Microborgs

One of the most terrifying alien species in the Star Trek universe is the Borg, a hive-mind collective of interlinked cyborgs that reproduce by assimilating individuals from other species, not the old-fashioned way (although they may do that, too, judging by how taken the Borg Queen was with Captain Picard in Star Trek: First Contact).  

Turns out the assimilate-your-neighbor approach isn't limited to the world of science fiction.  There are terrestrial species who seem to follow the Borg's mantra of "We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own."  Bacteria are especially good at doing this; they have small, mobile pieces of DNA called plasmids that are capable of being exchanged between cells, allowing gene flow without (strictly speaking) sexual reproduction.  Unfortunately for us, these plasmids frequently contain such human-unfriendly gene constructs as antibiotic resistance sequences and "pathogenicity islands" -- genes that code for a virulent attack on the host, such as the ones in the nasty strains of E. coli that can land you in the hospital.

Recently, however, scientists discovered a species of bacteria that has an assemblage of chunks of assimilated DNA (they actually called these strands "Borgs" after the Star Trek villains) that might prove useful to humans rather than harmful.  A species of Archaea (an odd clade of bacteria relatively unrelated to other, more common species, which includes groups that specialize in living in acidic thermal springs, anaerobic mud, and extremely salty water) called Methanoperedens was discovered in lake mud in western North America, and it was found to consume methane -- and has Borgs that allow it to do so at a spectacular rate.

Methanoperedens is odd even without the superlatives.  Most of the Archaea that metabolize methane don't consume it, they create it.  Methanogens -- Archaea that live primarily in deep ocean sediments -- produce methane as a byproduct of their metabolism, secreting it in the form of methane clathrate (frozen methane hydrate) at such a rate that the abyssal plains are covered with the stuff.  (Some ecologists believe that methanogens are, individual for individual, the commonest organisms on Earth, outnumbering all other species put together.)  

Burning methane clathrate -- "flammable snow" [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the United States Geological Service]

Methanoperedens, though, is a different sort of beast.  It lives by breaking down methane.  More interesting still, this ability comes from the fact that it has Borgs almost a third the size of its ordinary complement of DNA, made up of gene fragments assimilated from a dozen different species.

What has sparked interest in this bizarre species is the potential for using it to combat climate change.  Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas -- it has thirty times the heat-trapping capacity that carbon dioxide does -- and there's a significant concern that as the Earth warms, decomposing organic matter in the tundra will trigger a positive feedback loop, releasing more methane and warming the planet further.  If this methane-eating bacteria could consume some of the excess methane, it's possible that it could be turned into a tool for bringing the climate back into equilibrium.

I'm a little dubious, however.  It seems unlikely that any kind of attempt to culture Methanoperedens would be possible on a big enough scale to make a difference.  It'd be nice if we'd just face up to the fact that there is, and always has been, one obvious solution; stop burning so damn much fossil fuel.  We're so desperate to cling to our conspicuous-consumption lifestyle that we can't face the reality of what we're doing to the long-term habitability of the Earth.  (It doesn't help, of course, that a great many of our politicians here in the United States are being funded by the fossil fuel industry.)

Whether or not this bacteria species turns out to have any practical applications, the whole phenomenon of evolution by assimilation of DNA from other species is absolutely fascinating.  We ourselves contain "foreign genes" -- most notably endogenous retroviruses, pieces of viral DNA that have taken up permanent residence in our DNA and which might comprise as much as five percent of our total genome.  (There is good evidence that the activation of certain endogenous retroviruses is connected to the development of multiple sclerosis and some forms of schizophrenia.)

Walt Whitman didn't know how true his words were when he said, "I contain multitudes."

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The terrible cost of inaction

I try not to be a one-issue voter, but it would be very hard for me to support a candidate for state or federal office who is not explicitly in favor of addressing the causes of anthropogenic climate change.

The jury is still out, of course, as to whether we might already be too late to avoid some of the worst repercussions.  The temperature is climbing at a rate not seen since the globally-catastrophic Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum 55-some-odd million years ago, and it's possible that the rate of the increase we're seeing now is actually higher.

