The reanimators

An announcement a few weeks ago by microbiologist Jean-Michel Claverie of Aix-Marseille University that he and his team had successfully resuscitated a 48,500-year-old virus from the Siberian permafrost brought horrified comments like, "I read this book, and it didn't end well" and "wasn't this an episode of The X Files?  And didn't just about everyone die?"  It didn't help when Claverie's team mentioned that the particular virus they brought back to life belonged to a group called (I shit you not) "pandoraviruses," and the media started referring to them by the nickname "zombie viruses."

Claverie's pandoravirus [Image courtesy of Chantal Abergel and Jean-Michel Claverie]

The team hastened to reassure everyone that the virus they found is a parasite on amoebas, and poses no threat to humans.  This did little to calm everyone down, because (1) not that many laypeople understand viral host specificity, and (2) shows like The Last of Us, in which a parasitic fungus in insects jumps to human hosts and pretty much wipes out humanity, have a fuckload more resonance in people's minds than some dry scientific paper.

What's scary about Claverie's study, though, isn't what you might think.  First, the good news.  Not only is the virus they found harmless to humans, the team is made up of trained microbiologists who are working under highly controlled sterile conditions.  Despite what the "lab leak" proponents of the origins of COVID-19 would have you believe, the likelihood of an accidental release of a pathogen from a lab is extremely unlikely.  (The overwhelming consensus of scientists is that COVID is zoonotic in origin, and didn't come from a lab leak, accidental or deliberate.)  So the obvious "oh my god what are we doing?" reaction, stemming from a sense that we shouldn't "wake up" a frozen virus because it could get out and wreak havoc, is pretty well unfounded.

What worries me is the reason Claverie and his team are doing the research in the first place.

Permafrost covers almost a quarter of the land mass of the Northern Hemisphere.  A 2021 study found that every gram of Arctic permafrost soil contains between a hundred and a thousand different kinds of microbes, some of which -- like Claverie's pandoravirus -- have been frozen for millennia.  A three-degree Celsius increase in global average temperature could melt over thirty percent of the upper layers of Arctic soil.

So potentially, what Claverie's team did under controlled, isolated conditions could happen out in the open with nothing to keep it in check.

Concern over this isn't just hype.  In 2016, melting permafrost in Siberia thawed out the carcass of a reindeer that had died of anthrax.  Once thawed, the spores were still viable, and by the time the incident had been contained, dozens of people had been hospitalized, one had died, and over two thousand reindeer had been infected.  Anthrax isn't some prehistoric microbe that scientists know nothing about, which actually acted in our favor; once it was identified, doctors knew how to treat it and prevent its further spread.

But what if the thawing frost released something we haven't had exposure to for tens of thousands of years, and that was unknown to science?

"We really don’t know what’s buried up there," said Birgitta Evengård, a microbiologist at Umeå University in Sweden, which in a few words says something that is absolutely terrifying.

So the hysteria over Claverie's reawakening of the "zombie virus" focused on the wrong thing.  The reanimators we should be worried about aren't Claverie and his team; they're us.  There were already a myriad excellent reasons to curb fossil fuel use (hard) and try to rein in climate change, but this study just gave us another one.

As always, the problem isn't the scientists; the scientists are the ones trying to figure all this out in time to prevent a catastrophe.  (And, if I haven't made this point stridently enough already, the scientists have been trying to warn us about the effects of climate change for decades.)  The problem is the fact that politicians, and the voters who elect them, have steadfastly refused to do a damn thing about a problem that we could have addressed years ago and that has so many potential horrible outcomes you'd think any one of them would be sufficient justification for acting.  

So how about we stop worrying about the wrong thing and face the fact that we're the ones who need to change what we're doing?

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The vanishing ice

California and Oregon are, literally, burning up.  A couple of days ago, there were five named tropical cyclones in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico simultaneously, something that's only happened one other time since records have been kept.  One of those cyclones is, as I write this, in the process of pummeling coastal Alabama and the panhandle of Florida, and the city of Pensacola is mostly underwater.

And still our "leaders" are claiming climate change doesn't exist.

The issue is settled, folks.  It has been for some time.  There is not a reputable climate scientist out there who denies the reality of anthropogenic global warming.  I know you can't link single events to a climate shift -- saying, for example, that a particular wildfire was directly caused by climate change -- but the overall pattern is absolutely unequivocal.  To deny it is an indicator either of being beholden to the corporate interests who would very much like climate change not to exist, or else abject and inexcusable ignorance. 

