Google News and the climate Left are promoting a ridiculous article by ProPublica arguing that climate change, rather than wind and solar power, causes deforestation, which makes the spread of infectious diseases like coronavirus more likely.
Yesterday, I showed how solar and wind power requires massive land development and deforestation to produce just a small amount of power. Today, let’s debunk the false assertion that climate change also causes deforestation.
No study has ever directly linked any single species loss to anthropogenic (man-made) climate change, despite many efforts to try and make such a connection. Biologist/ecologist Jim Steele demonstrates this in his book, Landscapes & Cycles.
Climate change is not causing humanity’s conversion of land from forests to farms.
As detailed in Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels, modern agriculture, built upon and entirely dependent upon fossil fuels, is allowing farmers to produce more food than ever on less and less land.
This allows former croplands to be reclaimed by forests.
In addition, as detailed by CO2Science.org, the carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere over the past century is contributing to a general greening of the earth that, among other effects, is creating denser forests and turning desert into savanna, expanding wildlife habitat.
Contrary to the vast body of scientific literature detailed in Chapter Four of Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels, ProPublica’s article also falsely claims, “vector-borne diseases — those carried by insects like mosquitoes and ticks and transferred in the blood of infected people — are also on the rise as warming weather and erratic precipitation vastly expand the geographic regions vulnerable to contagion.”
Note that ProPublica presents no scientific evidence for this wild assertion.
By contrast, in a peer-reviewed 2010 study in Nature, scientists compared historical and contemporary maps of the range and incidence of malaria and found endemic/stable malaria is likely to have covered 58% of the world’s land surface around 1900 but only 30% by 2007.
They report, “even more marked has been the decrease in prevalence within this greatly reduced range, with endemicity falling by one or more classes in over two-thirds of the current range of stable transmission.”
Tying this all together, they write, “widespread claims that rising mean temperatures have already led to increases in worldwide malaria morbidity and mortality are largely at odds with observed decreasing global trends in both its endemicity and geographic extent.”
Also, research by vector-borne disease expert Paul Reiter, a professor of medical entomology at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and a member of the World Health Organization Expert Advisory Committee on Vector Biology and Control, reveals no links between climate change and vector-borne diseases.
In a 2008 article in the Malaria Journal, Reiter wrote:
“Simplistic reasoning on the future prevalence of malaria is ill-founded; malaria is not limited by the climate in most temperate regions, nor in the tropics, and in nearly all cases, ‘new’ malaria at high altitudes is well below the maximum altitudinal limits for transmission, [continuing] future changes in climate may alter the prevalence and incidence of the disease, but an obsessive emphasis on ‘global warming’ as a dominant parameter is indefensible; the principal determinants are linked to ecological and societal change, politics and economics.”
The COVID-19 pandemic is scary enough without agenda-driven rags like ProPublica hyping unwarranted fears of a climate change/infection disease link, or Google News heavily promoting such garbage as “news.”
Read more at Climate Realism
Malaria has been around for a very long time: Chaucer wrote about it in the 14th century; Shakespeare refers to it in eight of his plays; then, it was called ‘the ague’ and it was rampant in England even during his lifetime, a time at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries smack in the middle of the period referred to by climatologists as ‘The Little Ice Age’.
In the past century, the disease was endemic in some very cold places. In the 1920’s, Russia had 13 million cases of malaria in a population of 140 million, almost one in ten. 800,000 Russians died, 9,000 of them in Archangel, a city on the edge of the Arctic Circle, where the temperature is below zero for seven months of the year and rarely gets above 15C in the Summer. Until 1942, the disease was endemic in Norway, another cold country.
The IPCC baldly states that the malaria-bearing mosquito does not usually survive in areas where the mean Winter temperature falls below 16-18C. According to the UK’s own MET Office, the mean Winter temperature of the UK from 1981 to 2010 was a chilly 3.7C, and it was considerably colder than that in the Little Ice Age.
To put it politely: a load of tosh.
Since many say the Corona Virus can not survive in the Heat their rediculous statement by Pro Pulica is stupid and irrevelent