[Sparkyte]

This isn't an everything is fine mongering statement.

Everything is not fine, but without clear cut research linking two completely different problems is not a scientific way of understanding why what happened. Fear mongering is what the original commenter is doing.

[Jedd]

> This isn't an everything is fine mongering statement.

Then my apologies. The hand-wavey 'climate change happened before and will happen again' sounded like you thought it wasn't a critically important challenge facing us, frequently being down-graded by people with vested interests in understating the problem via dismissive 'this has happened before and we're okay' style comments.

The 'we need more science' refrain is also often heard from that quarter, so I expect you'll continue to spark a certain reaction when you use that phrase.

The problem in TFA definitely seems to be related to small rises in temperature leading to a much more favourable environment for pathogens. That it happened in elephants is profoundly sad, but what's genuinely frightening is we probably have close to zero coverage on what pathogens we're susceptible to are about to reach a viability threshold with a 2 degree rise.

In another comment you ignored TFA findings and said:

> But I am probably going to point out increased commercial farming in Africa as a potential culprit. The use of fertilizers are an issue with algae and bacteria growth.

It would be convenient for climate change apologists if that were the case, but as per TFA the event seems to be pretty clearly attributable to Pasteurella bacteria.

[Sparkyte]

WOW! I've never seen so many forms of psychosis in one post.

You quote, and say but you're an apologist. Please check your privelege. This isn't an apologist stance. One of the largest influencers of climate change is the growth of crops not deomestically supported by the environment. Agriculture in Africa has raised drastically over the last 5 years and the use of fertilizers in Africa is among the highest in the world.

I think we're done with this conversation because you don't understand someone who would rather take the scientific approach of analyzing a problem when you'll foot in mouth take the emotional route.

[Jedd]

TFA asserted cause was a specific pathogen that benefited from a temperature rise, and correlated with a similar incident wiping out 200k antelopes in 2015.

You said you thought we should 'look into fertilisers' as the root cause.

Perhaps you could argue your well-reasoned case with the authors of the paper published in Nature:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41987-z

[Sparkyte]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6924646/

TLDR fertalizers increase bacterium growth study done on bowvine. Fertalizer use in Africa as a content is up 300% and 33% higher than most developing countries. For example while USA uses a lot of fertilizer a small country like South Africa uses half. That is a lot in terms of land.

[Jedd]

No one is arguing over-use of fertilisers, along with the broadscale and monoculture practices that often accompany them, is / are a massive problem.

It's just that this isn't caused by _that_ problem.

TFA, and more importantly the upstream scientific paper they're citing, determine a different cause here - increase in temperature.