Long-dormant bacteria and viruses in ice are reviving as climate warms
bbc.com
bbc.com
On the whole, this is not an alarmist article at all. It merely explains some potential risks based on the findings of serious scientists.
Do you have anything to add to the discussion other than pure speculation, fearmongering and conspiracy theories regarding the motivations of the authors and scientists?
Russian roulette is a game for fools and those with no hope, not an intelligent species with only one habitable planet.
I didn't say it wasn't. I just said that this article is making giant leaps of logic and science to scare people. Even if I agreed with the policy suggestions of the most extreme environmentalists, I would disagree with this tactic. Science is on their side on a great number of issues, but transparent fearmongering like this will only serve to annoy people and ultimately hurt their cause.
To help you out, here are the researched facts that the article links to:
1) 1918 Spanish flu virus found in corpses buried in Alaska's tundra https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17944266
2) Study on the effects of permafrost melt in East Siberia and the 18th and 19th century deadly infections it might release http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3402/gha.v4i0.8482
3) Results from a study on the viruses present in the corpses of Stone Age people http://www.istc.int/en/project/84980DF9853EABD94325690B000F3...
4) Frozen bodies found to have contained fragments of DNA of Smallpox virus http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc1208124
5) Proof that frozen bacteria from 32,000 years ago can actually be revived http://ijs.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/ijsem/10...
6) Did i say 32,000 years? I meant 8million years http://www.pnas.org/content/104/33/13455
7) Not just bacteria, 30,000 year old viruses can be revived as well http://www.pnas.org/content/111/11/4274
8) Ancient bacteria are resistant to 70% of known antibiotics https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13803
9) Many of the bacteria emerging from melting permafrost may already have antibiotic resistance because natural resistance to antibiotics is so prevalent https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10388.epdf?referrer_ac...
But yes, lets talk about facts.
In this case I suppose I should take a more direct active role in attempting to mitigate FUD or verifiable inaccuracies - but those comments take a lot of effort and sourcing. Probably something everyone here should attempt to do more often though :)
But overall the conjecture and discourse in topics I'm relatively read up on but not a deep subject expert I find quite enjoyable, even if I know some of the details are likely to be wildly inaccurate. It's usually more than enough information to get pointed in the right direction so I can start doing my own highly specific research. I've found out about all sorts of awesome technologies/tools/projects I never would have if I hadn't read the comments on interesting subjects.
Overall I find that to simply be humans. Bar conversation was likely riddled with even less adherence to facts from otherwise scientific and principled people. It just happens, and is part of being human - you do it too and don't even know it. Most likely at least.
That has absolutely nothing to do with diseases. But it sounds so fancy that it's highly upvoted. Just like most other HN comments.
Here's a more recent article that cites some papers: https://www.verywell.com/are-operating-rooms-cold-to-prevent...
Thus half the reason for saunas (besides the Heat Shock Protein effects): they turn all the gels caught in your pores, your sinuses, your tonsils, your lungs, etc. to liquid, where your body can then much more easily flush them out.
Though, freezing cold air isn't that bad, either: a lot of those liquids will become fully solid. Frozen snot grows no bacteria.
I guess it's just the "danger zone" principle of food safety, applied to human tissue?
[1] it may have been specifically about cold and flu, I don't remember exactly. It was within the past month or two in case you feel like searching...
For a long time that was considered to be the only reason colds happen more in cold weather. This thing with influenza viability would change that (of course, what one study finds another refutes, so who really knows).
Bacteria have temperatures at which they grow most effectively, which is why we try to keep food cold. Note that the food in your fridge still goes bad, and it would be pretty damn uncomfortable living at fridge temperature for humans. Bacteria are way more resilient than we are, though it varies by species.
Generally the answer is no.
Viruses can be extremely resilient or extremely fragile, depending on a number of factors including whether or not they're enveloped, whether or not they're currently protected in an aerosolized droplet, etc.
This is basically the biology version of 'vim is better than emacs'. :P
It's a fairly good TV show on this topic.
It's a great show, and without spoiling is on-topic for this subject. Season 2 is a bit out there, but I really recommend people watch it.
It'd be sort of like airport security letting through someone with a blowgun because they're trained to look for modern guns.
Ideally we'd quickly gain immunity to the parasite or there would sell be some subset of humans with a resistance that they could spread to the rest of the population, but that's not always a given.
Depending on how far back you go, today's planetary environment is a very different place - in terms of chemical food, predatory tactics, biochemical efficiency, atmosphere, etc. Having to compete against organisms that are efficiently adapted in our current environment will almost certainly be immediately lethal for these revived organisms.
