Remember those claims of ‘global warming will increase dengue fever risks’? Never mind…

Watts Up With That?

From AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY and the National Geographic, wrong again department comes this bit of good news.

Warmer climate could lower dengue risk

This image shows one of the mosquitoes (Ae. aegypti) that carries dengue and Zika viruses. CREDIT Oregon State University on Flickr.

Health researchers predict that the transmission of dengue could decrease in a future warmer climate, countering previous projections that climate change would cause the potentially lethal virus to spread more easily.

Hundreds of millions of people are infected with dengue each year, with some children dying in severe cases, and this research helps to address this significant global health problem.

Co-lead researcher Associate Professor David Harley from The Australian National University (ANU) said that dengue risk might decrease in the wet tropics of northeast Australia under a high-emissions scenario in 2050, due to mosquito breeding sites becoming drier and less favourable to their survival.

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Nature: There are Worse Threats to Biodiversity than Climate Change

Watts Up With That?

1944 Picture of Bulldozers

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

A commentary published in Nature has claimed that careless human exploitation of natural resources poses a far greater threat to endangered species than climate change.

Biodiversity: The ravages of guns, nets and bulldozers

There is a growing tendency for media reports about threats to biodiversity to focus on climate change.

Here we report an analysis of threat information gathered for more than 8,000 species. These data revealed a contrasting picture. We found that by far the biggest drivers of biodiversity decline are overexploitation (the harvesting of species from the wild at rates that cannot be compensated for by reproduction or regrowth) and agriculture (the production of food, fodder, fibre and fuel crops; livestock farming; aquaculture; and the cultivation of trees).

Early next month, representatives from government, industry and non-governmental organizations will define future directions for conservation at the World Conservation Congress…

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