And yet our politicians sit on their hands.  "The scientists are still uncertain" -- despite the fact that the ones harping on all the doubt are the mouthpieces of the fossil fuel industry, who are scared stiff that there'll be an administration that actually takes climate change seriously.  "It's a natural warm-up" -- despite mountains of evidence that this alteration in the climate is caused by man-made greenhouse gases like carbon and methane.  "It'd cost too much to fix" -- despite the fact that the cost of not doing anything is projected to run into the trillions of dollars.  (More on that in a moment.)  And -- most maddening of all -- "it was cold in January so the world isn't warming" -- which you hear from politicians who evidently failed ninth-grade earth science and never figured out the difference between "weather" and "climate."

We had two more pieces of research recently published that highlight how dire the situation has become.  In the first, a team led by Eric Rignot of the University of California - Irvine showed that the rate of ice loss from Greenland -- which has the world's second-largest on-land ice sheet -- has increased sixfold in the last fifty years.  Between 1980 and 1990, an estimated 51 billion tons of ice melted from the Greenland Ice Sheet; between 2010 and 2018 -- a two-year shorter time span -- 286 billion tons melted.  Of the rise in sea level attributable to Greenland ice melt, over half of it has occurred in the last eight years.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Christine Zenino from Chicago, US, Greenland Ice Sheet, CC BY 2.0]

In an interview in the Washington Post, Rignot was unequivocal:

The 1980s marked the transition time when the Earth’s climate started to drift significantly from its natural variability as a result of man-made emissions of greenhouse gases...  The entire periphery of Greenland is affected.  I am particularly concerned about the northern regions, which host the largest amount of potential sea-level rise and are already changing fast. 

In Antarctica, some big sleeping giants in East Antarctica are waking up, in addition to a large part of West Antarctica being significantly affected. None of this is good news.  We ought to prepare ourselves for what is coming up and take action as soon as possible to avoid the most drastic scenarios.

The second study, led by climatologist Dmitry Yumashev of Lancaster University, looked at it from the perspective of the only thing that seems to motivate most politicians -- money.  The authors write:

Arctic feedbacks accelerate climate change through carbon releases from thawing permafrost and higher solar absorption from reductions in the surface albedo, following loss of sea ice and land snow.  Here, we include dynamic emulators of complex physical models in the integrated assessment model PAGE-ICE to explore nonlinear transitions in the Arctic feedbacks and their subsequent impacts on the global climate and economy under the Paris Agreement scenarios.  The permafrost feedback is increasingly positive in warmer climates, while the albedo feedback weakens as the ice and snow melt.  Combined, these two factors lead to significant increases in the mean discounted economic effect of climate change: +4.0% ($24.8 trillion) under the 1.5 °C scenario, +5.5% ($33.8 trillion) under the 2 °C scenario, and +4.8% ($66.9 trillion) under mitigation levels consistent with the current national pledges.

Catch that?  Under the best case scenario, the economic cost by 2100 is projected at almost twenty-five trillion dollars.  That's "trillion," with a "t."  And the current Paris Agreement pledges don't even meet that.  If all the signatories meet their pledged targets for carbon emission, the cost is projected to be well over twice that.

Oh, and the United States, one of the top carbon emitters in the world, withdrew from the Paris Agreement in June of 2017 under an explicit directive from Donald Trump, using the excuse that the mandated targets would be "too expensive" and "economically disastrous for the United States."

You want to see economic disaster, Mr. Trump?  You ain't seen nothing yet.  Wait till rising sea levels start inundating coastal cities, requiring massive relocation.  And from the Rignot et al. study referenced above, the wait may not even be that long.

"It’s disheartening that we have this in front of us," Yumashev said in an interview with The Guardian.  "We have the technology and policy instruments to limit the warming but we are not moving fast enough."

Disheartening?  I'd call it "alarming," myself.

I know I've rung the changes on this topic many times, but I feel duty-bound to keep bringing it up because our leaders are still not doing anything.  There's been some lip-service to addressing climate change, but the propaganda machine that is bound and determined to label any recommendations for mitigation as left-wing ultra-green economically unfeasible claptrap has worked all too well.  So don't expect this to be the last time you hear about it here -- and, hopefully, elsewhere.  We'll keep yelling until the politicians wake up or get voted out of office.

It's too important an issue to do otherwise.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and is pure fun: Man Meets Dog by the eminent Austrian zoologist and ethologist Konrad Lorenz.  In it, he looks at every facet of the human/canine relationship, and -- if you're like me -- you'll more than once burst out laughing and say, "Yeah, my dog does that all the time!"

