Why the vindication of the lab leak theory for Covid's origin is partly good news

By Matt Ridley. Excerpts:

"It is now beyond reasonable doubt that Covid began with an accident in a laboratory in Wuhan. Nowhere else in the world was there a laboratory doing exactly the right kinds of experiments on exactly the right sequences in exactly the right genes of exactly the right kind of virus at exactly the right time and at exactly the wrong biosafety level. The evidence for a natural spillover has stubbornly refused to appear: no infected animal turned up in any of the 40,000 markets selling live animals in China, let alone the one in Wuhan.

Paradoxically, this is partly good news. It explains why this virus – unlike every zoonotic spillover – was highly infectious from the start and impossible to contain. It was already trained on human genes. Zoonotic spillovers such as SARS, MERS, Ebola, Nipah, Hendra, Hanta and others tend to cause dangerous illness but not be very infectious and are soon controlled by contact tracing and quarantine. Lab leaks, of viruses honed on human receptors, are likely to be much more infectious from the start. And we can stop lab leaks happening. All we have to do is cease doing foolish experiments of dubious value on dangerous pathogens. Full stop.

It is worth reflecting on why so many people have a vested interest in resisting the conclusion that it was a lab leak. Some do not want to upset the Chinese government. They look at the way China retaliated against Australia just for calling for an investigation into the origin of Covid. Some do not want to tarnish the reputation (and funding) of science.

Others had been hoping to turn the pandemic into a fable about humankind’s brutal rape of Gaia. Environmental alarmism is a lucrative business and this was grist to their mill.

Even if ‘wet’ wildlife markets and smuggled pangolins were exonerated in this case, they argued, and the outbreak came from some direct contact with bats, the moral lesson was ecological. Deforestation and climate change had left infected bats stressed and with nowhere to go but towns. Or it had driven desperate people into bat-infested caves in search of food or profit."

"In July 2020, 17 scientists, including Dr Peter Daszak, who collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and was keen to exonerate his friends there, wrote an article in Science magazine insisting that the main lesson of the pandemic was that deforestation must cease: ‘The clear link between deforestation and virus emergence suggests that a major effort to retain intact forest cover would have a large return on investment even if its only benefit was to reduce virus emergence events.’

There were three problems with this argument. First, there is no ‘clear link’ between epidemics and deforestation. Aids, Sars, Mers, Ebola, Nipah, Hendra, Zika — none of these virus outbreaks has been plausibly linked to forest clearance, let alone as the major cause of them. Second, deforestation has not only ceased in southern China but went into rapid reverse a generation ago. There is more forest every year. Third, people encounter bats less, not more, than they did in the past. Urbanisation has drained rural villages of people and given them other ways of making a living than cutting trees or catching bats."

"tree cover has increased by 2.24 million km².’ That’s 7 per cent more forest globally than in 1982."

"Countries like Bangladesh have been rapidly increasing their tree cover. As for China, it is reforesting as fast as anywhere on the planet. ‘China alone accounts for 25 per cent of the global net increase in leaf area with only 6.6 per cent of global vegetated area,’"

"So if going into a cave was all it took to start a coronavirus pandemic, the odds are it would have happened eons ago. There are, however, three new reasons that people go into caves today: tourism, collecting bat guano, and science. The abandoned copper mine in Yunnan where the closest relative of Sars-CoV-2 was found is an unnatural, man-made tunnel, not an example of pristine nature. After guano-shoveling-miners got ill there in 2012, the only visitors to the site, as far as we can tell, were scientists, mostly from the Wuhan Institute of Virology more than 1,000 miles away. They not only went into the mine, disturbing the bats; they also captured them in nets, swabbed their rear ends for viruses and took them back to Wuhan labs. Now that’s encroachment."

How central planning ruined forests

See ‘In Praise of Floods’ Review: Let the River Run by Timothy Farrington. He reviewed the book In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings by James C. Scott. Excerpt:

"In the late 1700s, Scott recounted, German officials set out to rationalize timber production. They replaced the thickety labyrinths of natural forests with uniform rows of single species. Yields went up, and the model spread across the wooded world. Then, a few decades on, the forests began to wither. The fertility of the soil, it turned out, had been sustained by a web of species and processes neglected by the technocrats. As Scott couldn’t resist quipping, the “utilitarian state could not see the real, existing forest for the (commercial) trees.”"

