Volume 14, Number 40: 5 October 2011
In an Opinion article published in a recent issue of Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Rhor et al. (2011) state that "the notion that climate change will generally increase human and wildlife diseases has garnered considerable public attention, but remains controversial and seems inconsistent with the expectation that climate change will also cause parasite extinctions." Therefore, they decided to review the subject in some detail to see what the bulk of the scientific studies that have addressed the topic have concluded on this contentious matter.
In describing the nature of their review, the eight scientists say they highlighted frontiers in climate change-infectious disease research by "reviewing knowledge gaps that make this controversy difficult to resolve." And in doing so, they came to the conclusion that "understanding climate change-disease interactions is a formidable problem because of its interdisciplinary nature and the complexities of hosts, parasites and their interactions with the multiple factors that can co-vary with climate change."
As a result of this enlightenment, they go on to state that "effective forecasting of climate-change impacts on disease will require filling the many gaps in data, theory and scale," adding that their findings suggest that "forecasts of climate-change impacts on disease can be improved by more interdisciplinary collaborations, better linking of data and models, addressing confounding variables and context dependencies, and applying metabolic theory to host-parasite systems with consideration of community-level interactions and functional traits."
In terms of the implications of their findings, the eight U.S. researchers -- who hail from the University of South Florida, Princeton University, the University of Colorado, the University of California at Santa Cruz, Cornell University and the Pennsylvania State University -- write that "although there should be genuine concern regarding future disease risk for humans and wildlife, we discourage alarmist claims and encourage rigor, open-mindedness and broad thinking regarding this crucial and interdisciplinary global issue."
We agree. For far too long, we have heard only one catastrophic scare story after another in regard to how humanity will suffer from climate-change-induced impacts on various vector-borne diseases and other maladies, nearly all of which have been based on studies lacking the "rigor, open-mindedness and broad thinking" that Rhor et al. state is essential for evaluating all of the many interrelated aspects of the subject. We can only hope their plea will be taken to heart by all researchers working in this most important field of endeavor.
Sherwood, Keith and Craig Idso
Reference
Rohr, J.R., Dobson, A.P., Johnson, P.T.J., Kilpatrick, A.M., Paull, S.H., Raffel, T.R., Ruiz-Moreno, D. and Thomas, M.B. 2011. Frontiers in climate change-disease research. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 26: 270-277.