That is not to say that a virulent plague would not be a bad thing for a lot of individuals, if not the human species - but it'd be pretty challenging to even design worse than already exist out there - HIV, ebola, marburg or smallpox.
Something equivalent in virality and lethality to smallpox could be catastrophic if you consider the geopolitical consequences as well as the initial biological impact.
A nonlinear system, like an epidemic, can have phase changes. Most epidemics don't make it very far, but we should still be nervous about that one which crosses the manifold into pandemic.
In evolution, a population gaining immunity means that all individuals without the immunity die out before spreading their genes. Yeah, still not the ideal scenario...
When the white man arrived in South America and in Australia the diseases they carried devastated native populations.
Even though in the case of Australia they had been separated for over 50,000 years.
HIV came from chimpanzees - evolutionary distance 5 Million years.New influenza strains regularly come from chickens and pigs.
So what you are saying is complete nonsense.
Famous last words
It's like the concerns about high-energy collisions doing something terrible like forming micro-blackholes and eating the Earth. If that was a danger, it would be something Nature would already be doing and we'd be able to see it.
The ability to "infect" something is not a natural property that all bacteria have. It is something that has to evolve. A bacteria popping out of cold storage from half a million years ago precisely adapted to infect a modern animal would be every bit as weird as seeing a bacteria pop out of that same cold storage that was precisely evolved to live on Mars, or live on vast quantities of plastic, or otherwise adapted to conditions it couldn't possible have witnessed during its previous life.
It isn't absolutely, mathematically impossible. But it's not much worth worrying about. It's a science fiction storyline, not something that happens.
Now, if there were humans in such cold storage, I would be somewhat more careful. But so far in those cases where that has occurred we still haven't been wiped out. I haven't even heard of anyone pinning so much as a cold virus on pulling a cadaver out of a glacier. Links welcome if anybody does have such a story.
And the Black Plague did happen to come by less than a century after the end of the warm period...
I don't think we need to hypothesize that the Black Plague was some sort of bacterial refugee from the past; I've never heard anyone express any confusion about where it could possibly have come from, so it seems like a solution to a non-problem.
An asteroid can impact with the earth... Oh wait, that's happened already. Luckily, we haven't had such a collision large enough to kill us all, yet.
A plague could kill many people... Oh wait, that's happened already. Luckily, we haven't had a plague with enough virality and lethality to kill us all, yet.
If it materializes, I'm sure you'll set you priorities straight
Viruses are more of a concern, but the article doesn't make a great case there either. They mention that scientists found a smallpox victim but were unable to recover a complete smallpox virus. Just fragments of it's DNA. The scariest thing recovered was Spanish Flu. Which fortunately many people have already been vaccinated against: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-flu-vaccine-idUSTRE65E65S2...
http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/08/03/48840094...
Which could be really, really bad.
When you consider, for example, the Zika virus and it's effect on the human brain, perhaps - on the other hand - we have a virus to thank for making homo sapiens more intelligent than our then "competition"?
Bacteria, could be a positive well.
Of course it's a roll of the dice either way. C'est la evolution.
All I know of are colon-dwelling bacteria fermenting and otherwise breaking down "indigestable residue" ("fibre", cellulose, seeds etc --- which certainly helps voiding such roughage and may furnish some butyrate and possibly a few B-vitamins to the colon mucosa in the process) and other refuse. Do you host bacteria in your small intestine, the prime site of digestion and absorption? Or do you count the colon as a site of "digestion"? Maybe I have the wrong understanding of the word..
Yes, actually.
The idea that the small intestine doesn't host bacteria, and those that it does are transient passers-by from the oral mucosa, was due to some technically limited work from the 1950s. It was actually laughably easy to find that wasn't the case - there's a transition zone of gram positives to gram negatives throughout the latter ileum, which sharply switches to high numbers of gram negatives, anaerobes, coliforms, on the distal side of the iliocecal valve.
The intestinal bacteria also play a key role in furnishing vitamin K.
And yes, the colon is a site of digestion. Digestion is the process of food breakdown, nutrient extraction, and waste elimination. The colon is involved in some extraction (primarily vitamin production, and water reabsorption) and elimination; admittedly, not so much with breakdown.
From what I understand, we have bacteria on the skin as well. And that full body washing with soap might not be a great idea. Sure, get the obvious dirty bits ;) but the rest probably just need a water wash.
