UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
Global greenhouse gas emissions over the last century have made southern China a hotspot for bat-borne coronaviruses, by driving growth of forest habitat favoured by bats.
A new study published today in the journal Science of the Total Environment provides the first evidence of a mechanism by which climate change could have played a direct role in the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic.
The study has revealed large-scale changes in the type of vegetation in the southern Chinese Yunnan province, and adjacent regions in Myanmar and Laos, over the last century. Climatic changes including increases in temperature, sunlight, and atmospheric carbon dioxide – which affect the growth of plants and trees – have changed natural habitats from tropical shrubland to tropical savannah and deciduous woodland. This created a suitable environment for many bat species that predominantly live in forests.
The number of coronaviruses in an area is closely linked to the number of different bat species present. The study found that an additional 40 bat species have moved into the southern Chinese Yunnan province in the past century, harbouring around 100 more types of bat-borne coronavirus. This ‘global hotspot’ is the region where genetic data suggests SARS-CoV-2 may have arisen.
“Climate change over the last century has made the habitat in the southern Chinese Yunnan province suitable for more bat species,” said Dr Robert Beyer, a researcher in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology and first author of the study, who has recently taken up a European research fellowship at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany.
He added: “Understanding how the global distribution of bat species has shifted as a result of climate change may be an important step in reconstructing the origin of the COVID-19 outbreak.”
To get their results, the researchers created a map of the world’s vegetation as it was a century ago, using records of temperature, precipitation, and cloud cover. Then they used information on the vegetation requirements of the world’s bat species to work out the global distribution of each species in the early 1900s. Comparing this to current distributions allowed them to see how bat ‘species richness’, the number of different species, has changed across the globe over the last century due to climate change.
“As climate change altered habitats, species left some areas and moved into others – taking their viruses with them. This not only altered the regions where viruses are present, but most likely allowed for new interactions between animals and viruses, causing more harmful viruses to be transmitted or evolve,” said Beyer.
The world’s bat population carries around 3,000 different types of coronavirus, with each bat species harbouring an average of 2.7 coronaviruses – most without showing symptoms. An increase in the number of bat species in a particular region, driven by climate change, may increase the likelihood that a coronavirus harmful to humans is present, transmitted, or evolves there.
Most coronaviruses carried by bats cannot jump into humans. But several coronaviruses known to infect humans are very likely to have originated in bats, including three that can cause human fatalities: Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) CoV, and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) CoV-1 and CoV-2.
The region identified by the study as a hotspot for a climate-driven increase in bat species richness is also home to pangolins, which are suggested to have acted as intermediate hosts to SARS-CoV-2. The virus is likely to have jumped from bats to these animals, which were then sold at a wildlife market in Wuhan – where the initial human outbreak occurred.
The researchers echo calls from previous studies that urge policy-makers to acknowledge the role of climate change in outbreaks of viral diseases, and to address climate change as part of COVID-19 economic recovery programmes.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has caused tremendous social and economic damage. Governments must seize the opportunity to reduce health risks from infectious diseases by taking decisive action to mitigate climate change,” said Professor Andrea Manica in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology, who was involved in the study.
“The fact that climate change can accelerate the transmission of wildlife pathogens to humans should be an urgent wake-up call to reduce global emissions,” added Professor Camilo Mora at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, who initiated the project.
The researchers emphasised the need to limit the expansion of urban areas, farmland, and hunting grounds into natural habitat to reduce contact between humans and disease-carrying animals.
The study showed that over the last century, climate change has also driven increases in the number of bat species in regions around Central Africa, and scattered patches in Central and South America.
###
“Governments must seize …”
Freudian slip?
Ok people. Brace yourselves for this one! Forget bat viruses, forget cow farts, forget petulant Swedish Teenagers. THIS. IS. BIG!!
Yesterday, I saw someone use their turn signal BEFORE they entered a turn lane!!!
If that isn’t a sign of the impending apocalypse, then there can BE no apocalypse!
Based on my modeling trend, if this continues, by the end of the week, TRILLIONS of people will be obeying minor traffic laws!!
Get your guns! Get your ammo! Katie bar the door! It’s been nice knowing everyone!!!
They probably just missed the switch for the wipers. Now if you see that happen in a BMW, call 911 because it means the gates of hell are about to open or the car is stolen.
I refuse to let you shoot holes in my perfectly logical theory! You’re just an industry shill!!
