Hey Bevets, pull my finger ...

Dino

a long history of scientific hypothesis that borders on the ridiculous being printed in third-string media helps keep the blinders-on religious faithful happily chained and shackled to their sky wizard how-to books.

seriously, how are people coming from multiple generations of mind-crushing/twisting religious tripe supposed to break free from what binds them when they can easily point to the highly laughable?

religion for way too many people is a predetermined force feed when their parents are at the wedding altar (or equivalent thereof). many suffer this force fed fiction until they become adults. hopefully it is sooner not later that they are finally exposed to something that helps them onto a path toward recovery.

a scientific community that continually offers germs will not help the sick to heal.

Knows the dangers of farting and spontaneous combustion
/hot like the sun

So far I've managed to find another article in the Ottawa Citizen and one from a British blog about the Sunday Times article which is the source for the Daily Mail:

http://shufti.co.uk/dinozoo/the-dinosaur-fart-park-sunday-times-artic l e/

This new theory, that the dinosaurs farted themselves into extinction, plays into evidence that the dinosaurs were already declining by the time of the great extinction. However, the dominant explanation for this alternative scenario is that the volcanic eruptions then taking place in India, creating the "Indian traps", a massive area of lava flows in central India, produced climate change on a global scale. Dinosaur flatulence might well have contributed to methane production on a scale to alter climate, but it wouldn't have been the sole cause of climate change.

For that matter, humans are not the sole cause of climate change today. We are a large contributor, growing larger as our population and economic production grow concurrently, but there are other factors which work for and against rising CO2, methane, water vapour and nitrous oxide levels, not to mention our manmade greenhouse gases, CHCs and CHFCs.

The thing is that we are the only species on Earth that can do anything about climate change. We are the only species that can consciously and rationally do anything about anything.

Whether we are the main driver or not, we are the main actor. Only we can prevent climate change that we are causing and climate change that we are not causing. We are, as the title of a recent book puts it, the "God Species". We are Nature thinking about itself.

In short, we act or we do not act, but either way, we are facing some pretty disastrous changes--the Sixth Great Mass Extinction is ours to promote or avoid.

Oddly, despite getthing the story seriously wrong, the Daily Mail article is indirectly confirmed that one dominant species (or group of species) can alter their environment in ways that lead to their demise. And the 520 million tonnes of methane they suggest did this is a heck of a lot less than the 30 Giga tonnes of CO2 equivalent that we humans are now producing, let alone our total contribution to the CO2 levels in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution began which amount to about 500 Giga tonnes (note how much our emissions must have risen in the last few decades to create 30 Giga tonnes a year versus 500 Gigatonnes for more than two centuries). The real hockey stick is the rise in human populations times the rise in fuel consumption per capita. This is undeniable and truly frightening. That spike is not so much the blade of a hockey stick, as it is the blade of the Grim Reaper's scythe. Mann has actually understated the case, perhaps because of his being limited to the last thousand or few thousand years for the "shaft" of his "hockey stick".

On the plus side, human population growth can not and will not continue indefinitely. Demographic laws will cause our population to peak mid-century. It is unlikely that carbon emissions will grow forever as well. They too will probably peak, for better or worse. We must develop substitutes for fossil fuels long before the fuels run out. Peak oil is not the exhaustion of our oil supplies, it's the peak in production after which a long decline is inevitable. We may actually have passed the peak. Certainly countries like the UK and Germany have hit their own national peaks. China and the USA may be past their peaks as well. The problem is that it is much too late for the climate. We've already done TOO MUCH damage and there's enough oil, gas, coal and non-conventional shale "oil" (bitumen) to match or surpass past production.

In short, we have gone too far to avoid severe climate change, and can only go much too far before we run out of carbon to pump back into the atmosphere all at once.

Most of the coal, petroleum and natural gas was produced in a greenhouse climate much hotter than anything mammals have lived in, and indeed warmer than the world the dinosaurs knew and helped to create. Pump that back into the atmosphere of a planet circling a warming Sun and you get a much, much hotter world than we have evolved to live in.

It's not complicated (although weather is chaotic and climate is very complex). It's really quite simple: millions of years of carbon dioxide in two centuries, millions more in the next six centuries, and what you get is a hellish world where most of the species which have survived us thus far are extinct and the climate in every place on Earth is different from the kind of climates we have today. Deserts will go on growing, ice caps will go on shrinking, and making aliving will be harder for humans and for every other living thing except a handful of species that will come to dominate the new world as the dinosaurs dominated their world.