No, We Are Not Running Out of Forests

By Alexander C. R. Hammond of HumanProgress.

"Recently on the BBC, Deborah Tabart from the Australian Koala Foundation noted that “85 per cent of the world’s forests are now gone.” Luckily this statement is incorrect.

Moreover, due to afforestation in the developed world, net deforestation has almost ceased. I’m sure that Tabart had nothing but good intentions in raising environmental concerns, but far-fetched claims about the current state of the world’s forests do not help anyone. The record needs setting straight.

After searching for evidence to support Tabart’s claim, the closest source I could find is an article from GreenActionNews, which claims that 80 per cent of the earth’s forests have been destroyed. The problem with that claim is that according to the United Nations there are 4 billion hectares of forest remaining worldwide. To put that in perspective, the entire world has 14.8 billion hectares of land.

For 80 per cent of the forest area to have already been destroyed and for 4 billion hectares to remain, 135 per cent of the planet’s surface must have once been covered in forests. GreenActionNews’ claim not only implies that 5.2 billion hectares of deforestation occurred at sea, but that every bit of land on earth was once forested. Ancient deserts, swamps, tundra and grasslands make mockery of that claim.

Amusingly, GreenActionNews’ claims that “forest is unevenly distributed: the five most forest rich countries are the Russian Federation, Brazil, Canada, the United States of America and China.” Country size and forest area do not always correlate, but it is hardly “uneven” that the five largest countries also hold the world’s largest forest areas.

Anyhow, slightly more than 31 per cent of the world is covered in forest. The world does continue to lose forest area, but consider the rate and location of this loss. According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the annual rate of deforestation has more than halved since the 1990s. Between 2010 and 2015, the world has gained 4.3 million hectares of forest per year, while losing 7.6 million hectares of forest per year. That accounts for a net decrease of 0.08 percent of forest area each year.

Some argue this data is faulty, because the FAO defines forest area as including natural forests and tree plantations. But that criticism is illegitimate. The FAO makes it clear that “93 per cent of global forest area, or 3.7 billion hectares in 2015,” was natural forest. Natural forest area decreased at an average rate of 6.5 million hectares per year over the last five years, a reduction from 10.6 million hectares per year in the 1990s. Put differently, natural forest loss is declining by 0.059 percent per year and is heading towards zero.

The reason why most people labor under a misapprehension about the state of the world’s forests is that news stories often ignore afforestation. In about half of the world, there is net reforestation and, as Matt Ridley puts it, this isn’t happening despite economic development, but because of it.

The world’s richest regions, such as North America and Europe, are not only increasing their forest area. They have more forests than they did prior to industrialization. The United Kingdom, for example, has more than tripled its forest area since 1919. The UK will soon reach forest levels equal to those registered in the Domesday Book, almost a thousand years ago.

It is not just rich nations that are experiencing net reforestation. The “Environmental Kuznets curve” is an economic notion that suggests that economic development initially leads to environmental deterioration, but after a period of economic growth that degradation begins to reverse.

Once nations hit, what Ridley dubs the “forest transition,” or approximately $4,500 GDP per capita, forest areas begin to increase. China, Russia, India, Vietnam and Bangladesh are just some of the nations that have hit this forest transition phase and are experiencing net afforestation.

Poor people can’t afford to care about the environment very much, because other priorities – such as survival – are more important. If that means that a rare animal must be killed and eaten, so be it. “The environment is a luxury good,” says Tim Worstall of the Adam Smith Institute, “it’s something we spend more of our income upon, as incomes rise.”

A recent study from the University of Helsinki highlights that between 1990 and 2015, annual forest area grew in high and mid-income nations by 1.31 per cent and 0.5 per cent respectively, while decreasing by 0.72 per cent in 22 low income countries.

