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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Johanna
I was here..
So what? So was I. On the roof…
Johanna
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.
I am claiming nothing of the sort.
Just as some of the Canberra fires burnt in areas that had been burned the year before, the currrent Gippsland wildfires are burning in areas that were burned in 2006 and 2007.
The obvious point is that fuel reduction burns will not stop eucalypt crown wildfires in record heat, strong winds and periods of very low rainfall.
mosomoso
Having dissed data as so many ‘factoids’, having claimed personal satisfaction with your bit of the holocone, and having cynically declared your belief that the Oppositions’s climate policies are there only to be broken after the election…where is your credibility?
Climate Ace, see my comment above –
In Australia, if you try to cut a firebreak on your land, without spending half your life waiting on the pleasure of bureaucrats, you go to jail. If you do go through the process, chances are you’ll still be refused permission.
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/01/in-australia-if-you-try-to-clear-a-firebreak-on-your-land-you-could-go-to-gaol/
Better to lose your property to a preventable fire, than end up sharing a cell with Big Bubba.
The severity of this year’s fires are nothing to do with global warming, the blame lies squarely with the ignorance and prejudice of incompetent city politicians who actively punish people who try to do the right thing, for the sake of their trendy green ideals about how the world should be.
Climate Deuce, you are slipping and sliding. You said:
“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.”
Later, you claim you said:
“the currrent Gippsland wildfires are burning in areas that were burned in 2006 and 2007.
The obvious point is that fuel reduction burns will not stop eucalypt crown wildfires in record heat, strong winds and periods of very low rainfall.”
I repeat, how can you have eucalypt crown fires a year, or six years, after the ground has been burned bare? Trying to pretend you really meant fuel reduction burns after you explicitly said the opposite won’t work here.
Again, I deplore your tactic of turning an interesting thread about ticks and weather into a soapbox for your “CAGW causes human misery” meme, using examples of people whose houses are still smoking. It’s disgusting.
Steve B
Bushfires have occurred before white man hit these shores…
True
…so please explain to us what the AGW part of these recent bushfires would be?
The bushfire context is a record heat wave and record national temperatures.
You obviously don’t live in the Blue Mountains… True.
..where there have been many huge bushfires in the past. True.
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.
But hang on. There were fires before whites arrived (Captain Cook recorded smoke pretty well every day he was able to see land on his trip up the east coast). There have been many, many fires since. And people are surprised there are fires?
If all these fires are so ‘normal’ because there is no climate signal in the fires, why do our fire insurance premiums keep rising above the rate of inflation? We have some farmland with some stock on it. If fires, and fire risks are normal because there is no change in climate, why have our LG rates jumped well ahead of inflation because of what the local shire reckons is dealing with fire-related issues?
It would be nice if local governments did some fire rating overlays over their plans, and then enforced them. But I imagine the BAU boosters would start screeching that that would be an infringement of people’s private property rights to build where they want, when they want. Until they get burnt out, when they rush to the government for disaster relief.
Eric
Climate Ace, see my comment above –
In Australia, if you try to cut a firebreak on your land, without spending half your life waiting on the pleasure of bureaucrats, you go to jail. If you do go through the process, chances are you’ll still be refused permission.
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/01/in-australia-if-you-try-to-clear-a-firebreak-on-your-land-you-could-go-to-gaol/
Better to lose your property to a preventable fire, than end up sharing a cell with Big Bubba.
The severity of this year’s fires are nothing to do with global warming, the blame lies squarely with the ignorance and prejudice of incompetent city politicians who actively punish people who try to do the right thing, for the sake of their trendy green ideals about how the world should be.
I am glad we have got beyond ticks. BTW, your name rings a bell… are you the snake expert Eric Worrall who used to do shows? If so I take this opportunity to say that I appreciated them.
1. I support the use of fire breaks and control burns to protect property and lives. Some extinctions will ensue, but hey, we have had plenty already, and there are lots more on the way. I also support the idea of stopping idiots from building expensive homes among the gum trees and then expecting the rest of us to building huge fire breaks in the bush they purport to love, pay higher insurance premiums, risk our lives getting them out, and paying taxes for disaster relief. I am not sure if such idiots are ‘trendy greens’ or your ignorant city nouveau riche BAU boosting McMansion builders who just don’t get either AGW or the Aussie bush.
2. Some dirty rotten scoundrel the other day called me a Marxist, another a Nazi, another has called me a nit, several others have used various other terms of abuse, but then someone went completely over the top and accused me of being a bureaucrat. What lower form of life could there possibly be?
