Today’s inspiration comes to you courtesy of The Spectator (August 25, 2021) – more particularly it comes from Matt Ridley’s article Viral misinformation: the bogus environmental theory about Covid’s origins.
MOTHER KNOWS BEST
Ridley suggests that although smuggled pangolins were exonerated, direct contact with bats led to the moral lesson being ecology. The environmental argument is that deforestation and climate change stressed infected bats and they had nowhere else to go but towns. Alternatively it had driven disparate people into bat-infested caves in search of food or profit.
Ridley writes about how the Western environmentalists had hoped to turn Covid into ‘a fable about humankind’s brutal rape of Gaia’. “Gaia” is the personification of the Earth and one of the Greek primordial deities. Gaia is the ancestral mother of all life.
Inger Andersen, Head of the United Nations Environment Programme, said ‘Nature is sending us a message. We have pushed nature into a corner, encroached on ecosystems’.
That craven cheerleader of the Chinese Communist Party, director-general of the World Health Organisation, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Covid is ‘a reminder of the intimate and delicate relationship between people and planet’.
‘God always forgives, we forgive sometimes, but nature never forgives intoned Pope Francis.’
John Kerry, President Biden’s Climate Envoy, says ‘Climate change is a threat multiplier for pandemic diseases, and zoonotic diseases.’
Boris Johnson (who should know better) says that Covid-19 is the product of an imbalance in man’s relationship with the natural world.’
And finally, Sarah, Duchess of York tweeted that ‘Mother Nature…gave us fire and floods, she tried to warn us but in the end she took back control.’
The level of personification that is needed to make Mother Nature as demonstrative as this is quite extraordinary. I want to meet this woman!
NOT SEEING THE WOOD FOR THE TREES
Ridley refers to Dr Peter Daszak, whose collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology rather tarnished his reputation, wrote in Science magazine: ‘The clear link between deforestation and virus emergence suggests that a major effort to retain intact forest cover would have a large return on investment even if its only benefit was to reduce virus emergence events.’
Ridley the points out three rather obvious arguments against this thesis:
- There is no ‘clear link’ between epidemics and deforestation. He points to Aids, Sara, Mers, Ebola, Nipah, Hendra and Zika having no plausible link to deforestation let alone a major cause of them;
2. Deforestation has not just ceased in southern China but went into rapid reverse a generation ago. There is more forest every year;
3. People encounter bats less, not more, than in the past. Urbanisation has denuded rural areas of people who made their living catching bats.
Forest cover has increased by 2.24 million km2 or 7% more forest globally than in 1982. Also the world’s ecosystems have been getting greener for more than 35 years, because of carbon dioxide emissions. Plants grow fast and need less rainfall, when CO2 levels in the air are higher. Countries like Bangladesh and (particularly southern) China have been increasing their tree cover rapidly.
GO ON! BLAME THE BATS!
The reforestation in China has largely occurred in the very area where ‘Covid-19’s bat-infecting relatives live.’ So a Cambridge University study purported to blame the epidemic on an increase in vegetation leading to a greater diversity of bats in southern China! The study, however, relied on models not data.
Ridley argues that humans do, and always have done, more encroaching on nature ‘when poor and using pre-industrial technology.’ He refers to the reliance on bushmeat in Africa.
The horseshoe bats which carried Sars and Sars-CoV-2 generally roost in caves. Because man has always been going into caves, Ridley posits, so if going into a cave is all that it took to start a coronavirus pandemic, it would probably have happened ‘aeons ago.’
The site of the bats alleged to be responsible for Covid-19 was an abandoned copper mine, an unnatural man-made tunnel. The only visitors to the site since 2012 appear to have been scientists, mostly from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, 1000 miles away.
Said scientists not only disturbed the bats, but also ‘captured them in nets, swabbed their rear ends for viruses and took then back to the Wuhan labs. Now that’s encroachment’.
Lab leak theory for Covid, anyone?
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