Pirate's Cove

I blame the 25,000+ people who took fossil fueled trips to Glasgow for COP26

The Plague Is More Likely Now Thanks to Climate Change

The risk of the plague spilling over from humans to animals in the western U.S. has increased since 1950 thanks to climate change, a new study has found. Importantly, the research gives valuable insights into how this deadly disease has historically moved and developed in the U.S., which can help us understand more about its future.

“We want to understand where plague (yes, ‘The Plague,’ which is still a common wildlife disease) can exist in the United States, how where it can exist has changed over the last century, and why plague can exist in those places it does, and not say 20 miles further down the road,” study coauthor Boris Schmid said in an email.

Yersinia pestis is the bacteria that causes plague—including that plague, the medieval Black Death, which killed around 25 million people over the course of four years in the 1300s. The bacteria is spread to humans from animals, most infamously rats, which carry plague-infested fleas on them. Scientists have theorized that the plague, like many other infectious diseases, will probably increase its spread to humans as the planet warms and people come into increasingly closer contact with wild animals.

But there’s not a lot of research out there on what historically are the best conditions for the plague to develop and get out of control. As a result, there are still a lot of big questions about the plague—like why it hasn’t spread to certain geographic areas, or why human cases don’t always overlap with where animals are carrying the disease—that remain unanswered.

So, they don’t really know, but, they’ll still Blame man-induced climate change? Huh. Say, what caused the big outbreak of Black Death, the majority was between 1346-1353, killing an estimated 75 million to 200 million? Oh, by the way, that happened during the Dark Ages, which was a cool period (there is slight disagreement, with some studies showing that it occurred at the tail end of the Roman Warm Period. About 80% show the Dark Ages had started).

Climate Change Can Negatively Affect Sleep — But Here’s What We Can Do

The climate crisis is a health crisis, meaning it threatens the well-being of people as much as it does the planet. Some ways that it affects public health are obvious, like extreme storms driving people from their homes and inescapable heat washing over communities. Others are harder to see. In fact, one of them happens when our eyes are closed.

There is limited research on the connection between climate change and sleep, but it’s well summarized in a 2018 systematic review published by a George Washington University team in Sleep Medicine Reviews.

The review included 16 studies that focused on how climate change events like rising temperatures, extreme weather, floods, and wildfires affected people’s rest. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the team concluded that climate change caused “diminished total sleep times and sleep disruption” across the board.

Again, limited research, so, sure, why not, blame climate. How did humans survive during previous Holocene warm periods?