Scientists knew a heating planet would produce new viruses / pandemics as far back as 1970s

I first heard that the planet was heating in the late 1970s, and that far back there was concern that as the planet heated, ancient ice would melt and release ancient viruses. I was likely one of the first non scientists to hear about global warming because when I graduated from UT Austin in 1978 I was able to leverage my bachelor in journalism to a job at NASA in Houston in the Newsroom at LBJ Space Center, and then proceeded to Blow It, but that is another story. My main job was editing a house organ for the 28,000 employees there. While doing a feature story about asteroids found in the Antarctic, I was interviewing the geologist who traveled to the far southern continent of the planet every winter, their summer, to gather asteroids that rammed into the planet while flying by.  Every year he went to Antarctica then brought the samples back to be studied in Houston, six months one place six the other, for more than 20 years.

In the middle of the interview he stopped me mid question to say, "You know what is  more important. It's becoming real obvious that the ice caps are melting fast, that the planet is heating at a faster rate than normal," or words to that effect. "In a few years nothing will be more critical than the way the planet is heating. A few of us are seeing it now, but soon everybody will be affected, whole populations will have to migrate..." He seemed seriously concerned, almost like a mad scientist, about the heating planet, and I nodded and made note of it, but my assignment was to write about Antarctic meteorites…

That was in 1979. I left NASA to work in PR in L.A. in 1983. In the next decades, I heard mention here and there about the planet heating but it was not a high priority.  Still, as the story of global warming began to grow and show up in science magazines, then more mainstream sources, I was one of the first to pay attention, because I'd heard about it back in 1979. Now what the geologist said to me then was true, there was evidence the planet was heating.

So I paid attention to the topic of global warming / climate change since it first emerged in the scientific publications.

Viruses and pandemics were always, always in the dialogue.

The first scientists discussing global warming knew that as the planet heats, the polar ice caps in the Arctic and Antarctic and the glaciers on the highest mountain tops in locations such as the Himalayas would melt, ice that has been frozen and covering those parts of the planet for thousands of years.

Under that ancient ice are viruses. 

Everyone who studied the evolving climate change/ heating of planet Earth since the 1970s included predictions of viruses and pandemics after things emerge from that ice.

I don't understand why the connection is never made, today in 2020, as Covid 19 spreads through the land. The glaciers and polar ice caps are melting and releasing viruses that have been frozen for thousands of years and Covid 19 emerged in 2019 and apparently a mutated version is emerging in 2020. The Himalayas are just west of Hubei Province where scientists in Wuhan first discovered Covid 19.

I don't think the current coronavirus killing thousands of Americans a day is the last new virus that will emerge next months, as the planet continues to heat. The scientific community predicted the connection between viruses and global warming as far back as the 1970s, and no one planned for it.

Kay Ebeling

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