks (calcium sulfate). The impact vaporized the sulfate rock and deposited billions of tons of sulfur dioxide gas in the atmosphere.

"Studies of volcanic eruptions have shown that this gas would convert to sulfuric acid clouds in the atmosphere, and that such clouds could remain in the atmosphere for years. These clouds may have initially been thick enough to shut down photosynthesis for a year, and perhaps they blocked the sun long enough (several years) to cause major global cooling. This mechanism helps explain why the impact was especially devastating," Pope says.
 
The original theory, proposed by Luis Alvarez and his colleagues in 1980, is that asteroid dust from the Yucatan impact formed dense clouds that surrounded the Earth, obscuring the sun. The prolonged period of darkness that shrouded the planet caused the plants to die, breaking the food chain and starving the animals. Many of them, including the dinosaurs, died out.
 

Not my field, but the above theory sounds much more plausable than dinosaur farts.......just say'n.....

doc

[CactusCarlos]

Like huge cows, the mighty sauropods would have generated enormous quantities of methane.

Sauropods, recognisable by their long necks and tails, were widespread around 150 million years ago.

They included some of the largest animals to walk the Earth, such as Diplodocus, which measured 150 feet and weighed up to 45 tonnes.

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.

The rest: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/dinosaurs/9250032/Dinosaurs-passing-wind-may-have-caused-climate-change.html

[Freeper]

Rush was talking about this today, he said it didn't pass the "smell test". 

[EagleKeeper]

[CG6468]

Like huge cows, the mighty sauropods would have generated enormous quantities of methane.

Bullshit. No one knows what their digestive system did. Do today's lizards generate a lot of CO₂?

[EagleKeeper]

Well for what its worth I've (in the past) worked for a number of pet shops, mostly maintaining fish and reptiles.

I never detected a poofer, granted I never had to maintain a sauropod (thank god I guess) but whatever.

I did have to take care of an 11 foot albino Burmese python but I don't know if she ever farted. She did bite me though so I hope I gave her gas.

[NHSparky]

I'll just leave this here and let ya'll decide:

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyZwDcLGknU[/youtube]

[CG6468]

Isn't that a movie of moosh?

[SSG Snuggle Bunny]

It's a right wing conspiracy because we all know Hitler had a "gas" problem. ...

But Hitler, like the dinosaurs in the article, was a vegetarian.

Vegetarians: fascist climate destroyers