Farting Dino's Caused Climate Change

[SB Shock]

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

Huge plant-eating dinosaurs may have produced enough greenhouse gas by breaking wind to alter the Earth's climate, research suggests.


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

Looks like we need to pass a national law against against beans....

[tropicalshox]

Nature's way of saying enough is enough. They didn't have the brains to listen.

[Kung Wu]

I just had to go ahead and start crunching the numbers for myself.

It is entirely possibly I have made an error somewhere -- though I doubt it would be that far off if I did.

I have taken the very largest dino known to man: 88 tons in weight, took the Earth's entire land mass -- including Antartica and Arctic, and assumed that 10 of these dinos could live in every single kilometer on earth at one time. I calculated the output of methane as a ratio of the 88 metric tons of weight to a typical cows weight of .725 metric ton to get a ratio of methane emitted per year.

The result is: It would take 10 of the very largest dinosaurs known to man per kilometer covering the entire Earth, 100 years to contribute 1.6% of the methane already in the entire tropopause!

In reality the average size of the dinosaur is probably closer to 5 tons (nowhere near the highly inflated number I used) and the livable land mass is about 60% of the total land mass. Using those realistic figures it would take 2000 years to contribute over 1% of the total methane in the tropopause.

[BTW -- if you take the entire atmosphere which expands the volume of air by 1 magnitude, then it becomes 100,000 years for cows and 20,000 years for dinosaurs to contribute 1% of the total methane.]

Now consider this ... methane in the atmosphere is converted to carbon dioxide and water. And it has a net lifetime of about 10 years when it will be converted.

Final Conclusion: The decadal output of the average dino population would be about 0.005 percent of the entire base of methane already in the atmosphere -- and it would be reabsorbed over this same period of time. That means that over a 10 year period, worst case, we would see a 0.05 percent increase (5 hundredths of one percent) in total methane in the tropopause.

In other words, the total amount of methane as a percent of the air would increase by such a small number that it would get lost in the rounding.

There is little use in calculating the impact of dinosaur farts and belches on our atmosphere.

[SB Shock]

I need a graph please.

Capture.JPG

[60Shock]

I just had to go ahead and start crunching the numbers for myself.

It is entirely possibly I have made an error somewhere -- though I doubt it would be that far off if I did.

I have taken the very largest dino known to man: 88 tons in weight, took the Earth's entire land mass -- including Antartica and Arctic, and assumed that 10 of these dinos could live in every single kilometer on earth at one time. I calculated the output of methane as a ratio of the 88 metric tons of weight to a typical cows weight of .725 metric ton to get a ratio of methane emitted per year.

The result is: It would take 10 of the very largest dinosaurs known to man per kilometer covering the entire Earth, 100 years to contribute 1.6% of the methane already in the entire tropopause!

In reality the average size of the dinosaur is probably closer to 5 tons (nowhere near the highly inflated number I used) and the livable land mass is about 60% of the total land mass. Using those realistic figures it would take 2000 years to contribute over 1% of the total methane in the tropopause.

[BTW -- if you take the entire atmosphere which expands the volume of air by 1 magnitude, then it becomes 100,000 years for cows and 20,000 years for dinosaurs to contribute 1% of the total methane.]

Now consider this ... methane in the atmosphere is converted to carbon dioxide and water. And it has a net lifetime of about 10 years when it will be converted.

Final Conclusion: The decadal output of the average dino population would be about 0.005 percent of the entire base of methane already in the atmosphere -- and it would be reabsorbed over this same period of time. That means that over a 10 year period, worst case, we would see a 0.05 percent increase (5 hundredths of one percent) in total methane in the tropopause.

In other words, the total amount of methane as a percent of the air would increase by such a small number that it would get lost in the rounding.

There is little use in calculating the impact of dinosaur farts and belches on our atmosphere.

In other words, you are saying this is BS, or perhaps more accurately it would be DS?