It is the ultimate testament to the life of the academic. You spend ten years in the finest schools gathering your degrees only to find yourself calculating dinosaur farts. British scientists have done exactly that. Estimating the flatulence of sauropods including the gas giant, Brotosaurus. The result is a finding that the Earth’s climate was actually warmed by the huge amount of methane gas produced by dinosaurs. It was also the reason why alien civilizations never invaded our planet.
It has long been known that cows are a major source of emissions of pollutants, particularly methane. Cows, sheep and other ruminants are estimated to be responsible for one-fifth of global methane production — a greenhouse gas linked to climate change.
Scientists used cow farts to estimate the amount of gas produced by dinosaurs at 520 million tons a year. Perhaps the creationists are right and man did walk with the dinosaurs. If so, those primitive cave pictures might have been efforts to design the world’s largest air freshener.
The most gaseous were likely sauropods who fed on vegetation in the Mesozoic Era like the Brontosaurus. Studies indicate that the Earth was up to 10°C (18°F) warmer in the Mesozoic Era and apparently a lot smellier.
Source: BBC
David Blauw 1, May 9, 2012 at 10:30 am
This one small ball earth has been filtering things for 4 billion years. I am most impressed with how it filtered Dinosaurs out of existence.
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Actually, that was an asteroid cum meteorite about 6 miles wide that struck the Earth 65 m yrs ago.
The cosmos is a part of evolution, although not in the Darwinian sense.
The dominant species will probably be Quantum Computer 9000.
This one small ball earth has been filtering things for 4 billion years. I am most impressed with how it filtered Dinosaurs out of existence. Mans stupidity and ignorance of our need to protect the environment or join the dinosaurs is a tiny speed bump of earths evolution. 100 million years from now I wonder if the dominate species will even be aware or our existence.
This video reveals the dangers of wind energy generation when combined with cow farts.
It will throw the earth out of orbit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0UkH81NMTo&feature=player_embedded
Everyone makes mistakes, that is why a majority consensus is better than very few opinions.
What was said 30 or 40 years ago has improved as time progresses, as the science improves.
The reality is that the warnings have, in the main, been underestimates of the problems we face in global warming induced climate change.
Propaganda tends to forget that when other people’s lives are at stake, we should always try to err in the proper direction, err on the safe side:
(Later Than We Think?, quoting Noam Chomsky, emphasis added). The U.S. has had the best scientific warnings for the longest time, but has categorically refused to heed, has filled congress with deniers, and is now standing out like a sore thumb in the world community.
Bdamans Brother from another mother
he said he did not mind saying “All right, I made a mistake.” He claimed a university or government scientist might fear an admission of a mistake would lead to the loss of funding.
Lovelock — who has previously worked with NASA and discovered the presence of harmful chemicals (CFCs) in the atmosphere but not their effect on the ozone layer — stressed that humanity should still “do our best to cut back on fossil fuel burning” and try to adapt to the coming changes.
Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution at the U.K.’s respected Met Office Hadley Centre, agreed Lovelock had been too alarmist with claims about people having to live in the Arctic by 2100.
And he also agreed with Lovelock that the rate of warming in recent years had been less than expected by the climate models.
Bdamans Brother from another mother.
Some leading voices in the Global Warming Gospel Choir are now abandoning the old climate crisis hymnal. One is James Lovelock, the father of the “Gaia” theory that the entire Earth is a single living system who predicted that continued human CO2 emissions will bring about climate calamity. In 2006 he claimed: “Before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where climate remains tolerable.” Time magazine featured Lovelock as one of 13 “Heroes of the Environment” in a 2007 article (along with Al Gore, Mikhail Gorbachev and Robert Redford).
Recently, however, he has obviously cooled on global warming as a crisis, admitting to MSNBC that he overstated the case and now acknowledges that: “…we don’t know what the climate is doing.
The 92-year-old Lovelock went on to note, “…the climate is doing its usual tricks…there’s nothing much happening yet even though we were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now.” He added, “The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time.” Yet the temperature “has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising…carbon dioxide has been rising, no question about that.”
Fritz Vaherenholt, a socialist founder of Germany’s environmental movement who headed the renewable energy division of the country’s second largest utility company, has recently coauthored a new book titled “The Cold Sun: Why the Climate Disaster Won’t Happen”. In it he raises a man-made blizzard of criticism charging the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with gross incompetence and dishonesty, most particularly regarding fear-mongering exaggeration of known climate influence of human CO2 emissions.