Yeah, but did they signal right and turn left? Welcome to Florida
What pretentions piffle. Man made a Bio-weapon then tried to blame Bats. This is the result of Man trying to play God, screwing up and then lying. The death statistics prove this. The world is run by insane people from China to Canada and the only decent President since Reagan was “offed” by the communists.
The US election process has been carefully selecting for sociopaths for generations now! Both parties are now fully stocked with ASPD sufferers; how else do you explain the complete lack of remorse for the egregious lies and criminal behavior that have become commonplace since the 2016 election!
Now the elite have worked with foreign enemies to subvert the popular vote, while claiming they were saving democracy from itself! Accident or not, the ChiCom virus has been used to do more damage to human wealth and freedom than anything since religious nuts started following the prophet Marx!
No one disputes these SARS-like corona viruses co-exist with these Chinese bat colonies. A natural ecology of symbiotic mutualism exists between the family of these Corona viruses and those bat colonies. The bats serve as a host reservoir to sustain the virus in a chronically infected, circulating state. The bats immune systems and viruses have both adapted through selection with likely very low or no fitness cost to the infected bat in exchange for providing a circulating reservoir for this RNA virus family. These virus’s high mutation rate RNA genome and infecting colinies of millions of bats form a high computational solution rate via rapidly evolving niches for both as environmental pressures shift.
The infected bat colonies then benefit via the protection it affords them from predation by other mammals, i.e. attack us, feed on us and you die of one of the multitude of various viruses we carry. Not just one virus, but pool of closely related virus strains. The permutation math is in favor of those very high numbers of both virus and bat.
We see this virus-mammal reservoir symbiotic mutualism around the world in many mammal reservoirs of nasty non-Corona viruses to humans and mammals in general: rabies, hantavirus, ebola, nipah virus, just to name several very bad viruses that use this mutualism survival strategy.
This is nature at work, a very ancient survival strategy for viruses and social species that adopt and adapt to them for colony protection.
This mutualism theme of microbes and mankind is the plot device used in HG Wells War of the Worlds sci-fi from the 1930’s. Many other world sci-fi stories use a similar plot device where a planet is protected from alien invaders by some nasty bug, microscopic to macroscopic.
In the final plot twist in War of the Worlds, we’re saved from alien destruction as the alien invaders are leveled by microbes we live with everyday. We (mammals and really all animals) live with them not in spite of living with them billions, but precisely because we have evolved with most of them.
So this idea is not new, of humans getting leveled by a virus protecting another animal species when we venture into its “home” (a cave in this case with floors piled high with biohazard virus-loaded guano).
Invoking climate change is merely more rent seeking behavior on the part of those fraudsters. This article is Just another sad Sci-fi ploy to cash in on human ignorance surrounding the scam on the CO2 we release from fossil fuels.
Personally, I prefer skunks. They at least give a warning and one can back away.
evolution does not “adopt and adapt” … its is random and takes hundreds of years to have an impact on colony protection …
Evolution (e.g. life) is a chaotic function that follows a known, knowable, or unknowable fitness function, which can be estimated within a limited frame of reference (i.e. scientific logical domain). Some, many people follow their intuition (e.g. assumptions, assertions, preconceptions) and infer objects from images from patterns in order to fill in the missing links.
You can believe that if you want, but it’s not what we observe.
Not to mention the fact that researchers at the Wuhan laboratory have an enormous reservoir of new strains of virus to look at and study. What are the odds that they serendipitously discovered the most recent iteration and started playing with it? Maybe the current “plague wasn’t specifically man made, but it’s characteristics where not lost on the discoverers. What a great pathogen to release into Western societies.
As I recall from somewhere ages ago, about 20% of all mammalian critters on this Earth are= bats. Flying mice.
It did strike as rather a lot but hey ho
Thus, how many more did the climate create – the place is entirely over-run (over-flown) by the wee devils already. A few more ain’t gonna matter, unless of course, you a ‘Professional Census Taker Of Dancing Angels’
and why not, good money to be had…
The CO2 and warming creating more trees is total junk.
Insane as it seems, The Hideous Pollution would have made more trees/plants/vegemitetation
The Sulphur & Nitrogen Oxides are epic plant growth promoters, each vying for premier place as the local, local to everywhere in fact, Liebig Limiter
Soot is amazingly good stuff for plants tho no-one is quite sure why.