Donald Trump, for example.  The man was an amoral, sociopathic narcissist to begin with, and now is illustrating on nearly a daily basis that he is also a catastrophic clod.  Take the briefing he participated in with California Governor Gavin Newsom a couple of days ago, in which the following exchange took place:

Wade Crowfoot, the California Secretary for Natural Resources:  We've had temperatures explode this summer...  We want to work with you to really recognize the changing climate and what it means to our forests and actually work together with that science.  That science is going to be key because if we ignore that science and sort of put our head in the sand and think it's all about vegetation management, we're not going to succeed in protecting Californians.

Trump:  It'll start getting cooler.  You just — you just watch.

Crowfoot:  I wish science agreed with you.

Trump:  Well, I don't think science knows, actually.

Right.  Same as his statement a few months ago that COVID-19 was going to "disappear, just like a miracle, you'll see."

The fact that Trump has a single supporter left brings home the accuracy of Isaac Asimov's famous essay "The Cult of Ignorance," written all the way back in 1980, in which he said:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been.  The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

Trump may be the best illustration of that poisonous belief that the world has ever produced.

There's malice underlying his ignorance, though.  Trump not only is colossally stupid, he goes out of his way to surround himself with people who either share his views or, at the very least, don't dare challenge him.  Witness the fact that just two days ago, he appointed a well-known climate science denier, David Legates, to run the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration -- which oversees funding for climate monitoring and climate research.

All of this is hardly a surprise.  It's just more manifestation of a long-established pattern of science denial by our government.  Nevertheless, if you for some reason needed yet another reason to accept that climate change is occurring as we speak, consider the study that appeared in Nature last week, by Laura Landrum and Marika Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.  In a paper that has the grim title, "Extremes Become Routine in an Emerging New Arctic," Landrum and Holland describe a fundamental shift in the entire climate of the Arctic, where open water and rain is now more common than sea ice and snow.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Pink floyd88 a, Arctic Ice 2, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Writing about the research for the New York Times, journalist Henry Fountain paints a devastating picture of the speed of the change:

Using years of observational data from the region and computer models, the researchers found that sea ice is already in a new climate, in effect: The extent of ice in recent years is consistently less than what would be expected in even the worst year for ice in the mid-20th century.

Arctic sea ice has declined by about 12 percent per decade since satellite measurements began in the late 1970s, and the 13 lowest sea-ice years have all occurred since 2007.  This year is expected to be a record or near-record low for ice extent, which will be determined by the end of this month as the summer melt period ends.

I had to read that twice to realize that actually, even Fountain is soft-pedaling it.  The "thirteen sea-ice years since 2007" are every year since 2007.  The first sentence of the second paragraph should end with, "... and each of the last thirteen years has had lower sea ice than any other on record."

That is climate change.  Unmistakable unless you're either mind-blowingly ignorant or else in the pocket of corporate interests.

Or, like in the case of Donald Trump, both.

The time for argument over whether climate change is happening is over.  It has been for some time.  My fear is that the window of opportunity for doing something about it might be closing as well.  I'm not giving up yet, though.  Too much is at stake, like the long-term habitability of the Earth.  Time we elected some leaders who not only care about this, but understand and respect science rather than sneering and scoffing at it.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is about one of the most terrifying viruses known to man: rabies.

In Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus, by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, we learn about the history and biology of this tiny bit of protein and DNA that has, once you develop symptoms, a nearly 100% mortality rate.  Not only that, but it is unusual amongst pathogens at having extremely low host specificity.  It's transmissible to most mammal species, and there have been cases of humans contracting rabies not from one of the "big five" -- raccoons, foxes, skunks, bats, and dogs -- but from animals like deer.

Rabid goes through not only what medical science has to say about the virus and the disease it causes, but its history, including the possibility that it gave rise to the legends of lycanthropy and werewolves.  It's a fascinating read.

Even though it'll make you a little more wary of wildlife.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Unearthing the time capsule

It's said that there's no cloud without a silver lining, but sometimes the silver lining just adds to the whole situation's poignancy.

That was my response to the new show (opening in May) at the British Museum called Arctic: Culture and Climate.  The exhibit will contain priceless archaeological finds from the Canadian and Siberian Arctic, including a nine-thousand-year-old woven birch basket, a necklace made of mammoth ivory, a variety of objects carved from walrus teeth, bone needles, headbands, a spirit mask, clothing made of reindeer fur, a bag crafted from salmon skin, and a fantastic array of other artifacts, some of which date back to thirty thousand years ago.

The problem, of course, is why this beautiful exhibit is even possible -- the melting of the Arctic permafrost because of anthropogenic climate change.

"As the Arctic is melting, the permafrost, the frozen ground, is melting as well," said exhibit curator, archaeologist Jago Cooper.  "The things that people were living with in that landscape, which are incredibly well preserved in that frozen ground, are coming out as the ground is melting...  Archaeologists have to find the objects before they disappear on the surface of the earth because they are exposed to the elements.  It’s like the Library of Alexandria being on fire… You’re plucking out these books which are coming out, and yes, it’s a remarkable window into life, all coming out of the ground in one go...  This is a treasure trove, but its story is tragic."

