Posted by I have been waiting for the first liberal journalist to run an article linking the current coronavirus outbreak with climate change. It was inevitable that it would happen given that the media and politicians have blamed just about everything else on “global warming” including wars and terrorism. President Obama, for all his other shortcomings, was correct in stating, “Understand, climate change did not cause the conflicts we see around the world. Yet what we also know is that severe drought helped to create the instability in Nigeria that was exploited by the terrorist group Boko Haram. It’s now believed that drought and crop failures and high food prices helped fuel the early unrest in Syria, which descended into civil war in the heart of the Middle East.” Clearly that makes sense to anyone but the most ivory towered, naval gazing academic; it is the disruption and scarcity of resources caused by climate change (i.e., less food) that results in conflict. For those who think that the distinction is academic, remember that I believe that the correct use of time and money is not to prevent climate change (ie, zero emissions today) but to slowly phase out emissions while preparing and spending to mitigate the impact of climate change on the human population. My new philosophy fits in perfectly with Obama’s comments. If it is drought and crop failure that leads to terrorism and wars, then the solution is not to avoid the unavoidable climate change, but to spend money on things like genetically modified crops that are drought resistant and therefore mitigating the impact climate change has on humanity and civilization.
But good old Canada was the first to show up to the coronavirus was caused by climate change party led by my perennial favourite liberal media rag, The Star. “Coronavirus outbreak shows the risk in ignoring human activity’s impact on nature.”
“What do the novel coronavirus outbreak, warm winters in Ontario, and coyote poop all have in common? These three phenomena are all examples of a concept known as ‘One Health’: the recognition that human, animal and ecosystem health are deeply interconnected, and that degrading the well-being of the planet and its other inhabitants is damaging to ourselves. One Health might sound like a hippie maxim, something you would see on a T-shirt in Kensington Market. But it is a widely accepted principle, one adopted by the World Health Organization, the Public Health Agency of Canada, and other health authorities worldwide.”
Nice try Kate Allen (who’s claim to expertise in science and technology comes from being “interested in all things great and geeky – from particle physics to paleontology and everything in between.”) The World Health Organisation defines “‘One Health‘ is an approach to designing and implementing programmes, policies, legislation and research in which multiple sectors communicate and work together to achieve better public health outcomes.” There is a stark difference between the WHO definition of One Health, “To effectively detect, respond to, and prevent outbreaks of zoonoses and food safety problems, epidemiological data and laboratory information should be shared across sectors. Government officials, researchers and workers across sectors at the local, national, regional and global levels should implement joint responses to health threats”; and the mother gaia hippie maxim on the Kensington Market T-shirt that Kate tries to convince us that One Health is supposed to mean.
Kate finally then acknowledges obtusely that while this is not what WHO and other health authorities worldwide meant when they say One Health, it’s what it should mean and all those experts just aren’t “woke” enough. To accomplish this, she goes out to find like-minded radical fringe eco-nutters like herself to try to back up her opinion that One Health should mean something else but those experts at WHO are just narrow minded and stupid. “But those on the front lines say the principles have been imperfectly applied, and that critical components are being overlooked. ‘The link to environmental degradation is not there,’ says Justina Ray, president and senior scientist of Wildlife Conservation Society Canada. While veterinarians and human health experts might be doing a better job of collaborating to watch out for new infectious diseases, not enough attention is being paid to the environment that all animals — humans included — live in. ‘The link between planetary health and human well-being, and the services the planet provides, are not entrenched at all in our governments … (or) in our policies. And it’s not at all in the economic conversations.'” Well, maybe that’s because what you are rambling on about isn’t actually an economic conversation but hey; why quibble nuances with a holier-than-thou, I know best, eco-nutter. Oh, and someone who works at the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada can hardly be considered an unbiased source of opinion when it comes to the relationship and roles of man and nature (hint: they will almost always say that man is a pestilence encroaching on nature and wild spaces and we should basically do everything to stop any form of development that will harm the rare yellow-spotted one-eyed horned tree frog).
“Climate change, which Canada continues to contribute to, has made southern Ontario a more hospitable environment for the ticks that carry the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. Cold winters used to make it harder for the ticks to survive before finding a host. But Canadian researchers found that climate change has made it possible for ticks to sustain themselves in new areas of Ontario, including parts of the Niagara escarpment and Algonquin Provincial Park. Lyme disease cases in Ontario grew from 91 in 2008 to 624 in 2018. Last April, researchers from the University of Guelph reported that nearly one in four of the coyotes and foxes from southern Ontario they tested carried a tapeworm that can cause a potentially fatal illness in humans and domestic dogs. Coyotes and foxes catch the parasite from eating infected rodents like field mice, and then shed the parasites’ eggs in their poop. While the risk to humans is currently low, the researchers said, the more that urbanization — and the dog-loving people inside those urban areas — expand into coyote and fox habitat, the higher the risk.”
Finally, the long and threadbare logic chain Kate has been trying to weave get to the point. Its made-made climate change that is leading to these major disease outbreaks and you know, tapeworms from mice being caught by coyotes that eat them and then pooped out to infect Lassie when we take her for her walk and then we catch it when Lassie licks our face. Some great Jurassic Park chaos theory, butterfly in the Amazon, bastardized logic chain mumbo jumbo there.