Extra trees caused by derelict farms is a sweet sort of idea but, another distantly remembered nugget was that China has 22% of The World’s Population but only 7% of the farmland.
Population will certainly be greater now than then but farmland will (must) have decreased.
Where did they put the cities and what are they eating.
We know, always had a fondness for pork,requiring soya and now as they’ve acquired a taste for noodles made from wheat – instead of the totally tasteless & nutrient deficient rice they previously had to survive upon.
Wheat has Gluten, impossibly sticky stuff and good for absorbing, retaining/carrying flavours
Also, wheat bread combined with fat makes a superb Fake Meat – meat being = chewy stuff containing fat.
Wow, we just invented The Sandwich :-O
Isn’t science great 😀
Kinda negates the need to be eating any great lot of (flying) mice doncha think – and thus the folks thinking that can only really be described as ignorant and childish.
In Extremis
Sounds like they just need a little bio engineering. Time to get out the 24D and 245T.
You asked, “Where did they put the cities and what are they eating.”
They are eating food that they import, paid for with cheap manufactured goods. That is why they have acquired a taste for “noodles made from wheat,” as you acknowledged.
Climate change made the Wuhan lab too hot so they opened the windows and the Corona Virus blew out of the room into the live market.
Yup, it was “climate change“.
Yes, expulsion, circulation of viable viruses may happen when people, perhaps with good intention, follow a mitigating strategy to overcome the indoor greenhouse effect. It is, not coincidentally, the reason for increased infections in jurisdictions that discourage outdoor activities.
Horse dookey. The virus was released from the Wuhan Virology research lab. Whether it was in a wild state or had been tweaked by “gain of function” research is unclear, as is whether it was released deliberately or as a result of the reckless conduct of lab workers.
The pandemic had flat f***ing nothing to do with climate change. Nothing as in zero.
I agree with what you said, except I’d note that “reckless behavior” is probably more likely a single “careless mistake” by a tech or scientist of carrying some contaminated “fomite” out of biocontainment and initiating an infectious spread from one or several who worked there.
When we are talking RNA viruses, mutation rates are so high that “gain of function” is what they do naturally. No purposeful experiment is necessarily required when a novel host is presented to the virus, it either adapts or dies off.
Joel, your comment begs the question of why “Bat Lady” virologist Zhengli-Li Shi, who worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was co-author of an article published by scientific journal nature medicine (full version available at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/ ) and found it necessary to perform gain-of-function research using mice.
If one needs a “smoking gun” to establish the origins of the current COVID-19 pandemic, just look at these verbatim quotes taken directly from the referenced article’s main body text:
“Therefore, we synthesized the SHC014 spike in the context of the replication-competent, mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone (we hereafter refer to the chimeric CoV as SHC014-MA15) to maximize the opportunity for pathogenesis and vaccine studies in mice . . . To test the ability of the SHC014 spike to mediate infection of the human airway, we examined the sensitivity of the human epithelial airway cell line Calu-3 2B4 (ref. 9) to infection and found robust SHC014-MA15 replication, compa- rable to that of SARS-CoV Urbani (Fig. 1c).”
N.B., “pathogenesis” is med-speak for “the development of a disease and the chain of events leading to that disease” . . . now, why would one want to “maximize the opportunity” for that? And mice are the laboratory animals-of-preference for closely representing human susceptibilities to infectious diseases, especially those spread via airborne transmission.
Climate change has definitely fostered the proliferation of one species of bat; the left wing dingbat.
To be fair, the left-right governing spectrum from libertarian to liberal does not preclude divergent beliefs, other than the former is less susceptible to argument from authority and therefore less likely to kneel through unqualified faith.
Is the bat population problematic or not? We are supposed to take home the message that co2 is bad, but in their zeal to board the climate change gravy train, they seem to have thrown the bats under the bus.
they didn’t count the number of bats or bat species … they have no idea what the effects are on actual bats …
The bats in one case. The birds and bats in another. People are notably green at best, about what they characterize as positive development, and tend to follow their intuition (e.g. cargo cult science) or defer to authority, especially with actual or promised redistributive secular incentives.
Next up: “The exponential science funding effects (XPO-SFE) of Climate Change/Covid Intersectionality (CCCI)”.
They say a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. This “chain of logic” barely deserve the term, being no more than a bunch of tenuous theories linked together like strips of wet toilet paper.
