Global Warming: is there anything it can't do?

watch out for cooties!

Scientists warn long-frozen ‘zombie virus’ is ‘public health threat’ amid thaw

French scientists have sparked fears of yet another pandemic after reviving a “zombie virus” that had been trapped under a frozen lake in Russia for a record 50,000 years.

“The situation would be much more disastrous in the case of plant, animal, or human diseases caused by the revival of an ancient unknown virus,” reads the “viral” study, which has yet to be peer-reviewed. The new research was helmed by microbiologist Jean-Marie Alempic from the French National Centre for Scientific Research, Science Alert reported.

According to the preliminary paper, global warming is causing vast swaths of the permafrost — permanently frozen ground covering one-quarter of the Northern Hemisphere — to irreversibly thaw. This has had the alarming effect of “releasing organic matter frozen for up to a million years” — including potentially harmful pathogens.

In order to study these awakening organisms, scientists have, perhaps paradoxically, revived some of these so-called “zombie viruses” from the Siberian permafrost. The oldest — dubbed Pandoravirus yedoma after the mythological character Pandora, whose curiosity led her to open a box trouble, and the type of soil it was found in — was 48,500 years old, a record age for a frozen virus returning to a state where it has the potential to infect other organisms. This shatters the previous record held by a 30,000-year-old virus discovered by the same team in Siberia in 2013.

The new strain is one of 13 viruses outlined in the study, each of which possessed their own genome, Science Alert reported. While the Pandoravirus was discovered below the bottom of a lake in Yukechi Alas in Yakutia, Russia, others have been found everywhere from mammoth fur to the intestines of a Siberian wolf.

After studying the live cultures, scientists found that all the “zombie viruses” have the potential to be infectious, and are therefore a “health threat.” They postulate that we could see more COVID-19-style pandemics in the future as ever-melting permafrost continues to release long-dormant viruses like a microbial Captain America.

“It is therefore legitimate to ponder the risk of ancient viral particles remaining infectious and getting back into circulation by the thawing of ancient permafrost layers,” they write. Unfortunately, it’s a vicious cycle as organic matter released by the thawing ice decomposes into carbon dioxide and methane, further enhancing the greenhouse effect and accelerating the melt.

Dr. Tony “I am Science”, the man who somehow eerily predicted in 2017 that incoming President Trump would encounter a worldwide epidemic from a new virus during his term, is doubtless on his way to France now, to pick up samples of this newly revived bug and transport it to his Wuhan laboratory, but before we panic, consider this:

There have been at least five cycles of ice ages and thaws in earth's history, none of which were caused by human activity. In fact, we’re living in one now, the quaternary.

The Quaternary glaciation, also known as the Pleistocene glaciation, is an alternating series of glacial and interglacial periods during the Quaternary period that began 2.58 Ma (million years ago) and is ongoing.[1][2][3] Although geologists describe this entire period up to the present as an "ice age", in popular culture this term usually refers to the most recent glacial period, or to the Pleistocene epoch in general.[4] Since Earth still has polar ice sheets, geologists consider the Quaternary glaciation to be ongoing, though currently in an interglacial period.

During the Quaternary glaciation, ice sheets appeared, expanding during glacial periods and contracting during interglacial periods. Since the end of the last glacial period, only the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets have survived, with other sheets formed during glacial periods, such as the Laurentide Ice Sheet, having completely melted.

The major effects of the Quaternary glaciation have been the continental erosion of land and the deposition of material; the modification of river systems; the creation of millions of lakes, including the development of pluvial lakes far from the ice margins; changes in sea level; the isostatic adjustment of the Earth's crust; flooding; and abnormal winds. The ice sheets themselves, by raising the albedo (the ratio of solar radiant energy reflected from Earth back into space) created significant feedback to further cool the climate. These effects have shaped land and ocean environments and biological communities.

More important to this discussion, because humans lived during its occurance and were eating those same mastodons the frogs now claim carry deadly viruses, is what’s called the “Last Glacial Period”.

The Last Glacial Period (LGP), also known colloquially as the last ice age or simply ice age,[1] occurred from the end of the Eemian to the end of the Younger Dryas, encompassing the period c. 115,000 – c. 11,700 years ago. The LGP is part of a larger sequence of glacial and interglacial periods known as the Quaternary glaciation which started around 2,588,000 years ago and is ongoing.[2]

During this last glacial period, alternating episodes of glacier advance, and retreat occurred. Within the last glacial period, the Last Glacial Maximum was approximately 22,000 years ago. While the general pattern of global cooling and glacier advance was similar, local differences in the development of glacier advance and retreat make comparing the details from continent to continent difficult (see picture of ice core data below for differences). Around 12,800 years ago, the Younger Dryas, the most recent glacial epoch, began, a coda to the preceding 100,000-year glacial period. Its end about 11,550 years ago marked the beginning of the Holocene, the current geological epoch.

From the point of view of human archaeology, the LGP falls in the Paleolithic and early Mesolithic periods. When the glaciation event started, Homo sapiens was confined to lower latitudes and used tools comparable to those used by Neanderthals in western and central Eurasia and by Denisovans and Homo erectus in Asia. Archaeological and genetic data suggest that the source populations of Paleolithic humans survived the LGP in sparsely wooded areas, and dispersed through areas of high primary productivity, while avoiding dense forest cover.

Canada was nearly completely covered by ice, as was the northern part of the United States, both blanketed by the huge Laurentide Ice Sheet. Alaska remained mostly ice free due to arid climate conditions. Local glaciations existed in the Rocky Mountains and the Cordilleran ice sheet and as ice fields and ice caps in the Sierra Nevada in northern California. In northern Eurasia, the Scandinavian ice sheet once again reached the northern parts of the British Isles, Germany, Poland, and Russia, extending as far east as the Taymyr Peninsula in western Siberia.

The Arctic Ocean between the huge ice sheets of America and Eurasia was not frozen throughout, but like today, probably was covered only by relatively shallow ice, subject to seasonal changes and riddled with icebergs calving from the surrounding ice sheets. According to the sediment composition retrieved from deep-sea cores, even times of seasonally open waters must have occurred.[13]

Outside the main ice sheets, widespread glaciation occurred on the highest mountains of the Alpide belt. In contrast to the earlier glacial stages, the Würm glaciation was composed of smaller ice caps and mostly confined to valley glaciers, sending glacial lobes into the Alpine foreland. Local ice fields or small ice sheets could be found capping the highest massifs of the Pyrenees, the Carpathian Mountains, the Balkan mountains, the Caucasus, and the mountains of Turkey and Iran.

And from the days before SUVs, coal plants, and large-scale cattle farming, 12,000 years ago, before the modern Woodland Indians invaded the lands of the Archiac Indians, and exterminated them, we can consider the Holocene Glacial Retreat:

Scientists from the Center for Arctic Gas Hydrate, Environment and Climate at the University of Tromsø, published a study in June 2017[33] describing over a hundred ocean sediment craters, some 3,000 m wide and up to 300 m deep, formed by explosive eruptions of methane from destabilized methane hydrates, following ice-sheet retreat during the LGP, around 12,000 years ago. These areas around the Barents Sea still seep methane today. The study hypothesized that existing bulges containing methane reservoirs could eventually have the same fate.

The point is, humans were living in the very areas that froze, thawed, froze, and are thawing again, all without dying off from these newly discovered French viruses (although they didn’t do as well with the French pox). But you don’t get funding for your science projects these days unless you can somehow tie it to global warming, so every “scientist” does just that, and every flying monkey in the media laps it up and spews it out.

Humbug.