But we may not be one of those species. Our crops, domestic animals and forests are adapted to a cooler ice age world and temperate zones. So are we, so is agriculture, and so are our cities and our Civilization as a whole. We are Ice Age Mammals, and despite destroying most of the Ice Age Megafauna, we haven't learned our lesson and are working on more large species such as the lion, the tiger, the elephant, the leopard, and possibly ourselves.

I'm not worried about the cockroach, the rat or the mouse. I'm not worried about the seagull, the sparrow or the pigeon. But I am worried about the bee, which is really bad news because it pollinates one quarter of our fruit and vegetable species. I am worried about the whale, the dolphin, the blue fin tuna and the shark. I am not worried about jellyfish or squid, but I am worried about crustaceans (lobsters) and shell fish. I am not worried about chickens, but beef may be off the menu. I am not worried about catfish, but the salmon and trout may be in trouble.

God forbid that we lose the second banana, the Cavendish, having lost the Gros Michel, which was so much tastier according to anybody who has ever tasted one--a declining band of people born before World War II or who have connections with a few botanic collections that still have a rare banana plant of that variety.

It's a pity that the Daily Mail is our main funnel for articles from the Times and the Sunday Times. They not only get the facts wrong, they spin them as heavily as Fox News.

Only a small elite is allowed to read the Times since it disappeared behind a pay wall. Neither the Times nor the Sunday Times may be what they were before Murdoch bought them and lowered their standards of journalism, wiritng and impartiality, but it's sad that these two great papers are available only to those who can and will pay for them after contributing to the vast amount of information of high quality channeled from the scientific and other elites to the masses for several decades.

Between locking up high quality information and delivering it at a high price to the elites of the Inner Party, and spinning low quality information (Prole Feed) for the masses we are facing a rising tide of ignorance and mendacity which threatens a new Dark Age after an all too brief, all too circumscribed period and range of Enlightenment and liberal democracy and liberal education.

This is what 1984 really looks like. A bit more subtile and insinuating than rat cages and television that watches you, although as much truth goes down the memory hole as under EngSoc and Big Brother Rupert.

brantgoose, what a dismal rant! Your pessimism has such range and depth that I'm going to let you take over my worrying for me and for my whole family.

brantgoose: We are Nature thinking about itself.
GeneralJim: We now have a new definition of "hubris."

We agree with brantgoose on this point. Evolution has always been haphazard. Now it can proceed with an intelligent(?) hand at the wheel.

Great, what was a reasonably amusing thread about dino-farts has now been derailed by our resident global-warming deniers who can't even let a humorous comment pass by without trotting out their denialist factoids to stroke their anemic egos.

Gyrfalcon: Great, what was a reasonably amusing thread about dino-farts has now been derailed by our resident global-warming deniers who can't even let a humorous comment pass by without trotting out their denialist factoids to stroke their anemic egos.

Yeah, it didn't take long, did it? FARK used to be about these kinds of threads, but now the "let the trolls drive the page-clicks" strategy doesn't even allow the most obvious joke thread to survive.

brantgoose: God forbid that we lose the second banana, the Cavendish, having lost the Gros Michel, which was so much tastier according to anybody who has ever tasted one--a declining band of people born before World War II or who have connections with a few botanic collections that still have a rare banana plant of that variety.

He's making a great point and then he shiats all over himself by including "lack of a tasty banana" as a reason to arrest global warming. Stick with the big stuff, because if it comes down to cheap gas or that guy getting a second variety of banana on his dinner plate - well, I'm pretty sure I can guess who's going to win that argument.

Jayone: more gov. Funding

Unnecessary capitalizing of Funding: 2 points
Abbreviation of government as gov. because you aren't entirely sure of your spelling: 5 points.
Use of a long-dead denier talking point: 1 point.

8 points. Nicely done!

I wonder what the Urantia Book says about farts. Or dinosaurs. The mind boggles what truths may yet unfold!

Agrees

mc_madness: Sure - blame EVERYTHING on farts. Global warming, World War II, The Cold War...

Easy cop out. Blames the farts.

Hm, I'd be more inclined to blame the Cold War on the LACK of farts. You seen some of those old Soviet premieres, especially toward the end of the 70's? They all looked seriously constipated. A good fart would have done some of them good.

this is bad news for ... FartBongo

hitlersbrain: They live for hundreds of millions of years, I'm sure they were in harmony with nature.And, most of all, they were not killed by climate change, they were killed by a huge meteor (possibly in concert with volcanic activity).

During the AIDS hysteria some 'scientists' were sure the dinosaurs were killed by an AIDS like virus. Now it's greenhouse induced climate change?

Apparently scientists will never let go of the cause of the dinosaurs extinction, even though the smoking crater was long ago found.

Hopefully they will get the ridicule they deserve from their peers.


I thought the current theory was that there wasn't really a huge, instant die off. They just evolved into birds.