Deadly diseases trapped in ice caps for thousands of years could be unleashed on the world again by global warming, a top professor has said. Epidemics such as the Black Death could pose another threat to the human race if the earth's atmosphere continues to heat up. Peter Frankopan, professor of global history and director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research, warned that these disease pandemics could be caused by the inevitable melting of ice. His message comes as a report said the world has only 12 years to stop catastrophic climate change. Impacts of climate change, from droughts to rising seas, will be less extreme if temperature rises are curbed at 1.5C above pre-industrial levels than if they climb to 2C or more, the UN-backed study said.
Limiting warming to 1.5C is possible but will require fast and far-reaching changes to power generation, industry, transport, buildings and potential shifts in lifestyle such as eating less meat. It will also require action to take excess carbon emissions out of the atmosphere, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report said. But Professor Frankopan said there is “absolutely no chance” that nation-states will keep below the 1.5-degree increase. He told Cheltenham Literature Festival: “If we go over that degree change, it’s not about the Maldives being harder to visit on holiday or migration of people it’s about what happens when permafrost unfreezes and the release of biological agents that have been buried for millennia, in fact, tens of thousands of years.“The process of what happens when there is this kind of climate change is enormous.
"For example, in the 1340s, a 1.5-degree movement of heating of the earth’s atmosphere probably because of solar flares or volcanic activity changes the cycle of Yersinia pestis bacterium."That one and a half degree difference allowed a small microbe to develop into the Black Death.”The Great Plague was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, wiping out 75 to 200 million people in Eurasia and peaking in Europe from 1347 to 1351.“These are the things we should be hugely worried about,” Professor Frankopan said.