3. Believe me, it doesn’t take a city politician to be ignorant, prejudiced or incompetent. We had one prominent fool in Queensland who thought you could measure sea level change by looking at his yacht or something like that. We had another incompetent fool who thought that CO2 was ‘weightless’ even when his party had a policy to reduce CO2 emissions by tens of millions of tons. You probably know who I am talking about. We had another idiot who drove his vehicle (paid for by taxpayers) into a flooded creek. You know how it goes with politicians.
Climate Ace, as I said before, I diss out factoids knowing that there is very little to be concluded from them. You do the same – mixed with a lot of moralising and faux-indignation – and hope to build a case for something. It is frivolous in the extreme.
As for my belief that the Opposition will adjust, fudge, delay or cancel its policies: Abbott is something of a practical conservationist (contrast him with the arch-polluter, Garnaut) but he is clearly not an adherent to the religion of Our Green Betters. While he sacrifices much spare time to safeguard our beaches and bushland (he has been active with his local fire brigade in the present emergency), it’s pretty clear that he thinks CAGW is bunk. On the other hand, both his party and institutions all over the world are infested with climate alarmism. He, like Kelly and others, will need to give something to the super-powerful climate lobbies, just as he will have to cater to the interests of other powerful lobbies, such as the miners, the luvvies and supermarket duoply. Sadly, that is always so. One hopes that he will be shrewd like Merkel and turn climate/environmental spending to our national advantage. Sorry if all that seems cynical, but anything is better than a Whyalla Wipeout – the song or the actual event.
I think nothing is more cynical than the way Our Green Betters jump on any climate or weather disaster and manipulate it to fit a script. God knows what they would do with something like a 1955 Maitland flood, when an inland sea formed in NSW that was the size of England and Wales. Really! Or another Cyclone Mahina of 1899…
But I’d better be quiet about all that. The New Man at Year Zero has so much trouble spinning away history. If only he could abolish it!
Johanna
I repeat, how can you have eucalypt crown fires a year, or six years, after the ground has been burned bare? Trying to pretend you really meant fuel reduction burns after you explicitly said the opposite won’t work here.
Sorry, I did not understand the point you were trying to make. The important distinction is that control burns rarely burn tree canopies or leaves and usually burn only the ground layer and sometimes the shrub layer. There is a sort of ‘good’ reason for this. If a control burn turns into a canopy fire you don’t have a control burn anymore. You have a bushfire.
Eucalypt forests can burn twice in two years because the forest may be burnt bare but not ‘destroyed’ in a fire. Stringybarks and Ironbarks, for example, have fire-resistant bark which protects the tree from extremely hot temperatures.
After a fires such trees will still be standing and they commence regenerating their leaf cover within days of a fire by way of epicormic shoots. The ash bed consists of released nutrients that are newly available to the trees. Provided there are good rains, and the rains do not come in torrential bursts that erode the ash into the valleys, regrowth can be quite vigorous.
Sydney current temperature at 2.50 PM is 44 C deg. The ABC will no doubt have a ball tonite with their ‘see we told you so’. But a ‘southerly buster’ as we call it (cold front) will hit at 9.00 pm and cause the temp to drop by at least 15 C with tomorrow at 25C max. Pachuri’s Entourage in Tasmania must be enjoying the much milder weather at the Governments expense no doubt than the brass monkey conditions in Europe.
Bit off topic but with the 44C we had today hopefully will have wiped out most of the tick nymphs before our humid weather in Februrary.
Delicious irony in the use of ‘bit off topic’ to actually discuss ticks.The paralysis tick of the Australian Eastern seaboard is the most potent in the world of Ixodes species.It would have been great to have had a conversation on this blog actually about this most potent vector of disease.
We have been graced by gratuitous discussion of firebreaks and global warming and weather variation over short time periods despite the now recognised pause in global warming and the failure to find a significant CO2 anthropogenic footprint other than perhaps in a short time period.
I smell an Australian Federal election on hand.Looks like we will not be able to escape it on this site.
Hopefully we Australian taxpayers will be freed from the burden of having to pay for green lobbyists and the escalation of green taxes.Hopefully we will diselect politicians that fantasize they may control climate.
mosomoso
You left out the complete destruction of the coal industry and weightless CO2, but apart from that, you appear to have covered your ethical bases pretty well.
BTW, you mention Kelly in your post. He might have to revise his post. Sydney has just posted its all-time hot temperature record. If not quite an inconvenient truth, we are certainly looking at what might be called inconvenient timing. What a goose.
Frank, Alarmists won’t be pleased … Sydney recorded 45.1 today, 0.2 below the record set long before the current magnitude of UHI effects, in 1939.
It’s been much cooler on the coast all day although coast weather stations are off the air.
Well Climate Ace, did you ever figure out your ocean chemistry problem?
