Inside Climate News (ICN) recently published “Climate Change Could Make This Horrific New Jersey Wildlife Disease Worse” by Alex Megerle on February 17, 2026, claiming climate change, via warming temperatures, will intensify ranavirus outbreaks among New Jersey amphibians, producing indirect environmental and economic harms as a result. This is false, with points made in the article itself undermining the claim. Ranavirus outbreaks are driven by exposure and transmission routes in existing habitats, and ICN’s reporting concedes researchers still cannot identify consistent outbreak triggers from field variables in New Jersey, which makes the climate storyline a narrative add-on, not an evidence-based conclusion.
“Climate change could throw an extra wrench into the gears,” ecologist Kirsten Monsen-Collar, told Inside Climate News. “Ranavirus has a temperature range where it’s optimally active and infectious, and it tends to be more infectious at higher temperatures.
“A small temperature increase could make it more likely that pathogens will infect and spread faster within organisms, but going above their limit could actually prevent infection,” Monsen-Collar continued, noting that any predicted outcome and climate connection is speculation at best “We don’t know, we’re all kind of waving our hands, predicting, ‘Well, we think that this could happen . . . and we’re kind of just holding on to our seats, waiting to see what is going to happen.”
Concerning the wildlife-health references actually listed as transmission vectors for the disease, the World Organization for Animal Health explains that ranaviruses spread via direct contact with infected animals, ingestion of viral particles, and contact with contaminated surfaces, including water and soil. It also flags fomites, meaning human-mediated spread on gear and materials. That is the real-world “vector” discussion, and “temperature” is not on that list because temperature is not a transmission pathway. The same plain-language message shows up in state wildlife guidance like the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources ranavirus page, which again emphasizes direct contact, contaminated water or soil, and ingestion of infected tissue or contaminated material as the routes of spread.
Temperature belongs in a different category entirely: it can influence how a virus performs inside a host, or how quickly disease progresses, but that is not how pathogens move from pond to pond or from animal to animal. Even a ranavirus explainer web page that explicitly mentions temperature as one of many factors affecting infection outcomes still describes transmission as happening by direct contact, through the water, and by consuming infected tissues or fomites, meaning the movement mechanism is exposure, not a thermometer reading. ICN blurs that line, treating “warmer is worse” as if it were a field-established driver of New Jersey die-offs. It is not. Rather, it is admitted speculation layered on top of thin and inconsistent local observations.
Now, zoom out to the climate claim. Climate change is not a state-level switch that flips disease dynamics in one jurisdiction on cue. Climate is defined as average conditions over long periods, and the World Meteorological Organization uses 30-year periods as the baseline for “normal” climate. If someone wants to blame “climate change” for ranavirus in New Jersey as a matter of evidence, the minimum requirement is straightforward: measured long-term warming at the specific waterbodies in question, during the relevant biological windows, paired with a measured, long-term increase in outbreak frequency or severity that tracks those local measurements. This article does not present that observational chain.
In fact, the ICN article undermines its own climate framing with the most important field detail it reports: researchers combined multiple years of sampling and “still struggled to see any consistent pattern,” and variables like pond size, depth, canopy cover, tree species, and proximity to human impact were “not clearly associated with presence or absence of the disease.” When the honest answer from the field record is “no consistent pattern,” asserting that climate change is or might make things worse is unwarranted. No causation can be found in uncertainty. Woefully, the story redirects the reader away from the messy, local, measurable drivers that actually control disease ecology, and thus take attention away from real world prevention measures having nothing to do with reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The article also glides past a more practical and well-documented point: human activity is a direct mechanism for spreading amphibian pathogens between sites, which is why formal disinfection protocols exist in the first place. A Northeast Partners in Amphibian and Reptile Conservation field protocol lays out routine disinfection steps for gear because contaminated equipment and footwear move pathogens across locations. The United States Geological Survey publications on herpetofaunal pathogen disinfection similarly treat human-mediated transport, and not human caused climate change, as a serious problem worth addressing with standardized procedures. In a state as densely populated, developed, and heavily traveled as New Jersey, treating “warming” as the headline driver while downplaying boots, buckets, bait, sampling gear, stocking practices, and habitat disturbance is not “following the evidence,” it is hyping the “climate change causes everything bad,” narrative.
Inside Climate News is right to describe ranavirus as a serious wildlife disease. But attempting to link its spread to climate change is unwarranted. The story admits the outbreaks have no clear, consistent environmental trigger in the data, then pivots to climate change anyway, making this irresponsible reporting on a dangerous pathogen.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
Originally posted at ClimateREALISM