The Kuznets curve not only applies to forest area, but also biodiversity. Ridley gives the example of three apex predators: wolves that live in developed countries of Europe and North America, tigers who mainly inhabit mid-income India, Russia and Bangladesh, and lions, which live in poor Sub-Saharan Africa. Following the Kuznets curve, wolf numbers are rapidly increasing, tiger numbers have been steady for the last 20 years (and have just began to increase), while lion numbers continue to fall.

To encourage reforestation and environmental protection, the answer is a simple one – adopt economic policies that encourage rapid development and urbanisation. As people grow rich and move to the cities, more money becomes available for environmental protection and more land can be returned to nature.

Thankfully Tabart’s claim was wrong and historically unprecedented poverty alleviation that has occurred in the last 50 years means that more countries are increasing their forest area. Yearly net deforestation is fast approaching zero and according to current trends, within the next couple of decades net afforestation will be the norm. This tremendous news is something to truly shout from the treetops."

Could we please stop with the misleading fire stories?

From Bjørn Lomborg.

"Could we please stop with the misleading fire stories?

The Economist cover story, like so many other stories these last weeks, claim that forest fires are exceptional and record-breaking: "EARTH is smouldering. From Seattle to Siberia this summer, flames have consumed swathes of the northern hemisphere"
This is based on anecdotes, not data.

Here is the data for area burnt in US forest fires from 1926 up until today. (2018 is estimated on area burnt until August 3, which over the past 10 years was 59.8%, scaling 2018 similarly.)
As is evident, US burnt forest area has dramatically *declined* since the 1920s, 1930s and 1940, after which widespread fire suppression was introduced. As more burnable mass is piling up, fire is going up slightly.

Now, it appears probable that global warming will lead to somewhat more forest fires.
But it is important to get a sense of proportion. US fires were *much* more destructive in the first part of last century.

And this is also true globally. Because climate models need estimates for forest fires (because they emit CO₂) there are many and good models going far back. In one recent overview, run with 124 simulations, shows that while global warming will increase fires, we are now at a historic *minimum* of fires. Since 1900, fire activity has decreased about 20%. And even with the most damaging CO₂ increases over this century, “wildfire emissions start to rise again after ca. 2020 but are unlikely to reach the levels of 1900 by the end of the 21st century.” https://www.biogeosciences.net/13/267/2016/

Overall, 2018 will likely see burnt area of one-fifth of the average burnt area in the US in the 1930s.
The US is smouldering less, not more.

Data: https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_stats_totalFires.html
, 2018 based on burnt area until August 3: https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/nfn.htm
Since 1900 US foreests have remained stable at 745m acres ±5% with a low point in 1920 at 735m acres, https://www.fia.fs.fed.us/slides/major-trends.pdf
. Similar stories here: "World on Fire", http://theweek.com/articles/788224/world-fire

See my story on US forest fires last year, https://www.facebook.com/…/fires-in-cali…/10156121084368968/

See similar EU data for the last 36 years: https://www.facebook.com/…/a.2217582089…/10157018315208968/…

  Some people have pointed out that the National Interagency Fire Center writes that “Prior to 1983, sources of these figures are not known, or cannot be confirmed, and were not derived from the current situation reporting process. As a result the figures prior to 1983 should not be compared to later data.”

This is convenient, since the NIFC for the longest time didn’t even want to acknowledge that there were data before 1960 (https://web.archive.org/.../fireInfo_stats_totalFires.html). I’ve consistently pointed out that we had early data and where the data starting in 1926 comes from; it is the Wildfire Statistics from USDA, summarized in the official Historical Statistics of the United States - Colonial Times to 1970, p537: http://bit.ly/2hGp7XF.

So, we all know, very well, where this data is from.

Interestingly, what the NIFC forgets to tell us is that the earlier data was based on reporting from *much* less land – about 200m ha of 700m ha burnable land (http://www.publish.csiro.au/WF/WF14190). So, if anything, it is reasonable to argue that the early estimates should multiplied by 3.5 (divided by 2/7th), which indeed is what this article did  
(https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/.../07-1183.1): “Littel et al. (2009) recognised the reporting bias and, as part of their analyses of fire–climate relationships in the western US, multiplied the USFS-reported WFAB estimates ‘by the ratio of the total area protected in 2003 to the area protected in a given year’.”

