Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Royal Society has published a study which claims that global warming will unleash deadly swarms of giant arctic mosquitoes.
According to the Royal Society;
Abstract
Climate change is altering environmental temperature, a factor that influences ectothermic organisms by controlling rates of physiological processes. Demographic effects of warming, however, are determined by the expression of these physiological effects through predator–prey and other species interactions. Using field observations and controlled experiments, we measured how increasing temperatures in the Arctic affected development rates and mortality rates (from predation) of immature Arctic mosquitoes in western Greenland. We then developed and parametrized a demographic model to evaluate how temperature affects survival of mosquitoes from the immature to the adult stage. Our studies showed that warming increased development rate of immature mosquitoes (Q10 = 2.8) but also increased daily mortality from increased predation rates by a dytiscid beetle (Q10 = 1.2–1.5). Despite increased daily mortality, the model indicated that faster development and fewer days exposed to predators resulted in an increased probability of mosquito survival to the adult stage. Warming also advanced mosquito phenology, bringing mosquitoes into phenological synchrony with caribou. Increases in biting pests will have negative consequences for caribou and their role as a subsistence resource for local communities. Generalizable frameworks that account for multiple effects of temperature are needed to understand how climate change impacts coupled human–natural systems.
Read more: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/282/1815/20151549
Just one question – if a few degrees of global warming has the potential to turn Arctic mosquitoes into a B-grade horror movie nightmare, why isn’t this already happening in the slightly warmer Subarctic?
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The greenie beenies are soooo confused. I thought that wanted to unless lots of desease and death on the poor so as to wipe them out and reduce world population.
I am surprised they didn’t throw malaria into the pot with it, although I think that is implied by association. Prof Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute, one of the world’s leading authorities on such vector borne diseases, has put that to the sword several years ago. My ancient brain will try to hunt down his testimony to the HoL a few tears back.
Alan the Brit,
The first thing I noticed was the model. The abstract mentions predation by dytiscid beetles, so I said to myself surely the beetles will keep them in check (nature at work?). They said not really because of their model. Eric Worrall rightly asks why isn’t it happening now? Could it be due to the beetles? But they say:
Why didn’t they stick with the observations and controlled experiments?
You mention no mention of malaria. I think they are referring to the point that the mosquitoes can suck up to 300 ml of blood per day from each animal in a caribou herd. I note that Malaria was widespread in the Little Ice Age in countries like Canada, England, Russia and parts of the Arctic circle.
At this point I don’t know what else to say.
300 ml a day? That’s one hell of a mosquito.
I’m sure you know I am talking about many mosquitoes biting one caribou.
https://dx.doi.org/10.1038%2F466432a
I did Jimbo.
Unfortunately my version would get more traction in the media
The old English word for malaria is the ague, which is mentioned in the works of Shakespeare a dozen times or so, & yes the worst outbreak was in Arkangel, in the Arctic Circle!
I was kind of hoping it was a 300 ml mosquito. They get pretty big in the Dakotas and in Minnesota but we can’t quite hunt them with number 8 bird shot. Kind of fun to blast a mosquito with 300 ml of blood. Imagine the splash. Make a great video.
Malaria is eliminated, like many diseases, by cultural controls here in the US.
It was not the weather during the LIA that made these diseases exist here, and it is not the weather that eliminated them.
Screens on windows, and people in general protecting themselves, mosquito control programs, all work to keep the plasmodium from existing in this country.
Other vector borne diseases have been introduced into the US by travellers and stowaway mosquito’s, but have rarely spread.
Mosquito’s do not cause malaria, they can only spread it.
Here is some information on malaria in past times. DDT, timely medication drainage, window screens etc eradicated it from the USA, Europe and other countries.
a century of warming that has seen marked global declines in the disease
===================
which proves that global warming reduces malaria.
A major control mechanism for mozzies is fish. IF you have a bog full of mozzies put in a few fish. Minnows and goldfish are fine. They have to be able to survive the winter of course, either frozen solid or in deep pools. At the moment that is a problem.
A second control is frogs. There are nearly no frogs north of Arctic Red. I heard one in Inuvik once and asked about it. It had apparently hitched a ride on a flat bed from Arctic Red. It was a Leopard Frog which can survive being frozen solid. It lived, croaking out its call sign, for 4 years total before it went ‘silent key’.
