Warmists have been pushing the “climate change will make diseases oh so worse. Doom!” meme hard for the past couple of weeks. No surprise, this crops up almost every year, particularly during the winter. Science 2.0 reprints an article from The Conversation. See if you can guess whats’ missing
Bubonic Plague Linked To Climate Change In Asia
The Black Death struck Europe in 1347, killing 30-50% of the European population in six violent years.Â
It wasn’t a one-off epidemic: it signaled the start of the second plague pandemic in Europe that lasted for hundreds of years and only slowly disappeared from the continent after the Great Plague of London in 1665-1666.
These outbreaks were traditionally thought to be caused by rodent reservoirs of infected rats lurking in Europe’s cities, or potentially by rodent reservoirs in the wilderness. But our research, published in the journal PNAS, suggests otherwise.
If the “reservoir†thesis were correct, we would expect plague outbreaks to be associated with local climate fluctuations, through changes in agricultural yields and primary productions in forests, affecting the number of urban and wildlife rodents, resulting in more plague. We found that Europe’s plague outbreaks were indeed associated with climate fluctuations – but in Asia.
The Black Death came to Europe from Asia. Historical records tentatively map it back to outbreaks in 1345Â in Astrakhan and Sarai, two trade centers located on the Volga river near the Caspian Sea.
Now, go ahead and read through the rest of the article.
This is the narrative we aimed to substantiate through evidence, but which we ended up challenging. Using tree-ring based climate records from Europe and Asia, we showed that plague reintroductions into European harbors were associated with periods of wet conditions, followed by a drought, across large parts of Central Asia.
OK. Still missing something.
This followed a pattern that we associate with current-day plague outbreaks. What is the implication of such a finding? In terms of our understanding of the past plague pandemics, it provides a different perspective as to how the disease moved across Eurasia, driven by climate events that were and still are frequently occurring.
The implication, as has happened with so many articles about past climate doom, including ones about the Bubonic Plague, is that climate change is Bad and causes lots of problems and look at what is happening now! Doom! What’s not mentioned in most of these articles (such as about the fall of the Roman empire) is that these occurred during a time of cooling. The incredibly deadly Black Death outbreaks, including the one in Asia, occurred during the Little Ice Age, which started around 1300. What these “scientists” are attempting to do is create a link to the Modern Warm Period without providing context and factual data. This is simply scaremongering.