There are other, legitimate concerns, such as the inclusion of intentional burning in the early years, which may have added millions of acres to the numbers in the early part of the century (4-10% too much). But still, this does not in any way jeopardize the general trend of the data. This is of course why this data has been used by many academic publications, including Houghton, R. A. (03.2000). "Changes in terrestrial carbon storage in the United States. 2: The role of fire and fire management". Global ecology and biogeography (1466-822X), 9 (2), p. 145.

If anything, the graph that I’m showing is likely *underestimating* the amount of burning in the early part of last century.

One way to see this is comparing the graph to the US estimate from forest fires in the global carbon budget from “Fire history and the global carbon budget” (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/.../j.1365-2486.2005.00920.x). They estimate the burnt area in Eastern and Western US (here added together) in decades from 1900-2000. It is very clear that not only is the graph broadly right, but early fire, from where we have no or very spotty data, is likely to have been even greater, compared to the present.

The likely 2018 burnt area will be about 9% of the burnt area each year in the decade 1900-1910.

 

(it is burnt area in million acres up the vertical axis)"

California's Devastating Fires Are Man-Caused -- But Not In The Way They Tell Us

By Chuck DeVore. He is with the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Excerpt:

"In 2005 while a freshman California Assemblyman, I had the chance to visit Northern California and meet with the forest product industry professionals who grew, managed, and harvested trees on private and public lands. They told me of a worrisome trend started years earlier where both federal and state regulators were making it more and more difficult for them to do their jobs. As a result, timber industry employment gradually collapsed, falling in 2017 to half of what it was 20 years earlier, with imports from Canada, China, and other nations filling domestic need.

As timber harvesting permit fees went up and environmental challenges multiplied, the people who earned a living felling and planting trees looked for other lines of work. The combustible fuel load in the forest predictably soared. No longer were forest management professionals clearing brush and thinning trees.

But, fire suppression efforts continued. The result was accurately forecast by my forest management industry hosts in Siskiyou County in 2005: larger, more devastating fires—fires so hot that they sterilized the soil, making regrowth difficult and altering the landscape. More importantly, fires that increasingly threatened lives and homes as they became hotter and more difficult to bring under control.

In 2001, George E. Gruell, a wildlife biologist with five decades of experience in California and other Western states, authored the book, “Fire in Sierra Nevada Forests: A Photographic Interpretation of Ecological Change Since 1849.” Gruell’s remarkable effort compared hundreds of landscape photographs from the dawn of photography with photos taken from the same location 100 years later or more. The difference was striking. In the 1850s and 1860s, the typical Sierra landscape was of open fields of grass punctuated by isolated pine stands and a few scattered oak trees. The first branches on the pine trees started about 20 feet up—lower branches having been burned off by low-intensity grassfires. California’s Native American population had for years shaped this landscape with fire to encourage the grasslands and boost the game animal population.

As the Gold Rush remade modern California, timber was harvested and replanted. Fires were suppressed because they threatened homes as well as burned up a valuable resource. The landscape filled in with trees, but the trees were harvested every 30 to 50 years. In the 1990s, however, that cycle began to be disrupted with increasingly burdensome regulations. The timber harvest cycle slowed, and, in some areas, stopped completely, especially on the almost 60% of California forest land owned by the federal government. Federal lands have not been managed for decades, threatening adjacent private forests, while federal funds designated for forest maintenance have been "borrowed" for fire suppression expenses.  The policies frequently reduce the economic value of the forest to zero. And, with no intrinsic worth remaining, interest in maintaining the forest declined, and with it, resources to reduce the fuel load.

Some two decades ago, California produced so much wood waste from its timber operations, including brush and small trees from thinning efforts, that the resulting renewable biomass powered electric generating plants across the length of the state. But cheap, subsidized solar power, combined with air quality concerns (wood doesn’t burn as cleanly as natural gas) and a lack of fuel due to cutbacks in logging, led to the closure of many biomass generators. What used to be burned safely in power generators is now burned in catastrophic fires. Including the growing capture and use of landfill methane as a fuel, California’s biomass energy generation last year was 22% lower than it was 25 years before.

