Bromley: Dinosaurs left carbon footprints - Chippewa Herald

BARABOO â€" I always thought my lactose-intolerant Uncle Milt was to blame for global warming. Turns out, the dinosaurs beat him to it.

According to a study published this month in Current Biology, dinosaur farts and belches may have played a role in prehistoric global warming. Sauropods â€" the immense, long-necked plant eaters that roamed the plant more than

65 million years ago â€" produced about 570 tons of methane per year. Apparently, the Mesozoic era was a lot like Thanksgiving at Uncle Milt’s house.

This study elicits two questions:

1. What was in prehistoric vegetation that made dinosaurs so gassy? They might as well have dined at Taco Bell.

2. What is a publication titled CURRENT Biology doing studying events that occurred millions of years ago? Is this the jumbo shrimp of scientific journals? As climate scientist Andrew Weaver told the New York Daily News, “Frankly, methane emissions from dinosaur burps is probably not the No. 1 thing we should be concerned about in modern society.”

The study was authored by David Wilkinson of Liverpool John Moores University in England. It found sauropods’ emission of greenhouse gasses would have been similar to that produced by livestock, farming and industry today. Cows alone produce nearly 100 tons of methane a year. They do not, however, produce any of the “beef” sold at Taco Bell.

Wilkinson focused on the biggest â€" and presumably gassiest â€" dinosaurs, the sauropods that munched on the tops of trees. Because of their size, food fermented in their stomachs for long periods. I imagine they were like Uncle Milt during his post-meal nap, providing musical entertainment from the seat of his La-Z-Boy.

Wilkinson said dinosaur gas was just one factor that made the Earth so tropical then â€" about 18 degrees warmer than now. Other factors â€" volcanoes, swamps, water currents, shallow seas and plentiful plankton â€" also contributed to high greenhouse gas levels that kept things stuffy. Apparently the pre-human world was a lot like a middle school locker room after wrestling practice.

Climate experts welcomed the study’s findings but noted that any global warming from dinosaur gas would be dwarfed by man-made carbon dioxide produced by modern industry. They also noted it’s wrong to suggest the study blames dinosaurs’ flatulence for their extinction. Keep in mind that sauropods appeared 200 million years ago and didn’t die off until 65 million years ago. So as nasty as their gas may have been, they managed to survive for 135 million years. That’s even longer than “Guiding Light” has been on TV â€" but not by much.

You don’t need to be Al Gore to know gaseous emissions are an inconvenient truth. If Uncle Milt had ice cream with his pumpkin pie, he could clear out the living room in seconds. At the time, we thought the only victims were our singed nose hair and the seat of his favorite chair, which bore the brunt of his carbon footprint. Now we know he was doing more than peeling paint from the walls â€" he was contributing to global warming. And now, thanks to the brainiacs at Liverpool John Moores University in England â€" how’s that for a mouthful of plankton? â€" we know the sauropods left their own carbon footprint centuries earlier.

There’s not much that can be done about it now, of course. The dinosaurs are gone. But their legacy remains, hovering above us like a sauropod fart.

All we can do is continue our efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions and give Mother Earth a chance to recover. For some of us, this means pulling Uncle Milt away from the custard tray at Thanksgiving. For the rest of you, it means going easy on the Taco Bell.

The columnist’s lactose-intolerant Uncle Milt is a fictional character created for comedic purposes, not unlike Dan Quayle. Help keep Ben Bromley up to date on the latest news in flatulence by sending email to bbromley@capital newspapers.com.