Okay, maybe it wasn’t the Garden of Eden, but it was a lush, warm tropical habitat in the long ago time with a really, really big snake — Titanoboa.

You have to love a peer-reviewed climate science article in Nature titled, “Giant boid snake from the Palaeocene neotropics reveals hotter past equatorial temperatures,” (subs. req’d, abtract below). Nature News explains the article’s relevance:

Using models based on the largest modern-day snakes and their estimate of the Titanoboa‘s size, the team calculated how hot the tropics must have been 58 to 60 million years ago, a period known as the Palaeocene. The mean annual temperature would need to be at least 30-34 degrees Celsius to support the snake’s metabolism, the researchers report in Nature. This range matches previous estimates from Palaeocene climate models that assume high atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.

The results support the idea that the temperature difference between the Palaeocene tropics and higher-latitude regions was as large as it is today, even though the higher latitudes were much warmer during that time. This counters the so-called ‘thermostat’ hypothesis, which predicts that tropical temperatures would stay fairly stable even as other parts of the world heated up.

This “thermostat hypothesis” is a pet theory of famed denier Dr. Richard Lindzen, but like many small, defenseless pets, it was no match for a big snake, especially one estimated to have a “body length of 13 m and a mass of 1,135 kg.” A general debunking of Lindzen’s popular disinformation tracts can be found on RealClimate here.

If the world lets the sweet talk of denial and delay from the Lindzens of the world persuade us for another decade or so, then, like the snake’s seduction of Eve, we will lose our Garden of Eden — the miraculously narrow temperature window and livable climate that gave us modern human civilization — for 1,000 years or more.

The paper also sheds some light on the catastrophic greenhouse gas release of the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM):

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I am broadening SOTA to include any story that the FHA (Future Historians of America) might point to as emblematic of early 21st Century American decadence — assuming we don’t prevent catastrophic warming. I’m talking Last Days of Pompeii stuff.

When a couple with “nine other dogs, as well as cats, birds and sheep,” drops $150k to have a San Francisco biotech company create a facsimile of a beloved dead pet in South Korea, that is a SOTA.

[In the spirit of 25 random things about me, as if the blogosphere isn't solipsistic enough, but who am I to talk, really] Growing up, I loved my family’s Siamese cat — Lingi-lingi Lichi Yantgze-pangtze Ching Chong Nietsche Bong Gooey-sooey Leeming Lion Ticki-Wicki-Licki Chang O’Brien [no agreed-upon spelling exists, but I'm sure my brother will weigh in] — as much as anyone could love a pet, especially one that lived for more than 15 years, one that was a world-class mouser, one who came when I called every night … but I digress

I could see spending some money to prolong Lingi’s life. But I can’t see spending a fantastic amount of money to create a facsimile who would look exactly like Lingi, but wouldn’t be.

Now this couple can certainly spend their money however they want — heck, they can clone their sheep and birds if it makes them happy. But one can only imagine how future generations will view such extravagance assuming humanity, led by Americans, continues its refusal to devote even 1% or 2% of our fantastic wealth to averting the incalculable catastrophe to come (see “Hadley Center: Catastrophic 5-7°C warming by 2100 on current emissions path“). And, of course, we’re talking about a lot of future generations with a lot of time to curse our greed and willful myopia — 50 generations at least (see NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years”).

They won’t be cloning many dogs in 2100 if we stay on or near our current emissions path (although we may well have cloned some of the 40% to 70% of species the IPCC says will be extinct by then so I suppose this technology will have some value, ironically).

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