Story submitted by Eric Worrall
At least one Australian is not unhappy at the country’s recent hot spell. The following is a picture of something I pulled off a private part of my anatomy earlier this year.
Yes, it’s a paralysis tick, Ixodes Holocyclus
But I haven’t been bitten since, despite living in the Australian bush. Why? Because the recent hot spell has killed most of the ticks.
Ticks can’t survive long dry spells which are hotter than 32c:
Humid conditions are essential for survival of the paralysis tick. Dry conditions, relatively high (32°C) and low (7°C) temperatures will kill all stages after a few days. An ambient temperature of 27°C and high relative humidity is thought to be optimal for rapid development (Clunies-Ross, 1935).
Source: http://www.animaloptions.com.au/index.php?page=paralysis-ticks
The recent week or so of dry 40°C+ temperatures in Australia has disrupted their breeding cycle.
An added benefit, apart from the yuck factor, is the reduced risk this year, of myself and my fellow Australians catching one of the awful diseases associated with tick bites, such as Queensland Tick Typhus.
Global warming? Bring it on.
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I’ve never had an up-close and pesonal encounter with a tick (except on the dog), but man…they creep me out. From Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever to Lyme Disease, I’ll pass.
Australian fauna.
Reminds me of the Terry Pratchett snippet. Those who know it will recall the scene in the Library at Unseen University, when Ridcully enquired about Australian fauna.
For those who don’t – read Pratchett. [Possibly “The Last Continent” – a nod to Bryson? – and ROTFL!].
The value of a post such as ColdOldMan is that it puts the wailings and breastbeatings of the global warmers in perspective. The global warmers like to pretend that there have never been natural disasters before and that all present day natural disasters are due to global warming.
The fact is that they cherish their panic-peddling even more than they do their junk science.
Talking about ticks and Lyme disease. Here in Australia the Government Health Department state that there is no Lyme disease here in Oz. So when somebody gets the symptoms of Lyme disease after being nibbled on by a tick, doctors won’t diagnose it and even when they send blood samples to America and it comes back “Lyme Disease” the patient still doesn’t have Lyme disease because it doesn’t exist here in Oz according the the Health Department. LOL.
It is that pathetic that Pathology labs can’t screen for Lyme and there are no stocks of antibiotics. So much for precautionary principle. However non damaging climate change gets the precautionary principle treatment.
But that’s Oz for you.
Just had a tick case half an hour ago.But it is true that dry conditions reduce the amount of saliva, their venom,according to a lecture I went to.Unfortunately unpublished, not even a paywall.
in my part of australia – south-east queensland – there have been very few mosquitoes, which i figure may also be connected to less rainfall this summer (farmers around here say we’ll get our rains in march – time will tell). meanwhile,
17 Jan: UK Daily Mail: Panic buyers strip shelves after Met Office issues blizzard alert for Wales as Britain braces for blanket of up to 12in of snow tomorrow
Temperatures plunged to -9C overnight and sub-zero conditions forecast to continue
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2263837/UK-weather-Snow-forecast-UK-motorists-told-travel-avoid-it.html
@Jenn Oates,
Lucky you!
A couple of years ago, i had to take around 270 ticks off my son, who had been wandering through bracken on the Northwest of Scotland, in Assynt. On his clothes, underclothes, skin, and a few that had attached themselves. That was a fun evening !
An adult female tick increases her mass by a factor of ten on feeding to repletion. From roughly 4 milligrams to 40 milligrams. That is the mass of 10^9 red blood cells. There are 5 x 10^6 RBC/milliliter^3 of human blood.
If I didn’t lose track of my naughts and x’s, the tick must process 200 milliliters of blood to filter out the mass of RBC equivalent to her increase in mass. It’s kind’a like surviving on a watery soup but without coxal glands through which to eliminate the excess fluid.
A few years back when I was just a fifty-something kid, I used to hike once or twice every month and never once picked up a tick, thanks to Bayticol aerosol.
Philip Shehan says:
January 17, 2013 at 11:25 am
& mogambogaru:; fire breaks; & winds
Actually there can be truth to both of these. Without cleared spaces around your buildings there is little to be done to save them. When you have that space then there are things. It is also true that fire can race up a tree and send glowing embers into the wind to cause a new fire where they come down. My local area east of the Cascades in Washington State is a case history for this sort of stuff. Search — Taylor Bridge Fire — for images and follow the links.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jim south London says:
January 17, 2013 at 6:56 am
“So if its hotter in Australia has there been more Rain in Australia then?”
Virga! It existed before CAGW.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virga
As air comes over the Cascade Mountains we see the clouds and the precipitation evaporate as the air slides downslope toward the Columbia Basin. That’s why it is dry here – see above “Taylor Bridge Fire” !
‘Now that the land is burned, do Australians get carbon credits for replanting?’
