From Watts Up With That?

By Robert Vislocky, Ph.D.

Direct from the manual of “let’s run models and scare the world without checking actual data” is this recent piece from our favorite fear mongering news outlet, The Guardian, titled “Risk of snakebites increasing as reptiles adapt to changing world, says study.”

Risk of snakebites increasing as reptiles adapt to changing world, says study | Snakes | The Guardian

As can be guessed from the title, the article reports that rising temperatures from “climate disruption” will cause all sorts of venomous snakes like the spitting cobras, vipers and cottonmouth moccasins to shift their habitats into areas where they have not been seen before and potentially affect billions of people. The trend is projected to get even worse in the coming decades and is expected to predominantly affect those in poorer nations according to the study published last week titled “Climate change induced complex shifts in snake distributions expose people to snakebite and threaten biodiversity” which was referenced within the Guardian article.

Climate change induced complex shifts in snake distributions expose people to snakebite and threaten biodiversity | PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases


So how did the researchers compute the effects of future warming on snake migration? Through computer models of course! And guess which data the authors used to estimate future climate conditions by 2090? You got it … they used CMIP6 with the SSP5-8.5 emissions pathway and tested no others! That’s the same emissions scenario that was declared unrealistic by the IPCC.

Regardless of the modeling result and poor choice of emissions pathway, the obvious questions remain … have actual observed snakebites been increasing as the planet has warmed and is this really a growing problem of concern? While I was unable to find a good long-term dataset regarding snakebites, the following article from the journal Nature Communications provides global snakebite mortality data over the last several decades.

Global mortality of snakebite envenoming between 1990 and 2019 | Nature Communications