It must be said that (as the book was originally written in 1949) some of what he says about the origins of dogs has been superseded by better information from genetic analysis that was unavailable in Lorenz's time, but most of the rest of his Doggy Psychological Treatise still stands.  And in any case, you'll learn something about how and why your pooches behave the way they do -- and along the way, a bit about human behavior, too.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Aiming for the maximum

In what can only be described as a confluence of terrible news, catastrophically strong Hurricane Florence is now taking direct aim at North Carolina at the same time as the Trump administration has announced its plans to roll back Obama-era methane emission standards.  The reasons for this are the same as the reasons they've done every other damnfool thing they've done; (1) it benefits Trump's corporate sponsors in the petroleum industry, and (2) it allows him to check off another thing that Obama accomplished that he's undone.  Methane is one of the most powerful greenhouse gases known, having a heat-trapping capacity over seventy times higher than carbon dioxide's.

Some methane does occur naturally from decomposition.  This is why thawing of the Arctic permafrost is a grave concern; the anaerobic decomposition of the thick layer of organic matter underneath is feared to create a huge methane spike.  Methane also is present in cow farts, so the beef industry shares some of the blame, here.

But increasing the allowable amount of methane leakage from oil and natural gas drilling makes no sense unless you honestly have a short-term profit über alles attitude toward the habitability of the Earth.  The new proposal is a nasty confection of handouts to the fossil fuel industry at the expense of environmental health.  It includes:

• increasing the time between required inspections on drilling equipment from six months to a year
• increasing the time required for repairing known leaks from thirty to sixty days
• allowing states that have laxer emissions standards to follow those standards instead of the federal ones

Unsurprisingly, the petroleum industry is thrilled by all of this, and projections are that they will recoup nearly all of the $530 million that they'd have had to invest into following the Obama-era regulations.

If that's not enough, last week it was announced that William Happer has joined the National Security Council.  Happer has stated outright that "there's no problem with CO2," and had the following to say about climate change science:

There is no problem from CO2.  The world has lots and lots of problems, but increasing CO2 is not one of the problems.  So [the accord] dignifies it by getting all these yahoos who don't know a damn thing about climate saying, "This is a problem, and we're going to solve it."  All this virtue signaling. You can read about it in the Bible: Pharisees and hypocrites and phonies...  [T]he significance of climate change has been tremendously exaggerated, and has become sort of a cult movement in the last five or ten years.

If a monster storm at the same time as all of this isn't sufficiently ironic for you -- increasing strength of hurricanes, after all, was predicted as an outcome of anthropogenic climate change thirty years ago -- last week a study from the University of Geneva was released that gives us some rather horrifying news about where all this could lead.  The warmest point in (relatively) recent Earth history is the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, which occurred 56 million years ago and is thought to have been triggered by a double whammy of intense volcanic activity and destabilization of frozen methane hydrates on the ocean floor.  And I'm not talking about a little warm spell, here; the average global temperature shot up by five to eight degrees in a phenomenally short amount of time, and the recent study found that very quickly broad swaths of equatorial regions became effectively uninhabitable.  By the middle of this event, the amplitude of catastrophic flooding events had increased by a factor of eight, and there were palm trees growing above the Arctic Circle.

And I haven't told you the real kicker; once that maximum was reached, it took several hundred thousand years for the Earth's systems to recover.

Scientists are uncertain where we are with respect to the tipping point -- the point where feedbacks (like the thawing of the permafrost I mentioned earlier) begin to amplify, rather than counteract, the effect of global warming.  I'm convinced that the Trump administration doesn't disbelieve in climate change as much as it simply considers the question irrelevant.  So what if the world warms? seems to be the attitude.

We'll already have banked our share of the profit.  To hell with everyone, and everything, else.

Perhaps as of November, we'll see some new faces in Congress -- with luck, ones who not only care about science, but take the time to understand it.  Between now and then, I can only hope that the damage and loss of life from Florence and the other storms currently brewing in the Atlantic is as low as possible, and that maybe -- just maybe -- enough voters will wake up and see where we're headed before it's too late.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a charming inquiry into a realm that scares a lot of people -- mathematics.  In The Universe and the Teacup, K. C. Cole investigates the beauty and wonder of that most abstract of disciplines, and even for -- especially for -- non-mathematical types, gives a window into a subject that is too often taught as an arbitrary set of rules for manipulating symbols.  Cole, in a lyrical and not-too-technical way, demonstrates brilliantly the truth of the words of Galileo -- "Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe."