As the Arctic warms, leopard frogs will invade the area and breed like crazy, eating most of the mosquitoes and black flies that currently make the north a living hell in summer. The mosquitoes in Yellowknife move in huge concentrated clouds that shade the ground and darken the sun.
Because it is so cold, there are no bees. Mosquitoes are the pollinators. They are so big they have landing lights and pontoons for water landings. If you slap one you have to get a towel. If it would please warm up a lot more, the mozzies would be chased north by very fat frogs.
The first thing I noticed was ‘Royal Society’. End of interest.
So the moose hunter out in the Alaskan wilderness, hears this terrific buzzing sound outside his pup tent.
Then the flap rips open and a couple of foot long mosquitos fly in and buzz around his sleeping bag.
” Shall we eat him here or just take him back with us and eat him later ? ”
“” We better eat him here, because if we take him back with us the big guys will just take him off us ! ”
So earth to Royal Society; why don’t those giant killer mosquitos just come on down here where it is nice and toasty, instead of waiting for it to warm up, up there ??
g
You, sir, must be familiar with the mosquitoes of the arctic climes!
Remember a friend who spent his 2 week Army Reserve posted to Alaska. Couldn’t say how big they were, but they did naughty sexual things to turkeys.
Also, what rising temperatures in Alaska? According to the University of Alaska, the state has cooled 0.1 degrees since 1977, and almost 75% of the stations have cooled.
http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/sites/default/files/ClimateTrends/Seasonal_Yearly_Temp_Change_77_F.png
” a few tears back”
That’s appropriate on so many levels.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200506/ldselect/ldeconaf/12/12we21.htm
Sadly the IPCC put Reiter to the sword has well , they like their ‘experts’ to produce the ‘right results ‘not the factually accurate ones.
“We then developed and parametrized a demographic model to evaluate how temperature affects survival of mosquitoes from the immature to the adult stage.”
The unknown unknowns, or the sort of known unknowns?
Or the completely made-up unknowns.
Actually I stopped paying attention at the word “model”. No ground truthing, no actual science going on.
I stopped as well but we have to be careful. There are times models are needed if not necessary. To keep on bashing them can be foolhardy. And as you said as long as they are paired with actual science there should be nothing wrong with them.
Aye!
Or as most people who state it; “We played ‘what if’ using fantasy and wishes to replace reality.” “That way, our most feared disasters develop in just the way we want it.”
“97% of urbanites fear clouds of mosquitos! Let’s build a model that proves mosquitos ate the caribou.” /sarc, maybe
And totally ignoring amongst the known unknowns that the predator beetles are also likely to prosper with increasing temperature
Around here the wild turkey population is suffering because of the vengeful return of the mosquito’s cousin, the Simulium meridionale, or Turkey Gnat (aka Black Fly, Buffalo Gnat). These dudes have a toxin that causes anaphylaxis and can kill large animals. They bite around the head of any animal.
http://www.dirtdoctor.com/Turkey-Gnat_vq675.htm
Ironically, they were almost wiped out by polluted streams and warming, needing cold, clean flowing water to breed. Our sparkling creek that stays cold well into June has made them flourish, to the dismay of all.
I also skim 30 to 50 mosquito egg cases off my horse watering trough every morning.
“I also skim 30 to 50 mosquito egg cases off my horse watering trough every morning.”
Mosquitofish?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquitofish
Nice thought, Gary, but we run 30 gallons of chlorinated water into it every day and use Scope mouthwash to scrub the tub on a weekly basis, as hoses love to put mud, grain and hay into the water. I have thought about trying to find Mosquitofish from a local pond to transfer to mine (1 acre) by asking around. I have many Bass and oversized Bluegill who might make buying Mosquitofish them impractical.
Hoses? At least I could have typed hosses…
Mosquito fish escaped (overflowed) from a nearby constructed pond system (in the neighboring gated community) into the adjacent drainage canal … water six feet wide and 24″ deep (avg). I counted an average of 150 of the little fish per foot in five or six locations; about 100,000 of them over the 1200 foot reach of the canal/ditch. They are very prolific fish.
Never any mosquitos as I walk along the path adjacent to the canal.
“Warming also advanced mosquito phenology, bringing mosquitoes into phenological synchrony with caribou. ”
I would have thought that would be constantly happening in any case as a consequence of changing weather patterns.
I notice that while the above quote refers to “climate change”, it doesn’t say “man made”.
On a slightly different topic, the BBC had an item on how there would be more, and larger spiders in our homes this autumn, as a result of “the fine weather throughout the summer”.
