
Long-dormant bacteria and viruses in ice are reviving as climate warms - raulk
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170504-there-are-diseases-hidden-in-ice-and-they-are-waking-up
======
zbjornson
Soil-borne anthrax is very common; there's in fact "anthrax season" when
(usually small) outbreaks happen among wild and farmed animals, from North
America to southern Africa, Russia to China and India. (Search for anthrax on
[https://www.promedmail.org/](https://www.promedmail.org/), there are 37
reports in 2017 so far.) That a thawed carcass was infected is an interesting
anecdote as far as the mode of the transmission, but it isn't surprising. That
is, it's not a disease that we've eradicated that is coming back to haunt us.

~~~
downandout
Thanks for this. This isn't the first article I've seen that tried to make
tenuous connections between climate change (née global warming) and all manner
of horrible, immediate effects. The environmentalist crowd gets frustrated
that most people consider their cause to be a far off problem that everyone
currently living won't have to bear the burden of, and they use articles like
this to try to create fear of immediate consequences in order to advance their
agenda. I like to read facts, not speculation created by masters of
fearmongering.

~~~
dwaltrip
It may be true that this article is overblown, but let's not pretend that the
science for climate change and global warming is not rock solid, even if we
can't predict the exact extent of the damage.

Russian roulette is a game for fools and those with no hope, not an
intelligent species with only one habitable planet.

~~~
downandout
_> let's not pretend that the science for climate change and global warming is
not rock solid_

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.

~~~
wwayer
Here's a thought. Instead of criticizing the article for scaremongering, how
about rebutting the points? If you don't believe the permafrost is melting,
say why. If you don't believe the planet is warming up, say why. If you don't
believe that humans are contributing to the warming, say why. If you don't
believe that ancient microbes thawing out is a matter to be concerned about,
say why. By offering this sort of discourse, those of us who don't study
microbes and infectious disease, for example, can become better informed.

~~~
downandout
I was agreeing with the facts in the parent comment, rather than the theory
presented in the article.

~~~
smb06
There are research papers linked in the article with experimental findings.
That is not "theory".

------
secfirstmd
The comments on this article are fascinating and why I love reading the
HackerNews. Point vs point debates about interesting scientific theory but in
a way that average person like me can understand. I used to read about this
kind of conversation happening in the late 19th Century in the bars of Royal
Science institutions in Europe - it feels a little bit like that. :)

~~~
bendbro
Strange, I'm the exact opposite. Reading all this conjecture makes me cringe.
I don't know yet if I should consider that a personal failing, or just accept
it.

~~~
ScalaNovice
I'm with you. Educated comments are rare. The only good articles are HN are
business advice. Rest, including technology is fanboyism, conjectures and one-
upmanship.

~~~
ScalaNovice
Just as an example. A comment down there says heat increases entropy which in
turn leads to higher diseases.

That has absolutely nothing to do with diseases. But it sounds so fancy that
it's highly upvoted. Just like most other HN comments.

------
mickrussom
My wife always bugs me about the cold. I tell her operating rooms are cold.
Heat = entropy, disease vector increase. Any thawing of permafrost will start
to revive dormant diseases, viruses and flora. We might as well complete the
trifecta and start looking for ancient DNA and revive long gone species for
the win. She always tells me cold and drafts = sick, but if you look where the
percent of currently diseased - its never in the north - always in tropical
places where diseases, worms, parasites have a field day. There will be a day
where she'll be begging for the cold :)

~~~
hinkley
I believe they figured out that there is some truth to the idea that cold=sick
at least for influenza. It doesn't live long while airborne but in a cold
environment it can survive a bit longer, meaning in a warm room if someone
sneezes you are less likely to be exposed than in a cold one.

~~~
Asooka
Doesn't the cold also suppress your immune system, since you're using up
calories to warm your body?

~~~
knicholes
I read that being in a cold environment weakens the immune response in your
nostrils when breathing in that cold air enough to cool off the inside of your
nose, where then the pathogen fails to be destroyed as it would have normally
had it not been cold.

~~~
dkersten
I recently saw an article on HN (don't have a link, sorry) that said that cold
did not, in fact, do anything to make us sick or help us catch stuff[1],
EXCEPT that it made it more likely to spread something due to running nose or
other contact with body fluids.

[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...

