Maybe Dinosaurs Are The Real Problem

From Discovery News:

A sudden change in the Atlantic Gulf Stream, which new research has linked to the mass extinction of dinosaurs, may happen again, many scientists fear.

Wait. Hold the phone. All of my adult life, I've been told that a meteor hitting the Earth caused the dinosaurs to die out. They even found the place in the Gulf of Mexico where the meteor hit!

A popular theory concerning the extinction of dinosaurs is that a sudden, external event, such as an asteroid hit or volcano eruption, led to the dino demise. But new research, published in Nature Geoscience and the journal Geology, argues climate was more to blame. The research determined that the greenhouse climate of the Cretaceous period experienced a sudden drop in global temperatures.

Oh, okay. Wait. So global cooling caused the dinosaurs to die out?

Hold the phone. I'm confused. So the Earth was really crazy hot millions of years ago? It's probably because of all the Dinosaurs using incandescent lightbulbs and driving around in SUVs. So then they all got Priuses and started being concerned about their carbon footprint and the Earth cooled, killing them all? Bummer.

It's estimated that the first big Cretaceous temperature drop occurred 137 million years ago and caused ocean temperatures to plummet to as low as 4 degrees centigrade. It is hard to imagine such a dramatic ocean cooling now, given global warming, but climate change is believed to cause extreme shifts of all kinds, from harsher than normal storms to this type of major ocean temperature shift.

Sure. It's hard to imagine now, given global warming... Wait. So then the Earth wasn't crazy hot when the dinosaurs lived? Like, hotter then it is now so that the whole Earth was like one big jungle? Or maybe it was just normal hot, kinda like a refreshing spring day,and then BOOM! it got cooler and the dinosaurs all died? I'm confused. Even if it wasn't CRAZY hot - even if it was just NORMAL hot like it is now - the Earth still cooled somehow enough to kill off all the dinosaurs, right? So Even if it was normal hot, then it's completely possible, right? And if it was crazy hot - like hotter then it is now - and it happened and killed off all the dinosaurs, then even with "global warming" it would still be possible, right? I mean, if it happened, it happened. And the very first paragraph of the story said scientists are afraid it might happen again, right? So what's all this nonsense about "...given global warming..."?

Price said, "At certain times in the geological past, the world has been dominated by greenhouse conditions with elevated CO2 levels and warm Polar Regions, and hence, these are seen as analogues of future global climate."

“But this research suggests that for short periods of time, the Earth plunged back to colder temperatures, which not only poses interesting questions in terms of how the dinosaurs might have coped, but also over the nature of climate change itself.”

So climate change happened by itself without humans millions of years ago? Several times? Wow. The way everybody is freaking out, you'd think it was brand new and never happened before. Ever.

One thing that I've noticed:warming seems to be tied somehow to dinosaurs. I mean, it was really warm when dinosaurs lived. Now we use dinosaur bones and such to fuel all kinds of things and make petroleum and plastics and whatnot, right? So maybe dinosaurs just naturally make things warm.

Stupid, confusing dinosaurs.

Thanks to Melissa B. for passing this along.