The issue was summarized by the Western Governors’ Association in their 2006 Biomass Task Force Report which noted:

    …over time the fire-prone forests that were not thinned, burn in uncharacteristically destructive wildfires, and the resulting loss of forest carbon is much greater than would occur if the forest had been thinned before fire moved through. …failing to thin leads to a greater greenhouse gas burden than the thinning created in the first place, and that doesn’t even account for the avoided fossil fuel greenhouse gas emissions due to the production of energy from the forest thinnings. In the long term, leaving forests overgrown and prone to unnaturally destructive wildfires means there will be significantly less biomass on the ground, and more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere."

Forests have more than compensated for any of the negative effects of deforestation, drought, fire, insect outbreaks and global warming may have inflicted upon them over the past several decades

A Century of Forest Coverage Change on South Africa’s Cape Peninsula by Craig D. Idso of Cato.

"The world’s forests provide a number of vital ecosystem services that benefit both society and nature alike. However, in recent years many have opined that the future of forests is in doubt. Deforestation, drought, fire, insect outbreaks and global warming represent only a handful of the many challenges that are claimed to be causing a near-term demise in forest health that is predicted to become only worse in the years and decades to come. But how valid are these fears? Are Earth’s forests truly on the eve of destruction?

Though there are indeed some locations that are suffering from a variety of maladies, there are many that are not. In fact, multiple studies reveal forests that are thriving, with many increasing in productivity and expanding their ranges (see, for example, the many reviews posted on the CO₂ Science website under the heading Greening of the Earth and Forests). And they are typically accomplishing these things despite all the real and imagined assaults on Earth’s vegetation that have occurred over the past several decades. In fact, forests have more than compensated for any of the negative effects these phenomena may have inflicted upon them.

A recent example of this phenomenon is presented in the work of Poulsen and Hoffman (2015), who examined aerial and ground-based photographs to estimate long-term changes in the distribution of forests on the Cape Peninsula of South Africa. Specifically, the pair of researchers analyzed a series of forest-related characteristics from aerial photographs taken in 1944 and 2008, along with 50 historical ground-based repeat photographs that were initially imaged between 1888 and 1980 and then repeated in 2011 or 2012.

As shown in the table below, examination of the aerial photographs revealed there was an overall increase in forest cover of 65% between 1944 and 2008. And with respect to the ground-based repeat photographs, Poulsen and Hoffman report finding “an overall decrease in cover of more than 5% of visible rock and sand” (indicating more vegetative cover).

Table 1. Changes in forest cover of Western Cape Afrotemperate Forest and Western Cape Milkwood Forest on Cape Peninsula from 1944 and 2008, based on an analysis of aerial photographs. Source: Poulsen and Hoffman (2015).

In discussing their findings, Poulsen and Hoffman state “the aerial and repeat ground-based photograph datasets have shown that there has been a significant increase in the number of patches of forest as well as in forest cover on the Cape Peninsula since 1888 when the earliest repeat photos were taken.” In fact, as revealed in Table 1, overall forest cover has increased by more than 65 percent since 1944. And in areas where coverage has not increased, the two authors say they “are primarily situated along the coast where developments have expanded and replaced [the forest].”

As for the cause of the observed forest increase, Poulsen and Hoffman note that “increases in woody vegetation cover have increasingly been attributed to increases in elevated atmospheric CO₂ levels,” though they say it is difficult to establish that link here because “there has been no research on the effects of elevated CO₂ on South African indigenous forest taxa.” A more likely cause, in their view, is fire exclusion; yet that conclusion may be somewhat shaky, considering the fact that they report mean fire return intervals have declined from 31.6 to 13.5 years since 1975, which decline should not have favored forest growth.

Whatever the cause, or causes, one thing is clear: Cape Peninsula forests are far from approaching any tipping point leading to their destruction. In fact, we find that in many other locations throughout the world (see the many references cited in the links presented above), forests are defying alarmists’ projections of their demise, as they successfully cope with and adapt to the many challenges humanity and nature force upon them. Now that’s good news worth sharing!

Reference
Poulsen, Z.C. and Hoffman, M.T. 2015. Changes in the distribution of indigenous forest in Table Mountain National Park during the 20^th Century. South African Journal of Botany 101: 49-56."