Both the serious fires here in southern Tasmania were anthropogenic (one from a campfire and the worse from a tree stump that had been left to smoulder). Should they be counted as debits?
Wildfires (lightening strikes) are clearly ‘natural’, just as methane emissions from wild ruminants are, but farmed ruminants are not. What about managed populations of wild ruminants? All gets a bit dodgy, carbon accounting!
The heat in Hobart had a similar effect to ticks on the pear and cherry slug population that was just commencing its annual assault on our prunus and hawthorns. They didn’t seem to do too well in 41.8°C, so there will be fewer to introduce to my friend Pyrethrum.
On another point, I wonder what the contribution of the fires to the record maximum temperature might have been? The temperature in the city was (rather unusually) higher that day than at the airport. The former is in the Derwent Valley and the latter in the Coal River Valley. There was a large fire burning in the Derwent Valley directly up wind. Given that the hot weather was the result of that same wind bringing to ground hot air from the Australian mainland heated by the absence of cloud (late onset of the monsoon), does any one know what the effect of the heat from the fire might have been?
I ask, because the serious fire that devastated the town of Dunalley that day reportedly pushed the temperature there to around 50°C as it approached. (There is an automatic station there, but the records on the BofM website only show the 3pm temperature that afternoon).
Anyone have any expertise on the localised warming effect of bushfires?
If you think that dinky tick is something come up to the Ozark Mountains. We have ‘Moby Tick’… frightening for my beagle. They eat rattlesnake for breakfast.
Steve B says:
January 17, 2013 at 12:49 pm
Talking about ticks and Lyme disease. Here in Australia the Government Health Department state that there is no Lyme disease here in Oz. So when somebody gets the symptoms of Lyme disease after being nibbled on by a tick, doctors won’t diagnose it and even when they send blood samples to America and it comes back “Lyme Disease” the patient still doesn’t have Lyme disease because it doesn’t exist here in Oz according the the Health Department. LOL.
It is that pathetic that Pathology labs can’t screen for Lyme and there are no stocks of antibiotics. So much for precautionary principle. However non damaging climate change gets the precautionary principle treatment.
But that’s Oz for you.
——————————————————————————————————————
That’s not entirely true anymore. My trouble and strife had Lyme D that was diagnosed here in Oz and she was put on antibiotics after which she recovered. Its true there was disbelief some years ago amongst some Doctors because they had never heard of it and neither had the Health authorities. It was only after my wife showed her Doc articles from the internet that action was taken that succeeded.
For those overseas readers who may have not understood my cockney slang that Ozzies sometimes use:
Trouble and strife = wife
Noah’s arks = sharks
Have a Butcher’s (hook) = look etc etc.
http://www.cockneyrhymingslang.co.uk/cockney_rhyming_slang
for more.
Well, Eric, that is wonderful. You are safe from ticks! I am just so pleased for you.
The owners of the 150+ houses who have been burnt out in Tasmania and New South Wales, the folks at Seaton who have been burnt out of their homes overnight, and the thousands of other East Gippslanders who are either in refuges, having fled their homes, or who are getting ready to defend their homes, will no doubt be soooo pleased to know that there is a silver lining to their personal misery. As for the farmers who have had their livelihoods go up in smoke, they will be able to sleep soundly now that they know that at least they are safe from the tiny beasties.
As will the thousands of fireys who are battling the fires. They will all be able to rest in the shade of their fire trucks knowing they are safe from those nasty ticks.
No doubt the Sussex Inlanders on the New South Wales south coast will be conflicted, though. Should they hope for hot weather and dead ticks, or should they hope for cool weather and a stop to the fire that is burning in their vicinity?
BTW, those who carry on so about control burns (which I support – we are going to need all the weapons in our armoury as AGW progresses) might care to give some thought to the fact that the current fires in East Gippsland are in country burnt bare in the 2007 fires and that at least some of that country was burnt to the ground the year before that. The country is a mix of national parks, production forests running down into pastoral lands with some irrigation cropping and dairying at lower elevations and along the valleys.
The reality is that the only thing that will stop eucalypt crown fires after prolonged dry periods, record heat, and strong winds is the absence of eucalypt crowns ot burn. US readers may not be aware but eucalypt leaves contain volatile oils which vaporize during extreme heat, turning eucalypt crowns into gaseous bombs during very hot wild fires. The resulting fires can be so hot that they create local ‘weather’ including strong winds.
Obviously, our production forests and national parks have to be chopped down to save them from wild fires.
Well Ace, I suspect it’s soon going to look like Moby Ticks jumpin on Moby :)ick. 😉
Aynsley Kellow
‘…does any one know what the effect of the heat from the fire might have been?’
Closer to the fire front you get radiant heat.
IThe wind consists of air moving sideways. Fire action will heat that air. If there is a differential temperature between the heated air and the cooler air, the heated air will rise. In doing so, it will pull in cooler air at ground level.