Deuce, please stop making stuff up. Sydney official highest recorded temperature on the coast (not out in the western suburbs) is 45.3C (113F) on 14 January 1939. Where is your evidence that this was exceeded on the coast today?
I’m also still waiting for the evidence is asked for earlier to back your spurious and offensive claim that there is a relationship between record breaking temperatures at the location of the current bushfires and those fires. Waiting, waiting …
Your first paragraph was apparently satire, which I’ll leave to the hipsters and relishers of such irony.
Climate Ace, my region had its hottest single day temp in 2004, and its hottest January day in 1994. If some other place sets a record (which now has to be dated from the mid-sixties in most areas) I will take note. Just as I took note of the extraordinarily cool summer of last year. I took note of the North American heatwave, one of its worst, and probably its worst since the thirties, and I took note of the Central and Eastern Europe coldwave some months before, which was truly terrible.
You have a record hot day for an area of coastal NSW? Up here we’re way off any record, but it’s hot, and I’ll take note.
Brisbane recorded its coldest ever temp in 2007, but that’s only so far. It recorded its hottest ever temp in 1940, but that’s only so far. Do I think Brisbane is moving into an Ice Age? Do you? These are factoids. They tell very little.
I hope you can see the futility of this exercise. I have no idea of Sydney’s wind patterns right now, so I have no idea if this heat is anything like what occurred in 1791-1792, or 1960.
Lastly, we are all aware of a present fire emergency and many of us have to be at the ready, like Tony Abbott, possibly. By all means offer any advice which may be useful. I don’t live in a crown fire region, but I live around serious fire danger. I’m interested in any insights you may have about areas and species with which I am not familiar. But don’t appear to be cheering it on, like it was some kind of final comeuppance for conservatives and people of whom you disapprove.
It’s a bad heatwave, and somewhere records will be broken. It’s a grave fire emergency, although, thanks to wind patterns, not so bad here just now. Lives and property will be lost. It’s not new. It’s just terrible, like it was terrible in 1851 and 1839 and 1983 and 2009.
Dr Burns
The Sydney temperature would not have mattered at all, one way or another, except that Craig Kelly MP chose to draw everyone’s attention to it by writing a guest post about it on WUWT. You might recall the heading of his post – it was put fair and square in the context of global warming.
Fox 603 Weather Channel has just reported that the Observatory Station in Sydney a record temperature: 45.8 degrees. The Sydney Basin is getting a heat hammering as well. There was also a bit of talk about records being broken not by .1 or by .2 of a degree, but by .5 of a degree. And we all know that Fox is very, very reliable on these matters.
No doubt a Brick Yarder will come along and cool everyone right down.
Which is correct, I wonder? According to your logic, will BAU boosters be disappointed that there is yet another maxium record broken?
IMHO, anyone who gets attacked by a tick in Sydney over the next little while ought to buy themselves a tick-et in Tatts.
johanna
Deuce, please stop making stuff up. Sydney official highest recorded temperature on the coast (not out in the western suburbs) is 45.3C (113F) on 14 January 1939. Where is your evidence that this was exceeded on the coast today?
It wasn’t me who made it up. It was the Fox Weather Channel. If I misheard it, I will freely apologize for hearing it incorrectly.
I’m also still waiting for the evidence is asked for earlier to back your spurious and offensive claim that there is a relationship between record breaking temperatures at the location of the current bushfires and those fires. Waiting, waiting …
Years ago, when I was a volunteer firey, we were taught about the famous fire triangle which has three elements: fuel, heat and oxidizing agent.
Inter alia, there is a direct relationship between fire behaviour (including the likelihood of ignition, fire speed, fire intensity) and ambient temperature. As a general principle this is not, as they say, rocket science. The implication is that, in general, when ambient temperatures are higher, fires are more likely to start, more difficult to control and more destructive.
As you are aware, we have been having record hot temperatures at the national level and in many localities. OK, so, record temperatures and hundreds of fires in four or five states.
(Indeed, I must go off to check to see whether Canberra really has just had a record hot temperature for January – I just went outside and it certainly <ifeels very hot. But, I might have misheard that one as well.
BTW, you might want to check your personal bushfire plan. An out-of-control situation has developed at Booroowa – probably well over 60 k away – but with record temperatures, strong gusty winds, and tinder dry fuel, you are probably well-advised to be safe than to be sorry. The firies were certainly sounding a bit worried about the rate of speed of the firefront.
Climate Ace @7.42pm:
You commented that “Captain Cook recorded smoke pretty well every day he was able to see land on his trip up the east coast”, with the implication that this indicated uncontrolled fire of some sort. Rather, I have always understood his meaning to be that such fires were camp fires of the many, but scattered Aboriginal groups along the coast. This is particularly likely since it was in the context of his comments on the native peoples he saw from time to time.