And among many other non-digestive contributions, they do contribute to furnishing short-chain fatty acids and K+B vitamins from incoming substances. Glad I looked that up then =)
As a side note, one of the key takeaways I extrapolated from that article was bacteria have a direct effect on life expectancy.
For example, they say, when you have a partner you're likely to live longer. But is that love, or because you get to swap bacteria? The same for having pets. They too help to strengthen the system within your body. And so on.
Sometimes I wonder if we're more bacteria than we are human. That is, who is the host and who is the "parasite."
It did say current indications are gut diversity is a good thing. That such things impact life expectancy. It also said partners / family effect gut diversity, as do pets.
I'm sure emotions also play a role (as - e.g., - depression is bad for the immune system). But, best I can extrapolate, the gut also plays a role. But the details science has been done. Yet.
I imagine that for the social aspect of it, it's only a win/lose if one person gets more stress than joy out of the relationship.
I love you...because your gut told my gut to say that? :)
I don't want to get off topic but it was worth mentioning.
I would be more afraid of pathogens that were frozen more recently.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-o...
'Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs… Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory.
The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard, Millennium 1999, p. 41.
That Earth is made for us and we have the power to shape it in whichever way we wish. That we own the planet.
But, in reality, we don't. We are here only temporarily. There are powerful organisms hiding out there who are perennial.
And they act like guards. If we push it too far, we set off the right conditions for them to spring to life, and restore balance on Earth by anhililating the threat — i.e. us.
What a time to be alive!
It wouldn't surprise me if humanity chose to restore earth to something like the state it was in before the industrial age.
This sounds like more of a statement of faith than fact.
I'm hoping this is going to be the case, but some issues may be completely intractable. Strong AI and fusion have been on the five-year horizon for decades.
However, it's also entirely possible we'll fail miserably and go extinct, not because any of these things are prevented by physics (they're not, except maybe exceeding lightspeed but you can always build a generation ship or use cryo-sleep etc. to work around that), but because our basic human nature prevents us: we'll fight with each other and annihilate ourselves, or we'll destroy our environment due to our recklessness and collective stupidity and shortsightedness, and that'll prevent us from making those achievements in time to survive.
Personally, I'd bet on the latter. I think it's highly likely we won't be around in 200 years, or if we are, we'll be back to the stone age and our population reduced to very small numbers. We're simply not showing that we have what it takes as a species to deal with global challenges successfully.
We don't seem to be on a clear single trajectory. There is also a lot of short sighted self destructive stuff going on. You are right that we have definitely taken the helm but who knows which turn we will take next and the sea is a harsh mistress.
Who's in charge of what constitutes balance?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bacteria-discover...
http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a11137/secrets-of-the-...
It's our job to nurture the trajectory that will make this happen.
To who?
We have antibiotics for plague, and vaccination / eradication for small pox. That doesn't feel like we evolved any resistance. A couple of thousand cases of plague are reported to WHO each year.
If you take into account the infection of native Americans compared to Europeans since the 15th to 19th century [0] you'd infer that some ethnic stratum really evolved a lot of resistance wrt. to smallpox.
Conversely, because of smallpox eradication I would guess that some part of the population probably regressed on that.
The spread of disease from European contact was not always accidental. Europeans arriving in the Americas had long been exposed to the diseases, attaining a measure of immunity, and thus were not as severely affected by them. Therefore, disease could be an effective biological weapon.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_ep...
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/03/050325234239.h...
While we're at it, I can't recall the last time I met an accidental pedant.
The Thaw http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1235448/
There are people who profit from selling this doom. Buy less of it.
I'm not a binary thinker, so just because I'm saying "don't feel quite so doomed" does not mean I'm advocating for the polar opposite blindly sunny disposition either. I said "buy less of it" rather than "stop buying it" quite deliberately. But doom has been "real soon now!" for, like, 60+ years, and it's an important perspective to keep that in mind when you hear today's confident doom-mongers promising immanent doom Real Soon Now (TM). (More than 60 years, really, you can find people complaining about how society is going downhill in antiquity. But the modern brand is about 50-60 years old.)
This one happened in 1995: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident
The difference now is that we feel potentially doomed by inaction as opposed to reckless action, even though one could think of our environmental damage as the result of many compounded actions without awareness of their result.
And your comparison to the 1980s is even more nonsensical considering we came very close to doom a number of times in the 50-60 years you cite:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83
I would consider this support for my point, not contradiction.
Before replying, please do me the courtesy of at least trying to imagine how I might consider that the case.
