And another useless factoid pulled from an ass

It wasn't the methane in itself that did it

/it was adding that giant flaming match from the sky that really set things off

The Tunguska Event? Yup, it was a fart.

/that's why there's no radioactivity

So all disasters come down to bad cases of gas?

Explains a lot, really.

I refuse to believe this tripe. Everybody knows that Global Warming, Climate Change, or whatever you want to call it, was a Republican conspiracy and cover up.

Fluorescent Testicle: Unlikely tag? If cows can produce a greenhouse effect, why not dinosaurs?

And god knows the colons of dinosaurs were way a lot bigger than any cow we've got on earth today. Imagine what kind of fart a titanosaurus would rip!

I blame Chalupasaurus, which made up over 80% of the diet of the T-Rex

There seems to be serious errors in the math in this article.

520 million tonnes of methane is equivalent to 2.8 billion tonnes of CO2. (Using an online calculator.)
520 million tons is much smaller (2,000 pounds versus about 2,200 pounds, as the tonne is very close to the long ton).

Human CO2 emissions amount to over 30 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent. The dinosaurs can not have been producing more than all current sources combined if they were producing significantly less than just the human impact.

They point out that cattle are producing 100 million tons. That might be correct. Cattle ranching is only a small part of anthropogenic emissions, since agriculture accounts for roughly 14% IIRC.

Perhaps they meant 520 Gigatonnes of carbon. That would be more than all modern sources today perhaps. But according to the IPCC figures, human sources of CO2 are a fairly large chunk of all CO2 equivalent emissions above and beyond sinks.

And now the most beautiful four words in science: more research is needed.

I checked The Times article on this story and it doesn't say anything about dinosaurs producing more methane than all modern sources--it merely says that they produced five times as much as cattle. This is better.

That just stinks.

This is why rainbow warriors keep trying to assassinate me?

Biff667: This was a Weekly World News article in the 1990s....

It was a scientific hypothesis in the 1980s, and then discredited because the scale wasn't right. Weekly World News probably got it from a Scientific American one of their editors saw in a dentist's waiting room.

Old news, making the rounds again, whatever.