The cost of scientific ignorance

Arrogance (n.) -- having or showing the insulting attitude of people who believe they are better, smarter, or more important than other people; exaggerating one's own worth in an overbearing manner.

There.  Just thought I'd clear that up, right at the outset.  Because evidently Jeb Bush needs to consult Webster's before he starts throwing the word around.

[image courtesy of photographer Gage Skidmore and the Wikimedia Commons]

The subject comes up because of a campaign stop in New Hampshire that the presidential hopeful made earlier this week, in which he brought up the topic of climate change.  He was specifically responding to President Obama's comment that climate change was a national security risk -- something just about every climate scientist in the world would agree with, given its projected effects on sea level, storm intensity, and shifts in rainfall.

Bush, however, disagreed.   "If the president thinks this is the gravest threat to our national security," he told the crowd, "it seems like he would say, 'let's expand LNG (liquefied natural gas) as fast as we can to get it into the hands of higher carbon-intense economies like China and other places. Let's figure out ways to use compressed natural gas for replacing importing diesel fuel, which has a higher carbon footprint,'"

This conveniently ignores the role that methane itself has in climate change.  It is true that natural gas produces less carbon dioxide, both per pound of fuel and per kilowatt-hour of energy, than coal does; however, leaked natural gas from fracking is already outweighing any savings in the carbon budget that would be accrued from switching from coal to gas.  In a paper from last October by Schneising et al., the authors write:

In the past decade, there has been a massive growth in the horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing of shale gas and tight oil reservoirs to exploit formerly inaccessible or unprofitable energy resources in rock formations with low permeability.  In North America, these unconventional domestic sources of natural gas and oil provide an opportunity to achieve energy self-sufficiency and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions when displacing coal as a source of energy in power plants.  However, fugitive [i.e., accidental/unreported] methane emissions in the production process may counter the benefit over coal with respect to climate change and therefore need to be well quantified.  Here we demonstrate that positive methane anomalies associated with the oil and gas industries can be detected from space and that corresponding regional emissions can be constrained using satellite observations... calling immediate climate benefit into question and indicating that current inventories likely underestimate the fugitive emissions.

But then, Bush goes even further, accusing the scientists who have brought such data to light "arrogant:"

Look, first of all, the climate is changing.  I don't think the science is clear what percentage is man-made and what percentage is natural.  It's convoluted.  And for the people to say the science is decided on, this is just really arrogant, to be honest with you.   It's this intellectual arrogance that now you can't even have a conversation about it.

Governor Bush, let me clarify some of the "convolution" for you; speaking with authority about a topic on which you are an expert is not arrogance.  Arrogance is when you exaggerate your knowledge for the purposes of self-aggrandizement.  (Cf. the above definition.)  And ignoring the evidence, and stating that the science is "unclear" when it is not, is one of two things; if it's done unwittingly, it's called "ignorance;" if it's done deliberately so as to placate voters and tell them what they want to hear even though you know it is untrue, it's called either "pandering" or "lying outright," depending upon how harsh you want to be.

And of course, it is exactly this sort of thinking that is why the House passed a bill last year forbidding scientists to give expert testimony on their own research.  Can't have those arrogant scientists tooting their own horns, dontchaknow.  Gotta make sure we're only taking advice from reg'lar folk.

You know, folk who don't know what they're talking about.

I don't know how we got here, in a place where being knowledgeable about a field makes you arrogant, and being an expert on a topic makes you biased.  The politicians, I think, have largely forgotten that in science we're talking about facts and evidence, not opinions and beliefs.

Put succinctly, stating that the data support a causal connection between fossil fuel use and climate change is not arrogant.

It's simply true.

Farts, craters, Mick Jagger, and the problem with lousy science reporting

One of the reasons that it is critical that we all be science-literate is because it is becoming increasingly apparent that the popular media either (1) hires reporters that aren't, or (2) values getting people to click links over accurate reporting.

I suspect it's (2), honestly.  The most recent examples of this phenomenon smack of "I don't care" far more than they do of "I don't know."  Just in the last week, we've had three examples of truly terrible reporting in media outlets that should have higher standards (i.e., I'm not even considering stuff from The Daily Mail).

And, for the record, this doesn't include the recent hysterical reporting that melting roads in Yellowstone National Park mean that the supervolcano is going to erupt and we're all going to die.

