Sometimes, even when the energy and enviro news seems to be particularly bad, some item comes along that makes one think the universe is having a good guffaw at our expense…
Mammoth gas emissions helped keep planet warm, scientists say:
Gassy mammoths helped fill the atmosphere with methane and keep the Earth warm more than 13,000 years ago, scientists say.
Together with other large plant-eating mammals that are now extinct, they released about 9.6 million tonnes of the gas each year, experts estimated.
When the megafauna disappeared there was a dramatic fall in atmospheric methane, which may have altered the climate.
…
The scientists, led by Dr Felisa Smith from the University of New Mexico, pointed out that a ”cold event” hit the Earth about the same time that methane levels plunged.
”Our calculations suggest decreased methane emissions caused by the extinction of New World megafauna could have played a role,” the researchers said.
On a just slightly more serious note, according to Emissions of Greenhouse Gases in the United States 2008, page 6 [PDF], in 2008 the US emitted 148 million tons of methane from “enteric fermentation” (i.e. farm animal farts and burps), making it the second largest source of methane, behind only the 178 million tons from natural gas systems”. (Both numbers are in CO2 equivalent based on global warming potential over 100 years; divide by 20 to get tons of methane.)
And speaking of methane, here’s what it’s up to in our atmosphere right now:
I don’t think you need to have taken a graduate course in statistical analysis to conclude that something “interesting” started happening around the middle of 2006.
While I’m tossing depressing graphics around, here’s what your favorite greenhouse gas and mine, CO2, is doing:
Again, nothing much to burn gray cells on here, unless you’re, you know, so heavily invested in denial that you’ll expend endless effort trying to refute anything that’s “inconvenient”.
Woo hoo! The last little bit of the graph is clearly showing that methane levels are on a downward trend! (just like 1998 is the hottest year on record and the world has been cooling for the past 12 years!) :-)
stoner: You guys slay me. (That’s a good thing — nothing makes my day like a good slayin’.)
I am not at all surprised to learn that mammoth mammoth farts were so influential on warming the planet all those eons ago. Like many other elderly persons, I live in Florida, and fart. Not mammoth farts, of course (although my wife would take issue on that), but nonetheless substantial ones. Indeed, many of us are referred to as “old Farts”, which would be most insulting if it were not so abundantly self-evident. Anyway, before I lose my concentration again, I can vouch for the observed corollary that Florida has many more Old Farts in proportion than other places, and, as the story in Lou’s post would predict, is notably warmer than other places. We clearly fart mammothly, if not mammoth farts. One can verify this by simply sniffing the air near Senior Centers and Walmart parking lots, or outside any one of Florida’s gazillion drive-through drugstores, places where I and my gaseous peers on Medicare tend to be found in large numbers.
But I am curious: can one suppose that those large dinosaurs of even earlier periods, which consumed megazillions of tons every hour of the crunchy paleolithic equivalent of iceberg lettuce, and which must have let go with truly mammothian farts on a more or less continuous basis, had the same effect on the famously torpid (according to every Disney animation I ever saw) atmosphere of the time? It occurs to me to ask, because I and my lettuce-munching peers are also often referred to as old dinosaurs. In light of the clear government intent to keep all of us aged stinkers alive as long as possiuble as a means of preserving governement employment, we perhaps ought to consider banning burritos along with capping carbon emmissions and, more to the point of release, supplying my generation with methane-sequestering butt plugs. Hmmm, pity I will forget by tomorrow morning this last idea, or I couild have maybe filed a patent application on it…