Phuket Humor: Death from the Ozone Layer

PHUKET: There’s a new theory about what caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. It wasn’t a meteorite that wiped them out.

It was their own farting.

“The animals, weighing from 80 to 100 tons, would eat…between 130 and 260 kilos of food every day,” according to one report. “They would fart non-stop.”

Their farts contained a high proportion of methane gas. During the dinosaurs’ 100 million years of existence, “the atmosphere of Earth became charged with methane, which finally damaged the ozone layer and brought about great changes in the vegetation.”

This caused a food shortage that wiped the dinosaurs out.

This theory has frightening implications for the future of our species—and, indeed, for all life on our planet.

All those millions of dinosaurs farting non-stop for 100 million years must have produced a hell of a lot of methane. The question is, where did it go? It can’t have vanished into thin air. Gas rises, so it must have risen.

And it’s still lurking up there. Our planet is surrounded by a layer of lethal dinosaur farts.

Now, presumably the region of saurian flatulence lies just beneath the ozone layer. We can call it the fartbelt. What would happen if the ozone layer began to deteriorate?

I’ll tell you what would happen. The fartbelt would be shaken loose from the underbelly of the ozone layer and would begin to descend. Eventually it would reach ground level. It would cover the entire surface of our planet and poison the air we breathe. All living creatures would die in horrible convulsions of protracted agony from inhaling the lethal gases.

While I have no personal experience of the smell of dinosaur farts, I suspect that they must smell at least as bad as the beer farts emitted by me and my mates as we frolic in our local go-go bar. And if fresh dinosaur farts smell bad, just think how bad they’ll smell after fermenting beneath the ozone layer for millions of years.

But we need not despair. The captains of industry, ever alert to save our planet (and their profits) in times of crisis, have come to our rescue.

We all know that cars and factories emit greenhouse gases. It now appears that they form a protective layer beneath the fartbelt that holds it up, keeps it in place, and functions as a fartshield. So long as we produce greenhouse gases, they will reinforce the fartshield and prevent the descent of the fartbelt.

It’s true that the continued production of greenhouse gases will pollute our planet and contribute to global warming. But which would you prefer—to put up with a little discomfort from pollution and global warming, or to be engulfed in a gaseous sea of dinosaur farts that will kill us all?

This message comes to you through the kind courtesy of the automobile and manufacturing industries, which pay me well and have always known that greenhouse gases are beneficent.

Ye Olde Curmudgeon can be praised for his hard-hitting scientific analysis c/o s.tsow@ymail.com, except when he’s drinking toasts to his paymasters, the captains of industry, in his favorite go-go bar.

— Ye Olde Curmudgeon