T-Rex Hates High-Fives

I bought a great shirt in Macy's that has a picture of two Tyrannosaurus Rex dinosaurs facing each other and the words T-Rex hates high-fives. Think about it. I love wearing it.  It often gets a laugh from people passing me in the street. Sometimes I think they're laughing at me.  Sometimes they probably are.

 

Now there's no evidence in the fossil record that T-Rex ever held business meetings, but look at those tiny arms - they look perfectly evolved for holding a briefcase.  Mobile phones would have been a problem, what with T-Rex ears so high up on their heads, so they must have had Bluetooth and hands free. But what else went on in the lives of T-Rex? What was dinosaur society really like?

Our world is struggling with the greatest problem ever facing mankind - the greatest problem of our age as it has been described. I don't mean programming your video recorder to copy programs from free-to-air or deleting 'friends' off Facebook without them noticing. I'm talking about global warming.  This week, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels at the remote Mauna Loa mountain in Hawaii were the highest ever recorded. Ever. Down here in Sydney we've had 27 consecutive years of it getting hotter and hotter, and the hottest day ever recorded was in January this year. Ever.

The best scientists in the world, in fact, every scientist that isn't paid by an oil, coal or gas company, say that we need to do something about this, and that something we need to do is cut carbon dioxide emissions.

Think about it.  The last time global temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were this high was when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.  Early dinosaur society clearly must have had a massive CO2 addiction, just like humans. With dinosaurs occupying every ecological niche for more than 180 million years their energy demands must have been phenomenal. Every grain of coal would have been mined to power dinosaur entertainment and air travel. Every drop of oil burnt to transport souvenirs and children's toys from the manufacturing hubs on Laurasia to become landfill in the tech savvy Gondwanaland markets. I have no doubt that dinosaur scientists would have reached the same conclusions as human scientists have 65 million years later: that society must change, that we must do more with less, and that we must move to a low carbon economy.

We should take a lesson from the dinosaurs. While the Jurassic and Triassic periods were marked by rampant capitalism and out of control consumption of resources, the Cretaceous was a golden age of sustainability. Cretaceous dinosaurs embraced low carbon, sustainable society.  Solar thermal, wind and other renewables powered their smart phones and tablets. Over the last 20 million years of the Cretaceous steel and concrete infrastructure of the great Triassic dinosaur cities was replaced by renewable bamboo, rubber and plant fibre technologies. Local production was favoured, helped by the breaking of Pangaea into smaller land masses. Clean-up of old contamination was complete. And  massive reforestation was undertaken on a global scale.  Even Antarctica was forested, as part of the planet's largest ever carbon sequestration project.  How ironic that these have become the coal and oil fields of the human age. The dinosaurs must be horrified. Turning in their fossilised graves.

Yes, the dinosaurs finally succeeded in tackling climate change.  It was a magnificent achievement, unprecedented in the history of the planet. Dinosaur society achieved a nirvana of sustainability. Completely biodegradable. It touched the Earth lightly.  So lightly in fact that not a trace of it remains today.

And 65 million years ago, as the planet's thermostat returned to normal, and the hazy, humid, skies cleared at last so that the stars finally shone again on the surface of the Earth, the first dinosaur astronomers since the early Jurassic began to peer out into the heavens, and finally noticed a large approaching rock.  That's the other reason T-Rexs don't high-five.