Thursday Hurrahpertif - Open Thread

By Meteor Blades

Ever since my blogmate, DemFromCT, started scaring the pants off me with his avian flu pandemic commentary and links, I’ve been looking for something to repay the favor.

Today’s Independent delivered, combining two apocalypses in one:

Last week, the latest study to track global warming revealed that Alaska's snowless season is lengthening. As the world warms and ice-sheets and glaciers begin to melt, most of us worry about how the earth will respond and what kind of impact climate change will have. Will flooding become a regular feature, or is the land going to become parched? Are hurricanes and typhoons going to spring up in places they have never visited before? Is the rising sea level going to swallow some of the world's most fertile farmland, along with millions of homes?

All of these are valid concerns, but now it turns out that the impact of global warming could be worse than we first imagined. Ice sheets are mostly frozen water, but during the freezing process they can also incorporate organisms such as fungi, bacteria and viruses. Some scientists believe that climate change could unleash ancient illnesses as ice sheets drip away and bacteria and viruses defrost. Illnesses we thought we had eradicated ... could reappear, while common viruses like human influenza could have a devastating effect if melting glaciers release a bygone strain to which we have no resistance. What is more, new species unknown to science may re-emerge. And it is not just humans who are at risk: animals, plants and marine creatures could also suffer as ancient microbes thaw out.

Gree-aaa-t. Maybe we’ll get to find out firsthand what really wiped out Neandertals.

Truth, justice and the American Way Polipundt style:

Surely there is some enterprising Republican prosecutor, in a very red county, who could indict a Democrat Congressman or two…

Rude Pundit has a slightly different take. I’ll excerpt some parts suitable for a family blog, but you’ll have to click the link to read the juicier parts:

The female cockroach emits a perfume that is a siren song to male cockroaches. When she's ready to mate, in one of the most erotic acts of the insect kingdom, the female cockroach will climb to a high point - say, the top of a steaming mountain of horseshit - and tenderly open her wings wide and, in an act of exposure and desire, release the pheremone that will bring her a bounty of males who would mate with her. …

Former exterminator Tom DeLay surely knows the potency and danger of being drawn in by the promise of a scent. He got into politics because he thought environmental regulation was hindering his business. And since that time, for DeLay, the political process has been about a grand pyramid scheme of money and power with the Hammer at the top, a Mafia-like operation where if one didn't obey, one could expect to be crushed like a stoolie in a car compactor. As long as those under him kept the cash flowing upward, DeLay was happy to offer them protection, legislation passage, campaign cash, and, really, baskets of cookies. …

While we may not get a conviction, let us relish yesterday's delicious sight of DeLay looking like a man who had just swallowed a poison-coated termite, desperately trying to disengorge himself of the bug, attempting to destroy Ronnie Earle, a man who, if he could touch, DeLay would have had buried alive years ago. If one actually does have the "categorial and absolute" facts on one's side, one does not need to attack the opposition with the viciousness that DeLay attacked Earle yesterday. Roy Blunt, the new House Majority Leader, is just a DeLay lackey, but let us pause and believe for a moment that the evil are punished.

From your tainted lips, RP, to the ears of whatever deity is listening.

Comments

[Mike S]

Scary shit indeed.

A few months back there was a discussion about mad cow disease. Some people are very worried about it, like me, and others think it is overblown. A couple weeks ago my mother told me something interesting.

My step father's brother died from it a few years back. I don't know where he got the meat, my mom's 70 so she's a little scattered, but I do know that I did not hear about it anywhere when it happened. I wonder how many other times it has happened without anyone hearing about it?

[ReddHedd]

National Geographic has devoted an entire issue to avian flu. Andrew Sullivan has a link up on his blog today. Arrrgh -- seriously scary shit. Not so scary that I can't enjoy the Delay indictment (or Safavian's or Frist's SEC investigation or...well, you get the schadenfreude picture.), but very scary indeed. Perhaps I'll be staying in a LOT this winter with our toddler just to be on the safe side for her.

