Did Climate Change cause Covid?

Pollution and/or destruction of the environment is bad. It’s bad for the planet, it’s bad for economies.

But it doesn’t cause super-contagious expialadocious coronaviruses.

If anything, environmental destruction should be great for reducing risk.

Here’s the argument again, this time by Daszak et al:

Rampant deforestation, uncontrolled expansion of agriculture, intensive farming, mining and infrastructure development, as well as the exploitation of wild species have created a ‘perfect storm’ for the spillover of diseases from wildlife to people.

Jeff Tollefson reiterates, proudly presented by Nature:

This phenomenon (Covid) is likely to be the direct result of increased contact between humans, wildlife and livestock, as people move into undeveloped areas. These interactions happen more frequently on the frontier of human expansion because of changes to the natural landscape and increased encounters with animals.

Putting aside that the evidence suggests the outbreak happened in Wuhan, not in some remote forest, the above theory, at first sight, sounds vaguely plausible.  But let’s think about it logically for a minute.

Thought image a:
An island of natural habitat being encroached upon by deforestation for development.

Thought image b:
That same island shrunk to a quarter the size by rampant deforestation.

Mathematics will tell you that deforestation decreases the overall interface circumference of human-animal interaction.  Depleting animal habitat, depletes the animals that live in it, meaning much less encounters with animals - not more.

As with migration, rampant deforestation is not something that started a few years ago. People talk about so many football fields of rainforest being cleared in the Amazon every day - i agree - very bad - but take a drive across America or along the east coast of Australia and see how many football fields of forest have been cleared for farming and buildings. This didn't happen yesterday - most of it happened over 100 years ago.  Why didn’t that cause a rash of coronavirus pandemics?

The thing is, when you bulldoze a habitat for a cattle farm, a mine, or a shopping mall, whatever, the native animals and birds don’t hang around riding the escalators and infecting the shoppers.  Most of the animals die.  Some lucky ones retreat back to the remaining habitat, where they compete for dwindling resources - causing further death.

Let’s take pangolin for example. Ian Lipkin, Holmes, Andersen et al told us that Covid was caused by bats infecting pangolin (likely in a high-density population where it underwent approximately 50 years of evolution) which then infected humans. But pangolin are solitary creatures, which are already an endangered species.  Bulldozing their habitat is not going to increase bat or human interaction with pangolin in the wild.   It will dramatically decrease it.

So what does that leave us with?  Top scientists, enabled by mainstream media platforms, cynically playing on people's concerns about environmental destruction to deflect attention from their own reckless, cruel experiments on animals - experiments designed to manufacture more contagious viruses - just like SARS-CoV2.

They were right about a "perfect storm" brewing though, i'll grant them that, but it was happening in Daszak's Bat Lab environment - not the natural one.