The first one, courtesy of the Australian news outlet News.Com.Au, pisses me off right from the outset, with the title, "A Mysterious Crater in Siberia Has Scientists Seeking Answers."  Because seeking answers isn't what scientists do all the time, or anything.  Then, right in the first line, we find out that they're not up to the task, poor things:  "Scientists baffled by giant crater... over northern Siberia -- a region notorious for devastating events."

"Baffled."  Yup, that's the best they can do, those poor, hapless scientists.  A big hole in the ground appears, and they just throw their hands up in wonderment.

Before we're given any real information, we hear some bizarre theories (if I can dignify them by that name) about what could have caused the hole.  UFOs are connected, or maybe it's the Gates of Hell, or perhaps the entry to "the hollow Earth."  Then they bring up the Tunguska event, a meteor collision that happened in 1908, and suggest that the two might be connected because the impact happened "in the region."

Despite the fact that the new crater is over a thousand miles from the Tunguska site.  This, for reference, is about the distance between New Orleans, Louisiana and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Only after some time are we told that the Siberian crater site is also the site of a natural gas field in which explosions have taken place before.  In fact, the whole place is pocked with circular craters, probably caused by methane explosions from the permafrost -- i.e., it's a completely natural phenomenon that any competent geologist would have been able to explain without even breaking a sweat.


But this is world-class journalism as compared to ABC News Online, which just reported that Brazil got knocked out of the FIFA World Cup because of Mick Jagger's support.

To be fair, ABC News wasn't intending this as science reporting, but from all evidence, they did take it seriously.  Here's an excerpt:

It seems the Rolling Stone frontman has developed a reputation for jinxing whatever team he supports. Some Brazilian fans are even blaming Jagger for their team’s 7-1 thrashing by Germany in Tuesday’s semifinal game. 

The 70-year-old singer turned up at the game with his 15-year-old son by Luciana Giminez, a Brazilian model and celebrity. Though he wore an England cap, his son was clad in Brazil jersey and they were surrounded by Brazil supporters. 

The legend of the “Jagger Curse” dates back to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, where he sat next to Bill Clinton for the USA-Ghana match, only to see the U.S. lose 2-1. When he attended the England-Germany game the next day, wearing an England scarf, his home country lost. But it wasn’t until the Dutch defeated Brazil during the quarterfinal round, where Jagger turned up in a Brazil shirt, that the Brazilians first blamed him for the loss.

Seriously?  It couldn't be that the winning team played better, could it?  You know, put the ball into the net more times?

It has to be Mick Jagger's fault?  Because of a magical jinx?


So I'm just going to leave that one sitting there, and move on to the worst example, which has been posted about five million times already on Facebook, to the point that if I see it one more time, I'm going to punch a wall.  I'm referring, of course, to the earthshatteringly abysmal science reporting that was the genesis of The Week's story "Study: Smelling Farts May Be Good For Your Health."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I'm hoping beyond hope that most of the people who posted this did so not because they believed it, but because most of us still don't mind a good har-de-har over flatulence.  But the story itself is idiotic.  Here's the first paragraph:

The next time someone at your office lets out a "silent but deadly" emission, maybe you should thank them. A new study at the University of Exeter in England suggests that exposure to hydrogen sulfide — a.k.a. what your body produces as bacteria breaks down food, causing gas — could prevent mitochondria damage. Yep, the implication is what you're thinking: People are taking the research to mean that smelling farts could prevent disease and even cancer.

Well, at the risk of sounding snarky, any people who "take this research" this way have the IQ of cheese, because two paragraphs later in the same article the writer says what the research actually showed:

Dr. Matt Whiteman, a University of Exeter professor who worked on the study, said in a statement that researchers are even replicating the natural gas in a new compound, AP39, to reap its health benefits. The scientists are delivering "very small amounts" of AP39 directly into mitochondrial cells to repair damage, which "could hold the key to future therapies," the university's statement reveals.

There is a difference between smelling a fart and having small amounts of dissolved hydrogen sulfide enter the mitochondria of your cells.  It is like saying that because sodium ions are necessary for proper firing of the nerves, that you'll have faster reflexes if you put more salt on your t-bone steak.  Worse than that; it's like saying that you'll have faster reflexes if you snort salt up your nose.

