Global Warming -- Something to Think About

No news is good news… and the media have capitalized on this truism for a very good reason: Disaster sells! As a result, more and more people are becoming aware of the dangers associated with Global Warming, for example:

• Wildfires -- 100,000 fires reported in 2006 with nearly 10 million acres burned (125% over the decade’s average), not to mention the recent horrific Australian inferno that caused scores of deaths, and the complete loss of some rural towns.
• More powerful and dangerous hurricanes (Hurricane Katrina of August 2005 was the costliest and one of the deadliest hurricanes in U.S. history).
• Intense rainstorms and flooding together with more reports of droughts and deadly heat waves.
• Growing effects on wildlife, for example, Polar Bears drowning because they have to swim further to reach ice floes (all of the glaciers in Glacier National Park will be gone by 2070).
• Rising sea levels, reduced snowfall and increased rainfalls. Imagine the loss of every coastal city and most island nations throughout the world. In fact, a combination of these factors is already threatening residents in the Sacramento-San Joaquin river delta area, and if the trend continues, the homes of some 300,000 Californian residences will be flooded, not to mention the fact that the drinking water of 24 million people will also be contaminated.
• Health threats such as bad air resulting in allergies and asthma, plus the increases in the frequencies of infectious diseases and food and waterborne outbreaks.

And so on… Which brings me to the subject of this article, which few people are aware of:

ECOSYSTEM SHIFTS.

The journal ‘Nature’ recently reported the discovery of fossilized remains of the world’s largest snake, Titanoboa cerrejonensis, discovered in a large coal quarry in Colombia. It is estimated that the snake was approximately 42 ft long, the length of a bus, and so wide that it would have reached up to a person’s hips.

Herpetologist Jack Conrad of the American Museum of Natural History in New York said, "This is amazing. It challenges everything we know about how big a snake can be,"

Although the animal was large enough to swallow a cow, its diet probably consisted of giant turtles and pre-historic crocodiles. It hunted the way modern anacondas do, by lurking in the water and overcoming its prey in ferocious bone-crushing strikes.

Professor Polly from the Indiana University said, “A snake living in the tropics would have been operating at a much higher metabolic rate, so snakes had the opportunity to evolve and grow as this one did.”

Dr Jason Head from the University of Toronto at Mississauga, Canada, added that the discovery “Challenges our understanding of past climates and environments as well as the biological limitations on the evolution of giant snakes.”

Using the animal’s size to make an estimate of the Earth’s temperature 58 to 60 million years ago, researchers concluded that a snake of Titanoboa’s size would have required a temperature of between 30C and 34C (86F and 93F) to survive.

By comparison, the average temperature of the region where the snake was discovered is about 28C.

A rise in global temperatures of a mere 2 to 6 degrees caused by global warming falls within the estimates given by many modern climatologists… and this gives us pause.

Apart from the other factors, do we also want to live in a world populated by giant reptiles?

Think about it…