Apparently it was based on this report by the University of Gloucestershire.
http://www.gloucestercitizen.co.uk/Big-year-spiders-says-University-Gloucestershire/story-27811579-detail/story.html
What fine weather – to quote the met office report
“Using provisional figures up to August 26 and then assuming average conditions for the final few days of the month, Met Office statistics show the UK mean temperature for this summer will be around 14C. This is 0.4C below the long-term average.
“Rainfall overall is slightly higher than average, with the UK so far having seen 271mm of rain, which is 13 per cent above the long-term average.”
Yes I noticed that, according to my family back home this has been an awful Summer!
Still, don’t let the facts get in the way of a ‘good’ theory!
The competition for the most ludicrous alarmist story is clearly in full swing in advance of Paris in December. Expect even more ridiculous nonsense in the next 2 months.
And there’s more folks.
They will be trained to sting only those horrible people who do not believe CO2 is warming the planet.
Bugger! That’s what got me last night….I thought it was a particularly itchy bite. That’ll teach me to be sceptical.
Hmm I thought that was their trigger. More CO2 expressed the more attractive the target. Mosquitoes are the original AGW ists.
The whole of Finland, and areas of Russia near Arctic Circle, are of same temperature as (19)-30’s.After late -30’s temperature dropped, and from about -60’s it rose back to the same or even less.Easy to check from Finnish pages of FMI.So,warming of the arctic is mostly science fiction.
I ran across this the other day off Eureka Alert and it seemed that the “research” opinionation came out of Dartmouth, formerly in the Ivy League, and now cherished club member for deploying sustainability scares upon children for massive tuition, room, & board fees –
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-09/dc-amt090915.php
Question – since we have not yet turned all of our money over to BO, BS, Hillary, mother of Dennis Rodman, for how long after “graduation” will all these post-docs be living in their parents’ basements?
Apparently, you haven’t ever been fishing in Canada, Eric.
If the local hospital runs out of blood, they just trap and tap a mosquito to get by until some blood donors can make it in.
I’ve had my share of mosquito bites, I live next to a swamp on the bottom edge of the tropics 🙂
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/04/18/the-giant-spider-climate-story-which-simply-wont-die/
Since H.R. brings up the subject of Canadian mosquitoes and Eric brings up a swamp …..
Whilst living in New Orleans I stored and launched a boat from a place with the unlikely Cajun name Yscloskey deep in the Saint Bernard bayous, (think marsh with lots of tidal channels).
My boat was kept in a grassy lot carved out of marsh grass on oyster shells. Any time spent hitching or unhitching the boat required advance preparation and maximum movement speed, all while not breathing through one’s mouth.
If rapid enough, one loses less than a pint of blood. If careful enough, one doesn’t choke on inhaled mosquitos.
A raccoon I saw there once was the scrawniest most anemic raccoon ever. I threw a hardhead catfish (Cajun trash fish) near the raccoon and watched it pounce on the catfish and drag it off into the marsh.
Anywhere that fosters clouds of mosquitos, (Arctic, sub-Arctic, Canada, swamps, Siberia, Alaska, South America, Africa, South East Asia, or pretty much anywhere where man isn’t using mosquito controls), so thick that breathing is very difficult, deserves caution.
However, I doubt that a few degrees temperature change anywhere can manage to make mosquitos worse than they really are. Perhaps the researchers above, closeted in their pristine cubicles, have any clue to reality.
The tropics have their share of mosquitoes, but the Arctic gets professional about it.
In addition to DDT (which we can’t use) draining the swamps (which we cannot do) was effective mosquito control.
Luckily the giant leeches that will evolve (or at least a model of them will, perhaps in The Guardian?) will hunt the mozzies for the blood and will control them!
And don’t say leeches can’t live in Canada etc, CO2 pollution will change them!
I had remembered a story about an early settler in the west being bitten to death by a swarm of mosquitos. I couldn’t find it on-line but I did find this:
“Fatal exsanguination” = death due to blood loss
I found that mosquito venom can trigger anaphylaxis in people:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7719881
Very possible folks misunderstood why the deaths occurred, back then.
Mosquitos are very bad in subarctic areas (much less so in the true Arctic). Northern Scandinavia and Siberia are worst, though parts of Canada are almost as bad.
If climate grows warmer I would expect the worst zone to move north away from inhabited areas. By the way Iceland is OK. No mosquitos have managed to get there.
But if the climate grows warmer surely the inhabited areas will move north as well.