The fact is, the Arctic is the region of the Earth where the climate is changing the fastest; current estimates are that within eighty years, summers in the northern Arctic will be entirely ice and permafrost-free.  Entire communities are disappearing as frozen-solid soil capable of holding up house foundations turns into marsh.  The only place on Earth I can think of that is changing this drastically and this fast is the coast of my home state of Louisiana, where communities on the fringe of coastal marsh, such as Isle de Jean Charles, are being swallowed up as sea levels rise.  But since both the Arctic and coastal Louisiana are occupied by poor and/or marginalized people mostly belonging to ethnic minorities, there has been little if any attention paid to the devastation climate change is wreaking.

The effects on the Arctic are multiple and widespread.  The 2019 Arctic "report card" from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was not so much sobering as outright terrifying.  Its findings include:

• 2019 was the Arctic's second-warmest year ever recorded.  (The warmest was 2016.)  July 2019 was the warmest month since records started in 1850.
• Cold-water fish populations are shrinking and retreating north, disrupting the food chain and affecting populations of Arctic predators such as seals, walruses, and polar bears.
• The amount of ice melted from the Greenland Ice Sheet in 2019 tied for highest volume ever lost (with 2012).
• The ice at the very north is itself destabilizing.  Only one percent of the marine ice in the Arctic Ocean is over four years old, so the "permanent Arctic ice sheet" is a thing of the past.
• The loss of ice cover in the summer is causing a feedback loop as darker/more absorptive open ocean retains more of the summer's heat and ramps temperatures up further.  The summers for the past ten years have broken record after record for high temperatures and speed of warm-up.

Horrifying news.  But most countries seem to take the stance of "oh, well, it doesn't affect us," and continue to sit on their hands.  It immediately put me in mind of the old comic strip, one that has shown up in many contexts, from Nazi aggression before World War II to Wall Street speculation to the spread of terrorism, but which seems tragically apt here:

Sometimes I get tired of shouting "WILL YOU PEOPLE PLEASE WAKE UP AND FOR FUCK'S SAKE DO SOMETHING?"  Heaven knows I've hit on this topic enough times here at Skeptophilia, my readers must be getting sick of my ringing the changes over and over.  But given that there are still climate change deniers out there, and people are paying more attention to noted climatologists like Meat Loaf than the actual scientists, we can't afford to let fatigue silence us.

The problem is, the scientific papers and even the heartbreaking exhibits like the one opening soon at the British Museum are almost entirely reaching people who already know that anthropogenic climate change is happening, and simultaneously are unable to change policy.  I can virtually guarantee the politicians aren't reading science journals (in the case of Donald Trump, I seriously doubt he's ever read anything longer than the label on a soup can).  So it's a case where there are two hermetically-sealed groups -- the science community and informed laypeople, who know what's happening but are unable to change it, and the elected leaders, who are able to change it but are either uniformed or else willfully participating in the disinformation campaign.

So I'll keep blogging, and other concerned people will continue working toward getting the truth out there, but until we change things at the ballot box, my guess is that to paraphrase Douglas Adams, nothing will continue to happen.

My only hope is that by the time we are able to act, it won't already be past the tipping point.

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is simultaneously one of the most dismal books I've ever read, and one of the funniest; Tom Phillips's wonderful Humans: A Brief History of How We Fucked It All Up.

I picked up a copy of it at the wonderful book store The Strand when I was in Manhattan last week, and finished it in three days flat (and I'm not a fast reader).  To illustrate why, here's a quick passage that'll give you a flavor of it:

Humans see patterns in the world, we can communicate this to other humans and we have the capacity to imagine futures that don't yet exist: how if we just changed this thing, then that thing would happen, and the world would be a slightly better place. 

The only trouble is... well, we're not terribly good at any of those things.  Any honest assessment of humanity's previous performance on those fronts reads like a particularly brutal annual review from a boss who hates you.  We imagine patterns where they don't exist.  Our communication skills are, uh, sometimes lacking.  And we have an extraordinarily poor track record of failing to realize that changing this thing will also lead to the other thing, and that even worse thing, and oh God no now this thing is happening how do we stop it.

Phillips's clear-eyed look at our own unfortunate history is kept from sinking under its own weight by a sparkling wit, calling our foibles into humorous focus but simultaneously sounding the call that "Okay, guys, it's time to pay attention."  Stupidity, they say, consists of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results; Phillips's wonderful book points out how crucial that realization is -- and how we need to get up off our asses and, for god's sake, do something.

And you -- and everyone else -- should start by reading this book.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]