We often talk about the impact climate change will have on us in big, visible ways, like floods, fires and storms. A new study published in Nature this month looks at much smaller ways climate change may affect us, microscopic ways. Climate scientist Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii was one of the authors of the study. And he told me part of their motivation was to see if climate change had anything to do with the outbreak of COVID-19.
MORA: What is happening is that there are many ways in which climate change is actually forcing these species to get into contact with us. And by increasing those contacts, it turns out that there are now pathogens that are in the wild, are having a higher chance to come in and making us all sick. And what we did in this paper was to quantify the magnitude of how big of a deal this is.
MORA: The way that I put it is like, imagine that I am going to get into a fight with Mike Tyson. Now, on top of that picture, put three other fighters like Arnold Schwarzenegger , Sylvester Stallone and Jackie Chan. And now you have those...MORA: Oh no, I think that can beat my - they can kick my butt, for sure.MORA: The analogy goes that I cannot endure one of them; forget about enduring the four of it. You can see heat waves everywhere around the world, wildfires, floods, you name it.
SHAPIRO: When you look at the diseases that we're struggling with right now, from COVID to monkeypox to polio, do you see a climate change connection?
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Source: WIRED - 🏆 555. / 51 Read more »
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