In terms of temperatures measured at ground levels, the temperature outcomes would be hotter near the fire front and possibly cooler, but more probably the same temperature, away from the fire front.
The recent record hot temperature in Hobart is highly unlikely to have been affected.
More good news from warmer weather – according to a story in The Advertiser this week, the white wine vintage this year will be great, so not all bad news.
Climate Ace says:
January 17, 2013 at 5:02 pm
==================
Gaia will win in the end.
Ask the dinosaurs.
It seems, She suffers no fools.
Another well thought out post from the climate troll, Climate Ace.
Bushfires have occurred before white man hit these shores so please explain to us what the AGW part of these recent bushfires would be?
You obviously don’t live in the Blue Mountains where there have been many huge bushfires in the past.
Aussies love their bush settings but they figure there will be no bushfires where they build so then they get a surprise when one happens.
Doug Proctor says:
January 17, 2013 at 11:24 am
Now that the land is burned, do Australians get carbon credits for replanting?
Sounds like a no-brainer ….
It is a no-brainer.
The overwhelming majority of eucalypt species are fire-adapted. In fact some of them can best be described as fire-promoting. (They have volatile oils in their leaves, they typicaly have large pieces of bark hanging from their branches which turn into spot-fire starting embers in firestorms, they produce very deep layers of forest litter, etc, etc).
For most eucalypt species (there are more than 500 different eucalpyt species) the standing trees resprout by way of epicormic shoots or from lignotubers after the fire has gone through. While there are some carbon flows, the main carbon remains as a stock stored in the forest.
For species that die in fires, in particular Mountain Ash, there is no need to replant because the Mountain Ash is also fire adapted. A Mountain Ash forest will release a massive seed shower that falls into the fire ash bed, thereby regenerating the forest. A Mountain Ash forest will typically last 3-500 years, provided no fires intervene. (A hectare of veneer-quality Mountain Ash is worth over $300,000.)
I am not aware of any Australian system whereby you get carbon credits twice for the same area of forest.
Reports have just come in of a fire track which was trapped in one of our current fire fronts and the fire passed over the top of it. In earlier years the truck would have been incinerated and the fire crew killed. As I know from personal experience one of the great fears during the fire season is for the safety of the firies – particularly when they are family members.
Learning from these experiences, governments have added self-protecting sprinkler systems to fire trucks. This was activated by a crew today. The truck got some damage, the crew escaped unscathed, and they are back on the job.
It is a great good news story. And the best thing is that their mates will probably shout them a beer when it is all over.
Clearly, Australia was not carved out by literal-minded finger-waggers and bed-wetters. When Lake George dried out and the Darling stopped flowing in the late 1820s, people didn’t see secular trends. They just saw drought and kept slogging. In 1888 you couldn’t buy a drop of rain over most of Oz. After three floods in Black February of 1893, you needed a row-boat to get around Brisbane.
I love Australia. I’m in awe of the practical genius of people like Liz Macarthur, Goyder and Kidman, who could consult the aborigine and their own stupendous commonsense, and actually make a bit of sense of this bizarre continent.
I had no idea that last summer would be freakishly cool. I suspected a dry spring this year, but had no idea there’d be drought right into January. I have no idea what next season will be like. Because I spend time in the bush, I may have a slightly better idea, but only slightly.
Our Green Betters claim to know about future climate. Their technique is to talk about climate extremes until one comes along. In Australia, that’s a bit like betting that a horse will win the Melbourne Cup – and maybe even the Cox Plate.
Fortunately, Our Green Betters are having a hard time fooling one another, let alone the rest of us.
Climate Deuce, what record heat are you talking about? If you refer to the newly minted and entirely unbelievable ‘national temperature average’ spruiked for the the first time this year by the BOM (to prop up their increasingly shaky CAGW meme), then it is irrelevant. The only thing that might be relevant is possible record temps in the places where there actually are fires, and you have produced no evidence for this – because there isn’t any.
As for the Gippsland fires, you contradict yourself. Unless you suggest that full grown, fuel-laden eucalypt forest can regenerate in a year, or six years, your claim is nonsense. Which means, your claim is nonsense.
Today is the tenth anniversary of the Canberra fires which destroyed 500 houses in an afternoon, and seriously damaged the Mt Stromlo observatory. Sadly, four people died. There were incalculable losses of native wildlife as well as significant stock losses. I was here, and the temperatures were not record-breaking, it was just typical hot, windy January weather – just as it is today – currently 39 degrees with a westerly wind. Happens every year.
As I said in another thread, your use of people’s personal suffering to push the CAGW meme is disgraceful and inaccurate.Please stop doing it.
John Trigge (in Oz) says:
January 17, 2013 at 5:36 pm
More good news from warmer weather – according to a story in The Advertiser this week, the white wine vintage this year will be great, so not all bad news.
Excellent news.