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Global Civilizational State: the application of the Scale of Global Rights to the most important global issues threatening humanity's survival worldwide.(with videos)
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Theme for this month February 2021:
Global Civilizational State: the application of the Scale of Global Rights to the most important global issues threatening humanity's survival worldwide.

Global Issue 8: sections 1,2,3,4,5, and 6 affected: The global coronavirus pandemic is the product of a staggering multitude of factors, including the air travel links connecting every corner of the planet so intimately and the failure of government officials to move swiftly enough to sever those links. But underlying all of that is the virus itself. Are we, in fact, facilitating the emergence and spread of deadly pathogens like the Ebola virus, SARS, and the coronavirus through deforestation, haphazard urbanization, and the ongoing warming of the planet? It may be too early to answer such a question unequivocally, but the evidence is growing that this is the case.

Scientific research suggests that breeding grounds for rats, like mosquitoes are expanding significantly as a result of rising world temperatures, thus facilitating the emergence and spread of deadly pathogens like the Ebola virus, SARS, and coronavirus. The global warming of the planet caused climate change and Artic ice to melt at rates unseen before. The Artic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. Iceberg and the Artic snow cover are melting much faster. The tipping points of greatest concern have been the rapid melting of the Greenland and West Antartic ice sheets. Should they melt ever more quickly with all that water flowing into oceans, a sea level rise of 20 feet or more can be expected, inundating many of the world's most populous coastal cities and forcing billions of people to relocate. The Artic Council suggests 20 percent of the uppermost layers of permafrost may melt by 2040. As the ice begins to thaw, each eroding layer will expose new layers, along with microbes that have been frozen away for thousands of years. That vast collection of bacteria, viruses and other pathogens may impact, or infect, our lives in ways that are hard to imagine.

Many organisms change their nature with fluctuating climatic conditions, and become fatal and toxic with changing environments. In the Artic as melting permafrost steadily releases the hundreds of gigatons of methane, a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide, stored in soil, lakes and sediment in Canada and Siberia. Methane is also boiling up from underneath the Artic ocean. Melting permafrost could potentially yield viruses from long-extinct homonin species like Neanderthals and Denisovans, both of which settled in Siberia and were riddled with various viral diseases.

The thawing of permafrost either from global warming or industrial exploitation of circumpolar regions are affecting and threats to human health. Putting aside long-dormant new viruses, there is also the issue of "zombie diseases" that have been safely tucked away in the ice for tens of thousands of years. These can include infections that have wreaked havoc on human populations in previous eras, including smalpox, various flu varieties, bubonic plague, and other deadly illnesses long since forgotten. Other infections that did not kill previous generations, but which we have lost immunity protection for, could also emerge. A bacterium that have been encased in the Antartic glacier for million years can be revived. Carnobacterium pleistocenium shared the era with mastodons, woolly mammoths and saber-toothed cats. Though the microbes have been immobilized in a chunk of ice for thousands of years, they can be revived as things warm up. Even within humans and other living creatures there exist micro-organisms whose nature we simply cannot ascertain. Science so far has been able to identify only one percent of bacteria and its nature living in human body, and 99% of other organisms living within us are still unknown.

Warmer temperatures and more moisture are conducive to the accelerated reproduction of mosquitoes, including those carrying malaria, the zika virus, and other highly infectious diseases. Such conditions were once largely confined to the tropics, but as a result of global warming, formely temperate areas are now experiencing more tropical conditions, resulting in the territorial expansion of mosquito breeding grounds. Accordingly, malaria and zika are on the rise in areas that never previously experienced such diseases. Similarly, dengue fever, a mosquito-borne viral disease that infects millions of people every year, is spreading especially quickly due to rising world temperatures.