Bubonic Plague Around the Corner?

A new study looks at the history of climate and its relation to the spread of bubonic plague.

Pandemics of bubonic plague have occurred in Eurasia since the sixth century ad. Climatic variations in Central Asia affect the population size and activity of the plague bacterium’s reservoir rodent species, influencing the probability of human infection. Using innovative time-series analysis of surrogate climate records spanning 1,500 years, a study in BMC Biology concludes that climatic fluctuations may have influenced these pandemics. This has potential implications for health risks from future climate change.

 

The plague has been at the heart of many historians theories about how some of the largest changes in European and Asian history have gone down.

Did the Justinian Plague contribute to the terminal weakening of the eastern Roman Empire [2]?

Did the Black Death hasten the collapse of Europe’s feudal system, and the advent of liberalizing moves towards mercantilism, literacy and the Renaissance [3]?

(And was the rise and fall of the Mongol-controlled Yuan Dynasty in China, from the mid-12th to mid-13th centuries, influenced by flickering pre-pandemic plague epidemics in China during that Medieval Warm period?)

Turns out that there’s a growing batch of evidence showing a connection between fluctuations in climate, and incidence of plague.  See the figure:

Here’s their description of the graph:

Modeling the effects of climate on plague. In the top plot, the solid black line represents plague activity in the central Asian rodent population (Y(mean)) over the past 1,500 years, as estimated from the authors’ model of the effects of climate (including via observably correlated vegetation indices) on this natural reservoir (sylvatic) plague activity. The broken gray lines show 95% quantiles and the red line represents the multi-frequency (2 to 60 years) Gaussian moving average. The dark-blue plot represents the long-term (2 to 400 years) multi-frequency mean, with the maximum (upper broken line, Y(max)), minimum (lower broken line, Y(min)) and sum of minimum and maximum (solid line, Y(qu.)). The periods leading up to the Justinian Plague (1), the Black Death (2), the 19th-century pandemic (3) and the Manchurian epidemics (4) are shaded in pale blue. The third plot shows the index of conflict between Chinese and nomad societies (solid black line, War). Below this are shown the coverage of the climatic data used in the modeling: glacial series (blue), tree-ring index (green), and the decadal coverage in the monsoon proxy (brown). Taken from Figure 3d of Kausrud et al. [1].

This type of study is both kick-ass (because of how interesting it is) and frightening! 

Human Extinction 70,000 Years Ago: A Close Call

A report in the New York Times says that 70,000 years ago, the total human population may have dropped to as low as only 2,000 individuals!

What’s particularly interesting to me about this is the timing.  About 50,000 years ago is regarded as the time when humans went through a major brain shift … ie, we got smarter.  And it is widely known that evolution happens at a much faster rate in small isolated populations.  Could the drop in population have contributed to a speeding up of our intellectual development?

Eastern Africa experienced a series of severe droughts between 135,000 and 90,000 years ago and the researchers said this climatological shift may have contributed to the population changes, dividing into small, isolated groups which developed independently.

Paleontologist Meave Leakey, a Genographic adviser, commented: ”Who would have thought that as recently as 70,000 years ago, extremes of climate had reduced our population to such small numbers that we were on the very edge of extinction.”

Climate Change strikes again.

Who Cares if the Arctic is Warming?

Who cares about climate change? Polar bears care. Or at least they would if they had the ability to understand the depth of the problem. Their habitat is shrinking, and there is little that we can do about it. By 2050, two-thirds of the current population of Polar Bears will be gone, pushed back to a fraction of their original habitat.¹ Even if we decided as a society to cut carbon emissions to marginal levels, the heat would continue to clime. The ocean absorbs heat and releases it slowly. Because of that (and other reasons), there is a climate change time-lag. A certain amount of global warming is now inevitable.

Right there, we’ve convinced most of the worlds 8 year olds that there is a serious problem with a warming world. The idea of a planet without polar bears (or at least one with drastically reduced numbers) would anger most children to action. It would also anger a number of adults, but not likely to the same degree, nor to the same level of action. (Adults are, by nature, far more self-absorbed than that). And since only adults actually have the right to vote, and hold politically and economically high positions, then we’ll need to find a reason that adults can get on board with: a reason that affects them.

Over this next century, regardless of what we do, and projecting conservatively, the worlds oceans will rise by 3 feet.² It may be a whole lot more, but no less than 3 feet. If 3 feet doesn’t sound like much, remember that much of the earths population lives at or below sea level. A 3 foot rise in the ocean spells doom for literally billions of the worlds people. Homes will be deluged, whole cities placed under water, untold billions made into refugees. It will be Katrina on an earth-sized scale. There will be no more stability. The coast lines will be ever increasing.³ Land developments, and sea-side homes will have to be abandoned. The economic costs alone will be staggering.

