What if Melting Ice releases all sorts of "old" bacteria?

and precisely WHERE did either of us suggest any such thing?

on another note, evolution don't work that fast or that way, no, we're not going ot be armwrestling t-rex's in our back yards that way, but SOME of those old viruses and bacteria might be things we're not, haven't had occasion to develop imunities to.

things that are already happining include insect vectors falowing the climate line movement. things that only live in very hot climates showing up in climates that previously weren't.

in one sense there's no point in worrying about them because the momentum and inertia involved isn't something anything we do will chainge imediately, just something that if we don't chainge our own act REAL SOON, well the worse they WILL get, its just that how much worse we don't want them to get in 20 to 40 years, what we do now is what will effect that. what happens between now and then, is the product of what we've already been doing.

it's not a matter of the whole species dying off, we hope, although who knows, but more like, worse case, more people dying of disease and starvation then not. nature bringing our numbers back into balance for us if we don't lower our firtility and stop using any more combustion then we can find ways to stop using, ourselves.

it isn't that SOME remnent of our species won't servive to rebuild and all that, it's just that we HAVE an opportunity to spare ourselves a LOT of pain, and if we don't take it, then we won't have done so.

i'm still a bit curious, other then being extremely cold, how ice is supposed to resemble the vacume of space.

=^^=
.../\...

 

No... Viruses, as well as some bacteria can survive in ice for thousands of years... it's possible... unlikely, but possible

 

Where are you getting that? and even if they did evolve, it would take at least a billion years or so.

 

If you kissed the cheek of a person with AIDS the blood inside your lips would be about 1.5 milimeters (1/16") away from the closest HIV specimen, but you won't get the disease. The same way, people are healthy carrier of tons of viruses and bacteria, sometimes their own "personal" mutation of those species. When people die they are usually buried and when they rotten all those microlifes, if survived, are freed to the water table. I'm pretty sure the emerging risk of "new" bacteria is billions of times greater than the risk of "old" bacteria in the ice caps, though yet that risk it's still irrelevant.

There's another fact to take into account: horrible diseases are a failure of evolution. I mean, a disease caused by a virus or bacteria which is capable to kill most of the patients quickly and be very infectious, will soon become extinct. Be sure that without modern medicine, at a cost of many dozen thousands of deaths, Ebola virus will become extinct within 2 or 3 generations.

If something has taught to us the mad cow disease is that nature has its own consistency and long tested mechanisms, and giving to an hervivore the grounded remains of related species' specimens, had infected people with prions.

Why should we fear about an Ebola like virus released by melting ice? How that virus manage to survive if it is so dangerous? What's the chance that kind of virus managed to get caught by ice in the zenith of their short life as a species and had today the power to infect us? Probably one in a zillion elevated to another zillion.

The kind of rumminations and worries underneath these type of menaces is much probably what is called "epistemological hedonism": everybody has become writer, director and actor of their one suspense movies and looks for a plausible plot that keep the tension from beginning to end, just for the pleasure of it.

To be vaccinated against epistemological hedonism is very important.

[Without any ado, I'll keep greeting HIV positive people with a kiss in the cheek, as it is customary in my country between people of different gender or young people, whatever the gender -it looks as they are dozens these days-]

[You're welcome to correct my English]