Vahrenholt isn’t the only significant German scientist to find that IPCC’s global warming projections are exaggerated. Another is Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research who serves as the German government’s climate protection advisor. Schellnhuber coauthored a paper refuting reliability of General Circulation (climate) Models upon which their alarmist 2001 projections were based.
Schellnhuber recently admitted in a speech to agricultural experts that: “warmer temperatures and high CO2 concentrations in the air could very well lead to higher agricultural yields.”
An August 2011 Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of American Adults showed that 69% said it is at least “somewhat likely” that some scientists have falsified research data in order to support their own theories and beliefs, including 40% who said this is “very likely”. (The number who said it’s likely is up 10 points since December 2009.)
As for “scientific consensus”, 57% of those surveyed believed there is significant disagreement within the scientific community on global warming. This was up five points from late 2009.
Rapidly growing public skepticism in the U.S. and abroad about the veracity climate calamity claims is now putting alarmists on the defensive. As Paul Ehrlich at Stanford University reported in a March 2010 Nature journal editorial, this has his colleagues in big sweats about how to counter a barrage of challenges: “Everyone is scared s***less, but they don’t know what to do.”
Ehrlich is best known for his 1968 doom and gloom book, “The Population Bomb”, which predicted that a worldwide crisis in food supply and natural resource availability would lead to major famines and economic failures. In another book titled “The Machinery of Nature”, he predicted that carbon dioxide-induced famines might kill as many as a billion people by 2000.
Ehrlich’s claims were based upon a theory advanced by none other than John Holdren, who is now serving as the Obama administration’s Science Czar.
My sister is a great Southern cook, born in Monroe, Louisiana where we spent some of our early years. She even owned a restaurant before she became disabled. Her grandchildren were born and raised in the Midwest. She was making Sunday dinner one day and one of the kids came in the kitchen and wanted to know, “Grandma, are you going to make that vegetable that has guts.”
It took her a minute to figure out he was talking about okra.
pete,
The beauty of gumbo is once you get past the file/roux base, you can put just about anything in it. Although some may differ as to whether okra is optional or not, you could probably get away with putting knight in it. They put a politician/influence peddler in a pot of gumbo in the movie Angel Heart and nobody seemed to mind other than Harry Angel. He had other issues he was dealing with though.
frog legs, gator tail, mudbugs. i never could get the raw oyster thing. like eating snot with grit and hot sauce.
making myself hungry, might have to make some gumbo tomorrow.
Does anyone wish Gene and me to describe what the Cajun people of south Louisiana eat? I am sure Gene has a few delectable recipes, as do I.
Well now, didn’t PZ put the poo in the proverbial punchbowl…
The reports of dinosaurs dying of farts are greatly exaggerated
PZ Myers
“eat the roasted flesh ”
Which eventually led to the political slogan ‘eat the rich’.
No wonder the Republican are inveighing so strongly against class warfare. Here I thought it just about taxing and spending.
oops. that’s 14th century.
Pete,
Maybe that 1eth century remedy should get more publicity. I don’t advocate that solution, but maybe it will make those in the manor houses think of what could happen.
Most unpleasant. At least they weren’t that mean in Romania. Fairly recently.
Coming soon to a gated community near you.
an excerpt from one of al frankin’s books
In her book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Barbara Tuchman writes about a peasant revolt in 1358 that began in the village of St. Leu and spread throughout the Oise Valley. At one estate, the serfs sacked the manor house, killed the knight, and roasted him on a spit in front of his wife and kids. Then, after ten or twelve peasants violated the lady, with the children still watching, they forced her to eat the roasted flesh of her dead husband and then killed her.
bettykath 1, May 8, 2012 at 10:00 am
OS
When it runs out, it runs out. Will we be allowed to eat the richest one percent then? I figure they will be tough and stringy, and not particularly high in nutritional value.
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I think they will have the reverse in mind. They’re doing everything else nasty to us, why not?
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It might surprise you that the 1% / 99% eating each other, for medical reasons, is a modern European practice:
(The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine). My research is not complete, but I think farting in front of others was eradicated well before the “great scientific breakthrough“, medical cannibalism was.
On a canoe trip in the Yukon Territory decades ago, with a Ecology professor friend, upon pondering the cuisine there, I had the occasion to ask a local “what do you eat here?”, whereupon the local replied, “boy, we eat anything that don’t eat us first!”
Ah civilization.