Thursday, February 05, 2009

Hiss   [John J. Miller]

The latest reason why global warming is bad: The snakes are gonna be huge!

NYT:

Some 60 million years ago, well after the demise of the dinosaurs, a giant relative of today’s boa constrictors, weighing more than a ton and measuring 42 feet long, hunted crocodiles in rain-washed tropical forests in northern South America, according to a new fossil discovery. ... the existence of such a large snake may also help clarify how hot the tropics became during an era when the planet, as a whole, was far warmer than it is now, and also how well moist tropical ecosystems can tolerate a much warmer global climate. That last question is important in assessments of how human-driven global warming might affect the tropics.

UPDATE: Iain Murray shares this website, which provides a list of all the stuff we can blame on global warming. It appears as though giant jungle snakes are an entirely new problem that nobody has thought about — until now.

02/05 05:40 AMShare