I also reiterate my point about this not being a binary situation, because I can't help but think you did indeed, despite my explicit discussion, interpret it as a claim you shouldn't be worried about anything.
I imagine a lot of people thought things were going to be fine too as the Roman Empire collapsed. Or at the start of the Dark Ages. Or when the Black Plague began. Or when the 1929 market crash that kicked off the Great Depression. Or on the eve of both of the World Wars.
The point being: yes, most of the time, humanity muddles its way through its crises successfully. Until one day, it doesn't...
For example, the fall of Rome did not involve a decrease of average living standards. Rather it is the opposite that is the case as it happened at roughly the same time as the abolition of slavery in Europe.
You should not conflate crises that affect only the ruling classes with crises for humanity.
Now you're right that it wasn't exactly a "crisis for humanity" because it only affected one part of the world--western Europe (the eastern Roman Empire continued), and also didn't involve a massive die-off, just a regression of civilization in that one area.
There has certainly been lots of doom and gloom in the past, with some (not all) of it quite justified - look how close we came to nuclear annihilation multiple times during the cold war. It was only cool headed individuals that kept all of humanity from a tragic end. Those fears were well justified, and we're getting to a similar situation right now, so close that William J. Perry thinks we're at the highest likelihood of nuclear war since the Cuban missile crisis.
Those war-based risks are of a very different (political) nature however, one that doesn't persist after the war pressures subside. With climate change, we're in a much different situation, and one that I'm actually not sure we're up to solving. If we look at progress so far, I don't think it looks good.
It's a shame it's being converted into a political and tribal game. We're talking about the survival of an advanced species here (hell, it might be the only one). There is literally nothing more important than that.
No we're not. That's not the risk of global warming. Such false extremist ideas are part of the tribalism you mention and make it worse.
Humanity would have survived, lots of people would Die, but not everyone
Just because people don't cooperate to do the thing that you personally want them to do doesn't make them selfish. They are still cooperating doing something else which may turn out to be even more valuable - improving technology and helping each other with real, and possibly even more serious problems like disease and happiness. You can't judge that that they're working towards the wrong goal, it's just different to your personal goal.
What I'd like to know, is: "Is democracy suited to solving issues like climate change" ? It seems to me, that, solutions to climate change mostly mean a reduction in consumption & energy use (at least in the interim), and, what politicians will be voted in on those policies?
Noam Chomsky gave a talk[1] about a month ago about that question, but his version substitutes intelligence for democracy. Species that are successful at maintaining their niche over evolutionary time spans are not selecting for intelligence. Survivability of a species, population size, and speciation rate generally decrease as intelligence rises.
I might believe we have a chance as a species if we were doing anything even remotely realistic to address our actual long-term threats, but we aren't. Instead, the actual actions being taken seem to be almost unanimous trying to accelerate us into disaster.
How much fuel do we need to restart a society, assuming we still have knowledge left over? Could a seed of a technological society start at hydroelectric dams, or in places where solar infrastructure still exists?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation#Pre-industrial_h...
According to Guns, Germs, and Steel, a population of 4,000 humans living in Tasmania were cutoff from contact with the mainland after the Bass Straight flooded 10,000 years ago.
In this extreme isolation, they regressed beyond even stone-age technology, including losing knowledge of how to catch fish or start fires.
https://books.google.com/books?id=PWnWRFEGoeUC&pg=PA312&lpg=...
https://youtu.be/ZmHY9DkD1Hw http://www.mikeswindmillshop.com/instructional-lessons/mikes... http://www.techlib.com/electronics/amxmit.htm
Edit: Looks like I'm wrong. Apparently the ice block is in the John Carpenter film, but things aren't spelled out in great detail. I need to watch both of these again...
Why we are focusing on what happens to the overall earth's climate makes zero sense to me... I'm sure it is entirely political and it is a fight between few rich corporations and political powers where everyone has been dragged into. Climate will change very drastically like it has done in the past, with or without human activities. We should be working on how to save ourselves from changes in the future... not desperately trying not to breathe too hard which might cause some tsunami in another part of the world (butterfly effect)... specially because nobody can correctly predict if it will.
How much warming, in degrees F, C, or K, since when, measured how, by whom, published where, compared with what other measurements?
Why ask these questions? For one, AFAIK "climate warms" essentially has not been happening to any significant extent for about 20 years and, really, since the coldest of the Little Ice Age -- apparently there was some cooling from 1940 to 1970 so some warming since then. On the Little Ice Age, there was ice skating on the Thames River in London.