Giant Arctic mosquitoes?
We’re doomeder than ever!
Don’t worry, glo.bull warming will create giant , Godzilla sized birds to eat these giant mosquitos !!!
Isn’t the mosquito the state bird of Alaska?
Waste of space. Meanwhile, others are doing useful work:
http://goo.gl/fTrTRp
Look like the Eliminate Dengue project had paid off. The project has established naturally occurring wolbachia bacteria, which stops dengue transmission, within local dengue-carrying aedes aegypti mosquito populations. Thousands of Townsville residents did their bit to help the team.
The Eliminate Dengue research program has been tripled in Cairns, Vietnam and Indonesia, and is looking to carry out further trials in Colombia and Brazil.
That will piss the liberal greenies off !!! They WANT population control !!
The main question that this story raises in my mind is … “how darned silly can these clowns get?”
Do these clowns really have earned PhDs?
Maybe so, Mark.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3537/3511220797_635d5c1b0b.jpg
IPCC technical advisory committee – in session.
Shouldn’t that picture title be “Royal Society”?
*Just one question – if a few degrees of global warming has the potential to turn Arctic mosquitoes into a B-grade horror movie nightmare, why isn’t this already happening in the slightly warmer Subarctic?*
Good point Eric, to which I would like to add why are none of the horror shows the warmists take great delight in telling us about, not taking place NOW in some parts of the world.It is strange that these are all future events?
They have missed their big chance on one current problem; aren’t the people fleeing from Syria and Africa into Europe, doing so because of climate change? Off topic, my opinion is that a high proportion of these “refugees” are in fact terrorists. Trojan Horse is the phrase that springs to mind!
I have a model which clearly shows that as more environmentalists get provided with government funds, their numbers increase and the alarmism of their predictions diminishes phenomenally.
It has proved remarkably accurate in hindcasts, and I am now waiting for a fat government grant to publish it…
Whoops – I find that my sums are wrong. It should have read ‘increases’ rather than ‘diminishes’…
But, hey, that’s good enough for climate science. Simply reverse the sign…
I thought it was frogs that were the next plague? I don’t remember any plague of giant mosquitoes.
Forget the mozzies…it’s the bees we have to anguish about…
.
Or are they dying out now?
We already have a plague of blood-sucking pests. They call themselves ‘Climate-Change Activists’…
….and remember the two root words for politics: poly (many) + ticks (blood sucking pests!)
LOL
It seems like the headline for practically every new academic paper from the Warmists reads like a line from the movie Idiocracy.
The difference being that no one shows up at your door with a gun to take your house if you choose not to pay to see a movie. Now even the Royal Society is giddy with taxpayer money.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2012/06/02/royal-society-funding/
Which is just as well, since nobody believes it anyway. In fact, they don’t even READ it.
I’ve asked various friends and relatives how much attention they pay to “climate change.” Answer was, across the board, NONE AT ALL. It’s joined the part of the noise machine that warns you that death is a side effect of pills for restless leg syndrome.
Hares breed faster than lynxes, but eventually the lynxes catch up anyway.
So nobody is paying attention to the polar bear dying off drivel. If they published stories about the artic mosquito dying off, they’d hear cheers. So the mosquito has to try something different to finally get peoples attention.
As a society we’re getting dumber, but as a whole we’re not quite that dumb yet….
Maybe those mosquitos will drive out all the damnable blackflies that make up about 80% of the arctic biomass. Blackfly, the little blackfly, pickin’ at my bones until I die….
YES. It is ridiculously easy to stop breathing in mosquitos, they are big and buzz and waving one’s hand works wonders. But black flies are tiny, microscopic. Even a veil struggles to keep these buggers out. They also fly into one’s eyeballs and they drive livestock nuts.
Also called “no see ems”
Is this Global Swarming?
The Global Swarming will happen in Paris. Cut off their funding and maybe like most swarms of buzzing insects, they’ll die a natural death over the winter . . .
Well, let’s get them to join our Butte County Mosquito and Vector Abatement District, help us pay the director’s $100,000-plus salary and benefits!
Next up, snakes, leeches, and Harry Reid creatures.
“and Harry Reid creatures” – complete with giant lethal rubber bands made by the Koch brothers .
Yes, the Leeches who are medieval doctors who use these nasty swamp creatures to cure ague. 🙂
emsnews,
Your point brings to mind this superb (IMO) clip from “Black Adder”.
.