largely undisturbed, 5.5 million square miles of frozen terrain—is heating up fast. In fact, it’s warming nearlythan the rest of the world, with disastrous consequences for the region and its inhabitants. Many of these impacts you probably know from nature documentaries: ice caps melting, sea levels rising, and polar bears losing their homes.
An underappreciated consequence of climate change is how it will exacerbate the spread of infectious disease. As the world heats up, many species are expected to up sticks and meanderfrom their typical habitat, bringing various pathogens along with them for the ride. This means that previously unacquainted viruses and hosts will meet for the first time, potentially leading to viral spillover—where a virus jumps from one reservoir host to a new one, like our old friend SARS-CoV-2.
They then tried to gauge how likely it was that a virus might jump into a new species. To do this, they looked at the genetic history of a virus and its typical host. If a host and a virus show similar patterns in how they have evolved, it suggests that they’ve lived in tandem for a long time, and that the virus doesn’t tend to move into other species.
Knowing the propensity of viruses in the region to move species, they then used a computer algorithm to estimate how climate change would alter the likelihood of them doing so. They used the increasing flow of meltwater off nearby glaciers as a proxy for increasing temperatures, and found that as temperatures rise and glacier runoff increases, the risk of viruses in the area jumping hosts goes up with it.
One important caveat is that it’s not possible to give a definite answer on what will actually happen. “We’re not able to say, ‘We are going to have serious pandemic issues in the High Arctic,’” says Stéphane Aris-Brosou, an author on the paper and associate professor of biology at the University of Ottawa. The work is really just trying to quantify theMost Popular
The word ‘could’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting. And reading it it’s the usual Climate Change catastrophism. No real world examples just computer modelling and glorified guesswork because computer modelling have proved sooooo…reliable re climate in the past.🙄