But that’s the easy news. It could all end up being far worse. The 3 foot sea level rise is conservative, and understated. If any of the worse projections come to life we will be looking not at a rise of 3 feet, but 3 meters!⁴ And this would not happen gradually, but quickly, and with force. Millions upon millions of lives would be lost. New York’s Manhattan Island would be under water. Much of Washington DC would be under water. ⁵ And the third world and poorer countries would take an even greater hit since they would lack the economic means to adapt quickly to an ever changing world.⁶ Death, disease, and refugees. That is our future world.

The only way that we can affect positive change is if we can convince a larger number of adults to see the problem as one needing to be solved. The arctic is the proverbial canary in the coal mine. When the Arctic goes, so goes the world. The earth is warming at an alarming rate. But it matters not if no one is paying attention to the canary.

1“Warming is Seen as Wiping Out Most Polar Bears,” Andrew C. Revkin and John M. Broder. New York Times. Sept. 8^th, 2007.

2“In Greenland, Ice and Instability,” Andrew Revkin. New York Times. Jan. 8^th, 2008.

3see footnote 2.

4see footnote 2.

5“While Washington Slept,” Mark Hertsgarrd. Vanity Fair. May 2006.

6“Distributional aspects of climate change impacts,” Richard S.J. Tol, Thomas E. Downing, Onno J. Kuik, Joel B. Smith. Global Environmental Change. 2004.

Chicago Climate Exchange: Cap and Trade, the Wave of the Future

The Chicago Climate Exchange is one of the coolest, and boldest, ideas to combat global climate change that I’ve seen in years. It has essentially created a market in buying and selling CO2 emissions, that is, a cap and trade system.

CCX emitting Members make a voluntary but legally binding commitment to meet annual GHG emission reduction targets. Those who reduce below the targets have surplus allowances to sell or bank; those who emit above the targets comply by purchasing CCX Carbon Financial Instrument® (CFI®) contracts.

And it isn’t just big companies participating (though they are: Ford, DuPont, Rolls-Royce, etc). Here’s a list of Universities participating:

Hadlow College
Michigan State University
University of California, San Diego
University of Idaho
University of Iowa
University of Minnesota
University of Oklahoma
Tufts University

It would be interesting to see if Portland State University would consider hopping on board.

Oregon-Washington Dead Zones: Global Warming and Anoxic Oceans

[dead crabs washed up on the coast here in Oregon]

This is what’s happening to the coasts off of Oregon and Washington (as well as oceans around the world).  The oceans are becoming more and more acidic, in a process called acidification.  And that bodes poorly for creatures who are sensitive to rising acid levels (most).

There are an increasing number of Dead Zones in the waters of the world.  A Dead Zone is a patch of ocean that is so devoid of oxygen that nothing (or nearly nothing) can live in it.  As a point of reference, the bottom of the appropriatly named Black Sea is black because below 150 meters the water is anoxic (without oxygen), and there is no life (except certain bacteria) — just a bleak, black nothingness.

At more than one point in the earths history, the oceans — all of the oceans — were completely anoxic.   No life was found in them save for some particularly noxious bacterium that released large amounts of poisonous (to humans and other animals) gas.    Nearly all the major extictions of the past (save for the KT asteroid extinction) happened in conjunction with anoxic oceans.

These dead spots are growing.   The mouth of the Mississippi is now the 3rd largest dead zone in the world, every year growing to 20, 000 square kilometers.  It grows in summer, shrinks in winter.

A quote from a recent LA Times article, Dead zones off Oregon and Washington likely tied to global warming, study says:

Peering into the murky depths, Jane Lubchenco searched for sea life, but all she saw were signs of death.

Video images scanned from the seafloor revealed a boneyard of crab skeletons, dead fish and other marine life smothered under a white mat of bacteria. At times, the camera’s unblinking eye revealed nothing at all — a barren undersea desert in waters renowned for their bounty of Dungeness crabs and fat rockfish.

“We couldn’t believe our eyes,” Lubchenco said, recalling her initial impression of the carnage brought about by oxygen-starved waters. “It was so overwhelming and depressing. It appeared that everything that couldn’t swim or scuttle away had died.”

Upon further study, Lubchenco and other marine ecologists at Oregon State University concluded that that the undersea plague appears to be a symptom of global warming. In a study released today in the journal Science, the researchers note how these low-oxygen waters have expanded north into Washington and crept south as far as the California state line. And, they appear to be as regular as the tides, a lethal cycle that has repeated itself every summer and fall since 2002.

“We seem to have crossed a tipping point,” Lubchenco said. “Low-oxygen zones off the Northwest coast appear to be the new normal.”

Notice the Dead Zone off of Newport, a popular beach town.

Gore Won’t Endorse Obama … Nor Hillary

TNR makes the case. Gore won’t risk losing out on the chance to be a part of a pro-climate-change administration (or is that bad wording? Maybe the current administration is pro CC?).