Miles O’Brien:
So, climate change worsens a drought that triggers a megafire, which wipes out a habitat, causing a rodent rumble, a virus super-spreader, a nuanced link, to be sure, but not new.
The historical evidence linking the climate to zoonotic disease is growing.
Biologist Camilo Mora is a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He led a team that pored through no less than 70,000 scientific studies dating back to the end of the Roman Empire.
Camilo Mora, University of Hawaii at Manoa: Over 58 percent of those pathogens that have impacted humanity anywhere in the world are already affected by climatic changes. But those are the ones that we already know.
The scary things are the ones that we just don’t know about, because the ones that we know of, we know that we cannot cope with them. You can imagine the surprise that we might get when we start unleashing all of these pathogens that could be more damaging to us.