[DemFromCT]

It's not necessarily a 'this winter' thing. Alas, bird flu is a totally separate thing than regular seasonal flu. It can hit in summer, winter, spring or fall.

Want some reassurance? Here. Caveat emptor.

[emptypockets]

Mike S, I don't know much about this, but you may like to read a bit on Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease -- probably what she meant by mad cow, if it was in a person -- which is still fairly mysterious but is not necessarily due to eating meat (of any kind). Best analogy is to ice-nine, if you've read Cat's Cradle... a "seed crystal" can get it started but it can also, rarely (relative to all humans, not relative to all cases of CJD), get started spontaneously.

[Mimikatz]

There has been a great scientific effort to discover the flue virus that caused the 1918 flu. This happened in 1990.

"The bodies of six young miners were discovered frozen in the permafrost of the the Norwegian island of Spitzbergen - they had lain there undisturbed since 1918. An expedition, led by professor of virology at the Royal London Hospital John Oxford, analysed tissue samples taken from the bodies in an attempt to discover the genes responsible. Sadly they drew a blank, and the search for the Spanish Flu virus goes on."

It is hard to believe that melting permafrost wouldn't find something else, maybe this time the real thing. Or something worse.

Global warming also greatly increases the range of some organisms. Tropical diseases may start appearing well above the tropics. DC was once a malarial swamp, as was Philly.

[DemFromCT]

In this article (subscription required), Jeffery K. Taubenberger describes the 1918 virus.

This PBS site explains:

By spring of this year, Jeffery Taubenberger expects to have in hand the entire genetic sequence of the influenza virus responsible for 1918's devastating global epidemic. Taubenberger, a molecular pathologist at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Rockville, Maryland, is using the 1918 flu genome information to answer lingering mysteries about the flu virus, such as where it originated, why it was so virulent, and why it struck with such ferocity among presumably healthy young adults.

Maybe we'll find a Neanderthal or two when the ice melts, and learn even more.

[jonnybutter]

Forget about 'farting in the Sistine Chapel' - I think I'll just whimper right where I am!

[emptypockets]

Has anyone seen (or care to make) a simple bar graph showing relative human cost of great disasters of the last 100 or so years? Tsunami, Katrina, AIDS, likely range for avian flu, September 11, Iraq... ok so that's like the last 20 years but perhaps you can fill in some others. (I hadn't even heard of the 1918 flu... there were Neanderthals then? in the Bush lineage?)

[J i O]

Bacteria and viruses from olden times are only a theoretical worry. Not theoretical is the release of methane (25 times worse than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas) as the permafrost begins to thaw and decay. It's the tipping point of tipping points.

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/greenhouse-04d.html

[DemFromCT]

Here's a link to 1918 flu.

50-100 million killed worldwide, 675K in the US. More died from flu than from WW I. That'd be tought to top.

[Jeff]

Judy Miller's out of jail, and is apparently testifying tomorrow. This apparently after a conversation with Libby by phone from jail.

[entlord]

The 1918 or Spanish Flu killed more troops than did battle. My grandfather told me about its effects in the trenches in 1918 and my grandmother told me about the effects of it on the homefront. She told me that a family would not be at church on Sunday morning and when the congregation went to investigate, they would find the whole family dead or dying. No telephones in those days for rural America and most still relied on horse and wagon transportation which meant families could not see other members of the community for weeks or months at the time.
German TV last night announced the Max Planck Institute has re-examined the available information on global warming and decided we underestimated the effects. For example, instead of a 1 degree per century increase, it is more like a 4 degree per century increase.
In the meantime, the Congressional committee investigating global warming has invited Micheal Crichton to speak since one of his novels dealt with an extremist group using hysteria over global warming to advance their own goals. Mr Crichton has given speeches discussing the correlation bewteen alien interference on earth with global warming. His premise is that the willingness to believe in UFOs has laid the groundwork for a credulous public to now accept global warming.
What does the Max Planck Institute know anyway? I think Mike has the Brookings Institute in his corner.

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