~~~
hinkley
Air circulation is compromised in the winter because we close all the windows
and doors, and generally we congregate closer together.

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).

~~~
nkozyra
Here in Florida no circulation season is April - November. And yet flu season
is still winter, the only part of the year where people even consider opening
windows.

------
arctangent
I'm surprised that Fortitude [1] hasn't been mentioned yet.

It's a fairly good TV show on this topic.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortitude_(TV_series)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortitude_\(TV_series\))

~~~
Jaruzel
I was about to comment the same thing, but Ctrl-F'd for Fortitude first.

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.

------
enknamel
There are quite a few sci-fi novels and one show I saw that feature nightmare
scenarios based off of thawing ice. I seriously doubt we will see something
catastrophic though. It's been a while since I took bio but bacteria/viruses
from thousands if not millions of years ago will most likely not be able to
bind to our cells.

~~~
_nothing
The Red Queen hypothesis suggests that the struggle between organisms and
their parasites involves a constant reshuffling of offensive and defensive
strategies, so it may be entirely possible that, if one of the bacterial/viral
species released were originally adapted to infecting mammals or even our
ancestral primates, they could target a pathway that humans (or more likely,
some subset of humans) have stopped defending because modern parasites don't
currently target that pathway.

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.

~~~
toufka
There's also the thought that evolutionary adaptations are so tightly coupled
with environmental landscape that it'd primarily work the other way around.
For whatever defense mechanism we lack for that particular parasite, they lack
_anything_ to combat their own million-year-more-efficient predators (like our
immune system). It is less about evolution moving forward and being more
'advanced', and more about evolution ensuring an efficient equilibrium with a
crazy-dynamic environment. Jumping into a new environment after being
conditioned for a very different one likely leads to death much much more
often than an accidental advantage. You might not be able to even breathe were
you transported a few hundred million years either forward or backward.

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.

~~~
cbhl
But you only need one organism to end up with an accidental advantage to
result in a catastrophe.

~~~
toufka
Not really. A single organism (outside of the human race) cannot call the full
force of an entire 'environment' against another species. And species (outside
of humans) must abide by natural laws of energy transfer - for every advance
there is an energetic tradeoff. The more different the organism is the easier
it would be to target with drugs that only target precisely those differences.
The less different, the easier our own bodies would work on it. The more
lethal it was, the less it would spread. The less lethal, the more time there
would be to figure it out. Without bringing to bear the force of an
environmental change (shifting the equilibrium or set-point), there is very
little that could be biologically catastrophic for the human race.

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.

~~~
xapata
> biologically catastrophic for the human race

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.

~~~
Fomite
One should keep in mind, for example, that less than 1% of the Liberian
population ever caught Ebola, but the consequences for the country have been
serious and long-running.

------
fhood
I'll just add this to my list of things that I probably should give some
thought, but won't because the top of the list includes refugee crisis, income
inequality, and all the less Crightonesque consequences of climate change.

~~~
easilyBored
The idea is that this might harm YOU, not a person in Libya or a poor person
in Kentucky.

If it materializes, I'm sure you'll set you priorities straight

~~~
crush-n-spread
That's if it materializes. What's already material is 410 ppm carbon in the
atmosphere and rapidly thawing polar sea ice that regulates ocean
temperatures. If you are scared about some ice germs then you might as well be
reading USA Today for sensationalism. The truly scary stuff is not fun to read
about like this.

------
Houshalter
I'm not saying this isn't a threat. But it doesn't seem as scary as the title
or comments are making it out to be. The article admits that most bacteria
can't survive this long frozen. Only certain types that have adapted to
serving in the cold long term by forming spores. It only mentions one bacteria
that harms humans that can do that, botulinum. Which isn't contagious and is
only a problem with improperly canned food. And anthrax which is deadly but
fortunately not very contagious.

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.reuters.com/article/us-flu-vaccine-
idUSTRE65E65S20100616)

------
koolba
Reminds me of the anthrax outbreak in Russia:

[http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/08/03/48840094...](http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/08/03/488400947/anthrax-
outbreak-in-russia-thought-to-be-result-of-thawing-permafrost)

------
btilly
Diseases from early humans are an interesting point of worry. What tends to
make a deadly disease deadly is that it is able to infect us, but is poorly
adapted to us. A disease that is adapted to a close relative of ours is likely
to both infect us and not be well-adapted to modern humans.