I’m still trying to figure out this pseudo-religious belief that humans can magically affect climate change. Or that we’ve even caused any of it. Where is the supporting data? Nullius in verba.
There are a lot of theories. None confirmed.
My toilet clogged today, I’m blaming climate change.
But did you apply for a research grant? and do you special contacts in agencies and at science journals? and do you have some specials friends at media outlets?
Some toilets and more equal than others.
That’s a load of crap.
Increased food production due to CO2 so you eat more and therefor have larger egress portions.
Send check pls
I was reminded that a few years ago the sewage system in San Francisco clogged and the city had to spend 100 million dollars to fix it. Climate change? No the required low flow toilets caused the problem. More unintended consequences.
Any objective scientist would conclude from this study that the last 100 years of climate change, regardless of cause, has been highly beneficial for bats, pangolins, and forests in China.
Don’t mention that shoddy lab whatever you do…
Everything bad COULD be caused by climate change but I am not going to be herded by these people into following their green agenda by their fearmongering.
Since biodiversity is now “bad” as well, climate change “policy” is the solution
Carpeting China with solar panels and wind turbines requires razing vast stretches of wild land and so intermittent power is the solution to bat diversity
And they will chop and fry the ones that are left
Wins on all sides
Except for the bats I suppose
You are what you eat in Chinese wet markets.
The rest of us don’t even have to attend. Opting out of the bat soup is not an option.
The endless climate con game continues.
so they didn’t actually count the number of bat species … they assume they moved because the food they like expanded its growing area … any study that uses the word “could” as often as they do should be thrown out as garbage …
I heard they had billions of bats in a Yunnan cave.
6 billion, to be exact.
they keep using the term climate change yet obviously have no idea what it means …
This is a hilarious and infantile logical failure.
More CO2 makes more trees.
And this is bad because bats live in forests!
So it makes more bats which makes more coronaviruses.
So what next? The final solution for bats? Or trees?
Come back Agent Orange all is forgiven?
This is a cautionary tale of the pitfalls of linear catholic logic.
It takes you to insanely stupid places.
“The fact that climate change can accelerate the transmission of wildlife pathogens to humans should be an urgent wake-up call to reduce global emissions,” added Professor Camilo Mora at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, who initiated the project.
Camilo Moron.
So now wildlife is bad?
Better tell David Attenborough
The obvious logical conclusion is to eliminate wildlife that can be a threat to humans. /sarc
Geneticists at Cambridge UK showed that covid19 crossed from bats to Humans in Yunnan province before becoming established in Wuhan. Then spreading with mutation to Europe and everywhere else. This was about a year ago.
https://ptolemy2.wordpress.com/2020/04/29/the-genetic-web-of-coronavirus-origin-in-yunnan-not-wuhan/
And other geneticists, not at Cambridge UK, have revealed the very unexpected “insertion” of four combined genetic sequences (680SPRRAR↓SV687), consistent with a segment of the human HIV virus, to create a new furin cleavage site in the spike glycoprotein of the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) virus . . . something they maintain would have essentially zero chance of happening via natural mutation.
Going further: “The CoV [coronavirus] with the highest nucleotide sequence homology, isolated from a bat in Yunnan in 2013 (RaTG-13), does not have [this] furin cleavage sequence.” — ref: https://www.virology.ws/2020/02/13/furin-cleavage-site-in-the-sars-cov-2-coronavirus-glycoprotein/
So there.
Had to do some research to call BS on this paper.
Yunnan is mountainous, with elevation ranging from about 100 meters to 3000. The valleys are tropical, the mountain slopes are subtropical, and the mountain tops are forest/grassland alpine ecologies.
Although Yunnan accounts for only 4.1% of China’s land area, it accounts for over half of all plant species because of the ecological diversity. To be exact, 19333 plant species in 3084 genera in 440 families.
The Notion that climate change since 1900 could somehow significantly impact that vast biodiversity and therefore bats is just batshit crazy.
“The region identified by the study as a hotspot for a climate-driven increase in bat species richness is also home to pangolins, which are suggested to have acted as intermediate hosts to SARS-CoV-2. The virus is likely to have jumped from bats to these animals, which were then sold at a wildlife market in Wuhan – where the initial human outbreak occurred.”
I like the very scientific workaround, explaining the 1000 km distance from the study area to Wuhan.