However, you are very right about the modern day “controlled burn” that characteristically reduces the forest litter and low shrubs and small trees, but leaves taller trees, complete with high canopies, intact.
I was confused for a bit, but the official Sydney temp today is now 46, and the old 1939 mark was 45.3. (Sydney records still stand pre-1965.)
It’s interesting checking out these Observatory Hill records. People with a point to prove will find anything they want. If your’e a New Dalton fan, the hottest month since 1858 remains January 1896. The driest year was 1888, which appears to have been a drought nightmare over much of the continent.
As for me, I haven’t a clue what the climate will do. The early 1900s sucked where I live, but they had a huge timber industry so they weren’t entirely dependent on rainfall. When we got rain in 1949 and 1950 it nearly lifted us off the map. What a country!
Don’t want all that back – but Gaia’s a nasty old hag. She’ll do it all again, and worse.
mosomoso says:
January 17, 2013 at 9:12 pm
Your first paragraph was apparently satire, which I’ll leave to the hipsters and relishers of such irony.
Your leader has declared CO2 to be weightless, has declared his intention of mis-spending $10 billion or our taxes on reducing emissions of it by tens of millions of tons, and has declared the coal industry destroyed. Plus, more than half the population of Australia have signalled their intention of voting him in. Where is the satire? Where is the irony?
As for your factoids there is a piece of research floating around somewhere, maybe several pieces of research (and puhlease don’t ask me for a link, I hate work) that purports to show that hot records are outstripping cold records by a wide margin. I haven’t seen contrarian rebuttals on WUWT thereof, so there may well be some substance to it.
That being the case, it can’t possibly hurt for people to develop some useful associations between record hot temperatures, fire behaviour, and the consequences thereof. At the very least it might encourage them to skedaddle before it is too late. The signal lack of deaths in our recent and current fires seems to indicate that people are smartening up in this regard.
…so please explain to us what the AGW part of these recent bushfires would be?
The bushfire context is a record heat wave and record national temperatures.
Sorry Climate Troll – not true. Even the Sydney temps were below a 1939 record and here in Newcastle they were not the highest so you fail. Do some research – always helps.
Oodnadatta and Marble Bar records still not broken.
Vicki Sanderson says:
January 17, 2013 at 9:35 pm
Climate Ace @7.42pm:
You commented that “Captain Cook recorded smoke pretty well every day he was able to see land on his trip up the east coast”, with the implication that this indicated uncontrolled fire of some sort. Rather, I have always understood his meaning to be that such fires were camp fires of the many, but scattered Aboriginal groups along the coast. This is particularly likely since it was in the context of his comments on the native peoples he saw from time to time.
I wll agree that I have over-generalised what was, continent-wide, an extremely complex set of fire regimes ignited by both Indigenous people and by natural causes. I would also say that the former tended to reduce the fuel available for the latter.
Climate Ace @9.35pm:
Well, no, the fire management , (“fire stick burning”) that many people ascribe to the Australian Aborigines, was in many cases intended to flush out game, rather than deliberately reduce fuel to prevent bushfires. There is much misunderstanding of the relationship of of these people to their environment.
Cook reports many thin spirals of smoke, which almost certainly is indicative of cooking fires which were kept burning whilst a family group were camped within an area.
FrankK says:
January 17, 2013 at 4:29 pm
Steve B says:
January 17, 2013 at 12:49 pm
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.
*********************************************************************************************
Watching one of our esteemed current affairs programs (cough cough) about 3 months ago, the head of the Department of Health (a doctor) told us that Lyme Disease doesn’t exist in Australia. Yu must have got a doctor who ignores the Health Department then. (smilie)
Climate Ace sounds like our Red Witch Jooliar Gillard. Sounds like he is trying to save his job at the Climate Change Department. When I become Prime Minister it will be the first department to get axed.
Steve B says:
January 17, 2013 at 10:02 pm
…so please explain to us what the AGW part of these recent bushfires would be?
The bushfire context is a record heat wave and record national temperatures.
See my response to Johanna on the fire triangle.
Sorry Climate Troll – not true. Even the Sydney temps were below a 1939 record and here in Newcastle they were not the highest so you fail. Do some research – always helps.
Well, I would call that sentence simple bad luck as to timing and will not criticize you for it, even if you did call me something nasty, and you did tell me I failed, and even if you did imply that I don’t research stuff when occasionally I do some research.
The Sydney maximum temperature record was smashed today.
Oodnadatta and Marble Bar records still not broken.
So?