Which could be really, really bad.

------
chiefalchemist
A legit fear, but it could be a positive.

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.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Large parts of our genome do contain viral DNA, and we rely on symbiotic
bacteria to digest food.

~~~
dualogy
> _we rely on symbiotic bacteria to digest food_

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..

~~~
chiefalchemist
For the most part the phrase "the gut" seems to be in fashion. I'm not so sure
we know much about what's going on where, when and by what "third parties."

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.

~~~
dualogy
Now that you mentioned it, I took a look and behold, TIL! There _are_ microbes
in the small intestine indeed:
[https://microbewiki.kenyon.edu/index.php/Small_Intestine](https://microbewiki.kenyon.edu/index.php/Small_Intestine)

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 =)

~~~
chiefalchemist
Fwiw, the watershed moment for me was an article in the NY Times Magazine
approx 3 yrs ago about gut bacteria. Blew. My. Mind.

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."

~~~
dualogy
An interesting question with the partner or pet example for me is whether it's
truly "win-win" \--- do both "live longer" or one does and the other now lives
less longer, unwittingly =)

~~~
pavel_lishin
I always assumed that most of the health benefits came from things like
increased social interaction, and the simple fact that if you have a heart
attack or stroke or a fall, someone's there to dial 911.

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.

~~~
chiefalchemist
I think that's the standard interpretation (i.e., human interaction is the
lifesaver). However, when you start to drill down on the whole (gut) bacteria
thing, I think things change. Sure, emotions also have impact on the immune
system, but so do bacteria. Love IS a powerful emotion. As bacteria are as
well ;) The irony (?) is gut bacteria have also been linked to mental
conditions / emotions.

I love you...because your gut told my gut to say that? :)

------
jondubois
I'm not a microbiologist but when accounting for evolution, you'd think that a
microbe which was locked away in ice for millions of years would be maladapted
to modern animals - Particularly in terms of transmission between hosts.

I would be more afraid of pathogens that were frozen more recently.

~~~
GordonS
Doesn't this work both ways though, where modern animals would not be well
equipped to defend against a microbe that has been locked away for millennia?

~~~
jondubois
Maybe, but in terms of survival, the onus is on the virus to fit into the new
structure of the world not the other way around.

------
cmdrfred
Conversely modern bacteria and viruses are going to sleep in the Antarctic.

[https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-
gains-o...](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-of-
antarctic-ice-sheet-greater-than-losses)

------
whoisstan
Read the 'Drowned World' by J.G. Ballard, humans start having ancient dreams.

'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.

------
raulk
Revel with me in the thought that we —humans— think we are center of the
world.

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!

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _restore balance on Earth_

Who's in charge of what constitutes balance?

~~~
raulk
Balance can be technically defined as homeostasis. In the biosphere, a well
known concept is the Gaia Theory. More here:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeostasis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeostasis)

~~~
nyolfen
ecological homeostasis has been discredited for nearly half a century

------
jsz0
This sounds like a very manageable threat. We already have systems in place to
identify and control the spread of diseases. It's already equipped to deal
with new or rare diseases. This will be an added burden but probably no more
difficult than dealing with something like ebola. Likely easier due to the
geography and population density involved.

------
DanBC
> From the bubonic plague to smallpox, we have evolved to resist them

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.

~~~
pesfandiar
We have evolved to resist if we assume our intelligence is an extension to our
body, and intelligently managing diseases is an extension to our immune
system.

~~~
fhood
You are being pedantic on purpose.

~~~
castis
Which do you have an issue with, the idea, or the person expressing it?