“We’re just one inhabitant of the planet, although we’re overtaking it, absolutely. And we need the health of the planet,” says Ray, of the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada. Except that is kind of the opposite of what the rest of us are saying which is more scientific like; hey, maybe its not such a great idea to eat wild animals that are a reservoir of diseases and keep them in close proximity to people by having a wet market of live wild animals mixing with people in cramped close quarters like a giant mad scientist petri-dish.
But why let facts and science get in the way of a good political argument? Well once again, we are faced with another global outbreak; the problem is that the transmission of panic and misinformation in the age of social media is far more dangerous than the micro-organism itself. From the chart above, we can see that Ro (transmission rate) of this novel coronavirus is about the same as the flu and its case-fatality rate (mortality) is higher than seasonal flu but lower than the SARS or MERS coronavirus’ that preceded it. In other words, this is unlikely to be a catastrophic civilization destroying pandemic. If that table is too hard to figure out, here’s the same idea in graphic form below (although they used a log scale on the y-axis for mortality which makes it seem worse than it is because a regular linear scare would make it look super tiny).
So this novel coronavirus is not going to the biblical plague that wipes out humanity but we have to stop climate change because it eventually will release the evil devil disease from Pandora’s Box filled with rats, bats and cats that will kill us all. “Clearly we’ve got a problem that is related to the interface between wildlife or wild nature and humanity. It’s very simple,” agrees Steven Osofsky, the Jay Hyman Professor of Wildlife Health & Health Policy at Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine and one of the original architects of the One Health approach. “We kill wildlife, we eat wildlife, and we trade it; we capture wildlife and put it in markets, and mix species together from all over the world that never should have seen each other; and we encroach upon wild nature at unprecedented scales. Those three baskets of activities pretty much explain all the incidences of where these diseases come from,” Osofsky says.
Well put Professor Osofsky. Except that what you are saying has been happening since the dawn of time. In fact, despite a vastly increased human population and ever dwindling wild spaces, the worst incidents of disease and outbreaks occurred before all this hype about global warming and climate change that liberals keep pounding us with. Lets look at the great pandemics in modern world history, Spanish Flu at the end of World War One was likely due to the breakdown of healthcare and resource limitations as well as spread by troop movements due to World War One. The other two big modern outbreaks, HIV/AID and Hong Kong flu haven’t been attributed (yet, although I’m sure there is some PhD idiot out there writing a thesis on it) to climate change and ecological depredation. Sure, most human disease pandemics occur from zoonoses, that is transmitted to people from a reservoir of the disease in wild animals. My point is that has always been the case and while you would have thought that disease pandemics would have gotten worse as we chopped down the rain forest and ballooned to 8 billion people crowded into giant slum cities in the third world while factory farming animals in unprecedented quantities; the opposite seems true.
What we do see is the biggest pandemic, small pox, has been around since 3rd century BC and killed an estimate 300m people in the 20th century alone with 15m cases in 1967 alone. We don’t hear about small pox in the media anymore because the last case was diagnosed in 1977 and WHO declared the global eradication of the disease in 1980. How short is our collective memory to so quickly and easily forget that the worst plague of all time was only recently eradicated due to science and progress; the stuff that climate change activities would have us reverse in an inane attempt to live in harmony with nature and mother earth. Or how about number two plague, the measles? The measles vaccine has resulted in an 80% decrease in deaths from measles between 2000-2017 but still affects about 20m people per year, primarily in Africa and Asia. Measles deaths fell from 2.6m in 1980, to 545,000 in 1990 and 73,000 in 2014. But thanks to the internet, social media and general stupidity with Anti-Vaxxers, measles, once thought eradicated in the West, is now making a comeback even in developed rich countries. Did I just make a comparison between Anti-Vaxxers and Climate Change Activists? Hell yes I did. Because it is precisely science and technology that has propelled us out of the Malthusian trap of overpopulation, mass starvation and environmental depredation time and time again when so many “woke” futurists said we were all going to die and civilization was going to collapse. It is science and technology that have eradicated or have limited the destructive effect of most of the worst pandemic diseases which all predate man-made climate change. These eco-facists want me to believe that if I only stopped driving my SUV, the bubonic plague (black death) would not have happened? It is precisely modern science, technology and industrialization that has allowed us to mitigate the worst calamities facing mankind historically – disease and starvation. The price we paid was rising carbon-dioxide emissions but if you just look at the numbers, it was a price well worth paying.
So yeah, China should definitely review how they handle wet markets and live animals in the future in order to minimise the risk of a mutation and transmission of animal diseases into the human population (zoonoses). Or at least a more scientific examination into how to improve hygiene in those places because, as these articles here and here suggest, a knee-jerk ban and closure of all wet markets is not necessarily the panacea that some make it out to be. But to blame global disease pandemics on climate change and to make it sound like it is actually getting worse? Please. Even a cursory examination of the historical record shows clearly that disease outbreaks were way worse prior to “climate change” and science, medicine and general sanitation have advanced to actually reduce the impact of diseases on our societies. The return to nature proposals (impossible given the population of the world today but that is another debate) that the eco-nutters would have us try to do would basically doom us to a return to the days of Thomas Hobbes who described the human condition as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”