Here's another reason to combat climate change: Severe weather events can flush out terrifying giant snakes.

Your support powers solutions-focused climate reporting — keeping it free for everyone. All donations DOUBLED for a limited time. Give now in under 45 seconds.
Secure · Tax deductible · Takes 45 Seconds

Stories like this don’t tell themselves.

Make others like it possible. Your support powers solutions-focused climate reporting — keeping it free for everyone. Give now in under 45 seconds.
Secure · Tax deductible · Takes 45 Seconds

This photo — which gives me ALL THE WILLIES. ALL OF THEM — was taken in Louisiana near the Morganza spillway, a flood control structure that was just employed to relieve pressure on the levee system after recent floods. So basically, this snake is relocating due to flooding, like everyone else in the affected area. Man, as if the sharks in Brisbane weren't bad enough.

I dearly want this photo to be fake — snakes are creepy enough when they're not a hundred feet long. They WALK with their ABS, people! That's not right. But many of the commenters at Boing Boing, usually the first to tell by the pixels, are saying they think it's reality. Monstrous snakes — could there possibly be a better reason to keep the climate under control?

UPDATE: Oh thank goodness: It's looking increasingly like this is a recycled photo from the Australian floods. So the point still holds — severe weather → snake horror — but at least it's in Australia, which somehow makes me feel better. "Australia is trying to kill you" was a preexisting truism, so finding out that it's trying to kill me with giant flood snakes as well as deceptively adorable poisonous freak monsters isn't that upsetting.