A professor at Oxford University warned that global warming could reawaken old diseases and even black death.Professor Peter Francopan said global warming would melt ice sheets that store buried bacteria for a long time, which could spread disease and cause new global pandemics.
Francopane presented his predictions as part of the "Cheltenham Literary Festival" last Friday, according to The Times.
"There is absolutely no chance" of survival, because the international community will fall behind the goals of the Paris Convention in keeping the global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius, he said.
"If we go beyond this, it will not only concern the disappearance of the Maldives or the increase in migration, but what will happen when the permanent ice is removed and biological agents buried for thousands of years are released," he said.
Because bacteria will once again be released into terrestrial ecosystems, there will be a high risk of untreated diseases for the world's population.
The most important of these diseases, plague, also known as black death and great death, which spread in the Middle Ages, due in large part to global warming.According to Professor Francopane, such a possibility must be taken more seriously than sea levels or droughts, not least because black death killed between 75 million and 200 million people in Europe in the fourteenth century.
While Francophane's warnings paint the worst-case scenario for future warming, there are recent examples of permanent melting of ice, which poses a major threat to people.Francopane's predictions come amid a growing number of studies looking at some of the indirect effects of global warming, the latest of which this week said that severe climate change would cause a global shortage of beer drinks.
In 2016, a 12-year-old boy died and more than 40 people were taken to hospital in Siberia after being infected with anthrax.
Anthrax has been "released" when high temperatures in the summer have melted the persistent ice, which has kept several buried gazelles for decades after a previous outbreak of dangerous bacteria.
The removal of these deer from the ice caused the release of bacteria previously frozen in the water and soil in the region, entered after melting in the food chain.