While we're at it, I can't recall the last time I met an accidental pedant.

~~~
fhood
The idea is neither novel, nor does it add to the discussion. It simply
purposefully distorts the original commenter's intended meaning for
"resistance".

------
stuffedBelly
Reminds me of this horror flick I watched a couple of years ago

The Thaw
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1235448/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1235448/)

------
muninn_
I guess I prefer that they stay there... but can't help but to say that it
seems fascinating that there are these dormant antique lifeforms just waiting
to be discovered. Hope they don't kill us.

------
ccvannorman
I bet the CIA is sweating about that Winter Soldier that froze in the 60s.

------
tomcam
This has been happening for at least a couple of hundred years. Mammoth bodies
have been exposed in Siberia since at least the 18th century and probably much
further back than that.

------
minikites
Over the past 5-10 years I've gone from being mostly optimistic about our
collective future to quite pessimistic. It's looking increasingly likely that
we're unable to solve problems like climate change that require mass
cooperation and that too many people are too selfish and short-sighted to
allow for collective action. And in the (hopefully unlikely) event that
industrial society collapses (from a pandemic, mass political instability,
etc) any surviving humans won't be able to restart it because we've already
used all of the "easy" fossil fuels. This is pretty much our only shot at
making civilization work.

~~~
jerf
It may help you to ponder that in the 1980s, a lot of people were extremely
confident human civilization was doomed, doomed, _doomed_ by certainly no
later than 2000, and even setting the date that late was terribly optimistic.

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.)

~~~
ThrowawayR2
> _It may help you to ponder that in the 1980s, a lot of people were extremely
> confident human civilization was doomed, doomed, doomed by certainly no
> later than 2000, and even setting the date that late was terribly
> optimistic._

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...

~~~
yxhuvud
Of those, I would only classify the plague and the wars as some sort of crisis
for humanity.

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.

~~~
Arizhel
What are you talking about? The fall of Rome involved the loss of a huge
amount of technology and learning, as people abandoned the idea of
specialization of labor and cities so they could go work as serfs in the
fields for feudal lords. For the citizens of Rome (not just the ruling
classes), it was absolutely a large decrease in living standards, and in
overall civilization. There's a reason the period following is called "the
Dark Ages": there was very little education any more, and no one wrote
anything down like they used to, so that period is largely a mystery (relative
to how much we know about the Roman times). It took 1000 years for western
civilization to get anywhere near the level of civilization that Rome had
developed.

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.

------
dangayle
Drilling in the frozen north and releasing an ancient monster is the subject
of the first episode of the revamped Mystery Science Theater on Netflix.

~~~
erickhill
And John Carpenter's The Thing.

~~~
tyingq
Minor nit, but I don't think they reveal that the creature in The Thing was
cut out of the ice and revived until the much later 2011 prequel.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(2011_film)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_\(2011_film\))

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...

------
franzwong
No matter the climate change is due to human or nature. The fact is the
temperature is getting higher and it is the problem.

~~~
Profragile
Climate fluctuations will happen regardless of whether we do anything to cause
warming/cooling. We need to focus on protecting ourselves from it by using
more energy... because both heating and cooling our living rooms and cars
requires energy... and make artificial heating/cooling accessible to more and
more people... regardless of whether or not our activities warms up or cools
down the earth.

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.

~~~
averagewall
People do lots of hand wringing about climate change but really we could and
surely will just do what you say and protect ourselves from whatever comes.
Air conditioners where it becomes too hot, sea walls where storm surges become
too frequent, irrigation where rainfall is reduced, moving people around where
arable land moves, etc. We already do all these things on a massive scale.
They're nothing unrealistic.

------
zoom6628
Nature has given us a whole CDC vault for free. Seems like a golden moment for
science akin to corpse in the Alps.

------
yourthrowaway2
We're all gonna die!

------
rdxm
we've already been de-seleceted. now it's just a matter of time....

~~~
rdxm
ahhh yes, down-voted due to what, the pain of a reality check? interesting...

------
rglover
What a time to be alive.

------
graycat
> "as climate warms"

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](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!!!

~~~
orf
Your comment is absolutely huge and most likely not worth reading. All of the
scattered sentences I skim read are just rambling fear mongering, doubt and
general misinformation.

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.

------
bcaulfield
Oh. Goody.

~~~
bcaulfield
What, should I have made it clearer I was being sarcastic?

~~~
lolsal
I think that it doesn't matter if you were or not - it was a low-effort
contribution to the discussion.

------
akartaka
Pleistocene Park, the project to keep permafrost in Siberia, at Kickstarter:
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/907484977/pleistocene-p...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/907484977/pleistocene-
park-an-ice-age-ecosystem-to-save-the/description).

