The Coronavirus Is a Preview of Our Climate-Change Future

A recent article in New York Magazine highlights some of the future pandemics that climate change could potentially cause-- ones that, similarly to COVID-19, we are not well-prepared for. Diseases trapped in permafrost that humans have never been exposed to, for instance, could soon be released due to melting Arctic ice. Warming temperatures will cause the migration of insects carrying diseases such as malaria and Lyme disease to new populations.

"Scientists guess the planet could harbor more than a million yet-to-be-discovered viruses — many of them, like COVID-19, for now “quarantined” in particular susceptible species, but which could evolve or “jump” into humans, either as the result of changing climatic conditions or because the scrambling of native ecosystems and habitats brings the host species into contact with humans in a much more direct way that ever before," according to the article.

Read the full article here

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