It was this bastard's fault, and anybody who looked like him.
CALGARY, Alberta – Geologic evidence shows that the last Ice Age ended approximately 12,000 years ago at the close of the Pleistocene Epoch. However, until now it was uncertain what triggered the present warmer climate. Professor Ain L. Zephyr of the Calgary Institute for the Study of Ice, Snow and Vanilla Fudge believes he has the answer.
At a paleoclimate conference in Tierra del Fuego, Dr. Zephyr reported,
Dr. Zephyr, with CISISV
“Just before the end of the last Ice Age there was an explosion in the population of woolly mammoths for unknown reasons, perhaps an abundant new source of food. At the same time a mutant intestinal microbe infected the mammoths, a fact we learned from frozen Siberian specimens. This microbe, when tested in a quarantined laboratory setting, is an extremely efficient methane generator with minor amounts of sulfur dioxide. That is, as part of its metabolic process, the microbe turns grass into gas.”
He continued, “A biologist colleague estimates that over 40% of the plant matter that the mammoths ate was converted into methane by the microbe, Flatulinium gigantis. Thusly, an incredible amount of the gas was released into the atmosphere while the poor mammoths suffered from malnutrition and sore rectums. They had to try to eat more and more food just to stay barely alive which in turn created more methane, a classic vicious circle.”
“Methane is a very effective greenhouse gas and the Earth’s temperature rose, causing the glaciers to melt and retreat. Then the mammoths both starved and died of heat exhaustion due to those shaggy coats. The rise of other methane-generating ungulates such as bison maintained the high atmospheric levels and it was only with the advent of human industrial civilization that other gases came into play.”
He went on to say that in the 1800’s, North America’s herd of 60,000,000 bison was reduced to a handful. The consquential reduction of methane in the atmosphere, combined with volcanic dust, led to a series of colder-than-normal winters. However, as cattle herds quickly increased, the methane level rose back to its previous level. Today, environmental hand-wringers are ignorant of the fact that dairy and beef cattle are belching and farting more methane than that released by the oil and gas industry.
Dr. Zephyr concluded by noting that there is insufficient data to determine if the mastodon and other large grazing mammals shared the same fate as the mammoth with respect to Flatulinium gigantis.
