Fossil Flatulence ~ Exciting the AGW Crowd with Scientism and Fuzzy Math

Another culprit in the many theories of how the dinosaurs died has entered the arena, flatulence. I have two technical books arguing that global warming was the cause, and another says global cooling was the cause. Here again, politics is playing a part in this idea of dinosaur extinction. In fact, What’s Up With That says that “something smells alright – the stench of extrapolation is overpowering.”  Some of these fuzzy ideas are pointed out by Creation Today:

Like huge cows, the mighty sauropods would have generated enormous quantities of methane (emphasis added to indicate fuzzy words).

A simple mathematical model suggests that the microbes living in sauropod dinosaurs may have produced enough methane to have an important effect on the Mesozoic climate.

A Mesozoic methane mixing ratio of six to eight ppm seems very plausible.

CT continues:

The overwhelming majority of the article contains such examples of fuzzy words. Two additional sentences in the article give assumptions which are unprovable.

Medium-sized sauropods weighed about 20 tonnes and lived in herds of up to a few tens of individuals per square kilometre.

This quote suggests a degree of knowledge about the behavior of sauropods. How can it possibly be known whether or not the sauropods lived in herds, or how big or dense those herds were?

Gateway Pundit includes the Telegraph’s inclusion of the math formula:

“A simple mathematical model suggests that the microbes living in sauropod dinosaurs may have produced enough methane to have an important effect on the Mesozoic climate,” said study leader Dr Dave Wilkinson, from Liverpool John Moores University. Indeed, our calculations suggest that these dinosaurs could have produced more methane than all modern sources – both natural and man-made – put together.”

This is why the Global Warming crowd loves this stuff — it includes scientism and fuzzy math, and historical revisionism created ad-hoc, all based on the theory — not the evidence.