Reference for temperature over the past 2000 years? Okay:
Committee on Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years, National Research Council, Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years, ISBN 0-309-66264-8, 196 pages, National Academies Press, 2006, available at
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11676.html
In the Medieval Warm Period, did all the ice and permafrost melt and make everyone sick? Well, if it all melted, then what's in the ice and permafrost now is not so old and maybe safe. But I didn't hear that diseases released by the melting ice and permafrost made lots of people sick during the Medieval Warm Period.
My guess: The BBC is pushing made-up, cooked-up, stirred-up, gang-up, pile-on, continually reinforced fake, nonsense scare stories to get continuing eyeballs, ad revenue, and British government subsidies.
Not reading it.
For some simple evidence: The Little Ice Age really was significantly cooler, but there is no evidence that it was preceded closely by lower concentration of CO2 -- the lower temperatures had some cause other than lower CO2.
The Medieval Warm Period really was warmer, but there is no evidence that it was preceded closely by higher concentration of CO2 -- there must have been some cause other than higher CO2.
It appears from ice core samples and more that the temperature of the earth has varied significantly over at least the last 800,000 years. Maybe CO2 has had something to do with warming since the Little Ice Age, and otherwise it looks like the causes of warming/cooling had little or nothing to do with CO2.
It appears that people who talk about warming are blaming CO2, in particular from human activities, and from what I've seen in the temperature records for the past 800,000 years, the only time when CO2 might have caused significant warming was since the Little Ice Age -- even if we accept this, there's the problem of the cause of the cooling from 1940 -- 1970. Otherwise the temperature changes had other causes -- so, my guess is that the temperature change since the Little Ice Age also has some cause(s) other than CO2.
Is CO2 a greenhouse gas, that is, absorbs Planck radiation from the surface of the earth? Yup, absorbs in three bands in the infrared; since we can't see CO2, it does not absorb visible light. So, is there a warming effect from that CO2 absorption? Well, maybe, but water is also a greenhouse gas so that maybe the radiation would be absorbed by water instead of CO2. But even if CO2 is the only way that infrared radiation can get absorbed, it's still not clear how much warming, net, all things considered, it would cause. E.g., lighting a match will also warm the earth.
Is there more CO2 in the atmosphere now? Apparently the concentration someplaces is 400 ppm (parts per million) -- IIRC that would be in Hawaii, right, near a volcano, and volcanoes are supposed to be one of the major sources of CO2. Also there's CO2 in the ocean, and warm water absorbes less CO2 than cold water, so maybe recently some of the ocean around Hawaii is warmer and the source of the Hawaii CO2.
I've seen no good presentations of CO2 levels over time with explanations of the causes.
I've seen no good data on CO2 sources, sinks, or flows.
E.g., first cut, how much CO2 is in the atmosphere now? Then, how much CO2 enters the atmosphere from human activity each year now? If the ocean warms a little, say, from an el Nino, how much CO2 is released into the atmosphere? At what rate do green plants take CO2 from the atmosphere? My guess is that CO2 from human activities is comparatively tiny, that the basic data would show this, and this is why we don't get the basic data.
I see lots of articles on CO2 and warming, but I don't see articles with even this basic, first cut data.
So, to me, the articles don't really have a case since if they did they would make their case. In the articles I see efforts to grab people emotionally but darned little data to convince people rationally.
BBC: "as climate warms" is where you lost me.
Or with this logic, we could write even more shocking articles:
As the next galactic gamma ray burst hits the earth, all the atmosphere will be blown off the earth, and everyone will die. Moreover, since the gamma rays will come at the speed of light, we will never be able to see them coming. Now, get scared. Get afraid. Be very afraid. Watch the BBC for hourly updates 24 x 7 for the rest of your life to keep up on just what will happen as the next gamma ray burst hits the earth. Same for marauding neutron stars, highly magnetic neutron stars, and black holes. Read BBC tomorrow for the results as the next black hole hits the earth. For more, the expansion of the universe is slowing down, and we may be in a big crunch and all compressed to a point -- see the BBC next week for the details when this happens. Back home, see what will happen when Yellowstone blows again -- last time it put ash 10 feet deep (it's rock and enough to crush nearly any roof) 1000 miles down wind or some such. Remember, those bacteria are down there, fighting every second among themselves, evolving, just to come out and kill everything else, including YOU!!!
The climate is warming. The permafrost is melting, more and more each year. You have to be living in an echo chamber to not understand this.