I know that media outlets are in business to make money, and that readers = sponsors = money.  I get that.  But why do we have a culture where people are so much more interested in spurious nonsense (or science that gets reported that way) than they are in the actual science itself?  Has science been portrayed as so unutterably dull that real science stories are skipped in favor of glitzy, sensationalized foolishness?

Or is it that we science teachers are guilty of teaching it that way, and convincing generations of children that science is boring?

Whatever the answer is to that question, I firmly believe that it's based on a misapprehension.  Properly understood, the science itself is cool, awe-inspiring, and fascinating.  Okay, it takes a little more work to understand mitochondria than it does to fall for "sniffing farts prevents cancer," but once you do understand what's really going on, it's a hell of a lot more interesting.

Oh, and it has one other advantage over all this other stuff: it's true.

Jill-the-Ripper and dinosaur farts

For all of my love of science, I do get frustrated with academia sometimes.  There seems to be a regrettable tendency with some researchers to do nothing more than come up with an idea, and reevaluate the data we already had in light of that idea, and then pretend that they've broken new ground -- when in reality, nothing is new but the concept.

Now, I'm not saying that approach can't be fruitful on occasion.  After all, that's basically how Einstein came up with relativity; by taking what other scientists had already found (that light always seemed to travel at the same speed) and saying, "Maybe we should just start from assuming that light always travels at the same speed, and see where that leads."  And lo, he ended up revolutionizing physics.

Sometimes, though, these conceptual studies just seem to me to be arguing in a near-vacuum.  There are two examples of that in the news right now.

First, we have this story, entitled "British Author Claims Serial Killer Jack the Ripper Was A Woman."  A British lawyer, author, and historian, John Morris, has written a new book claiming that the notorious London murderer was not only female, but he identifies her as Lizzie Williams, wife of royal physician John Williams, and that she was motivated by fury over her inability to have children.

That Jack the Ripper may have been Jill the Ripper isn't a new idea, of course; a few years ago an Australian forensic scientist, Ian Findlay, tried to support exactly the same conjecture by extracting DNA from a stamp on one of the letters Jack the Ripper sent to the police, but results were "inconclusive."  Otherwise, all we have is the same evidence that people have been poring over for years -- the police reports of the murders, the letters, and what is known about people who were associated with the victims.

In other words, all Morris is doing is playing "what if?"  From what I've read, the evidence in the case could point in one of several different directions, and I've seen cogent arguments made for the guilty party being one of a variety of people (one of which is Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward, Queen Victoria's grandson).  Speculation about which one actually committed the crimes is as pointless as arguing over who wrote Shakespeare's plays -- it keeps the academics busy but doesn't really advance our knowledge a whole lot.

Another example of this phenomenon comes from the field of paleontology and paleoclimatology, and hit the news in the form of an article entitled "Excuse Me: Gassy Dinosaurs May Have Warmed The Earth."  This one takes what we know about methane production in cows and scales it up to herbivores the size of dinosaurs -- and then tries to estimate the effect that methane had on the Earth's climate.

The paper, which appeared in Current Biology and was authored by David Wilkinson of Liverpool John Moores University in England, suggests that herbivorous dinosaurs might have produced 570 million tons of methane annually -- equivalent to the output from all domestic livestock currently.  If so, he argues, it could have significantly warmed the planet, as methane is known to be a greenhouse gas with a more powerful warming capacity than carbon dioxide.

One thing that seems certain is that the world was warmer back then -- by some estimates, 18 degrees Fahrenheit warmer on average.  But it very much remains to be seen if dinosaur farts had all that much to do with it.  For one thing, we don't have a particularly good idea of how large dinosaur populations were back then; and even if we did, drawing a comparison between digestive processes in cows and those in dinosaurs is a conjecture in the first place.  Even the information we have on what the climate was doing a hundred million years ago is based upon inference from a variety of proxy records that don't always agree with each other.  So to estimate the effect that unknown numbers of dinosaurs emitting unknown numbers of farts had on a climate eons ago whose behavior is understood only in broad-brush terms is kind of an exercise in futility.

I suppose this sort of thing is harmless enough, really, and I'm not of the opinion that all science needs to be deadly serious; but you have to wonder if "studies" like this exist mainly to result in new publication credits for the authors.  As such, they're a little like masturbation -- they keep your hands busy for a while, and you feel a nice warm satisfied glow afterwards, but in the long haul, they don't really accomplish much.