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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http://m.theage.com.au/environment/weather/severe-weather-warning-issued-after-sydney-temperature-hits-record-high-of-458-degrees-20130118-2cxrr.html
It’s getting even hotter. Cracked the 1939 record. Now if Eric had just enough imagination to ask what other creatures are copping it apart from the ticks.
There are many unusual factors that need to come together in a very short time to cause a rash of bush fires. Certainly, one of them is a high air temperature – but high when?
We are hearing stories of record daily maximum temperatures in Sydney and Canberra today, 18 Jan 2013. The regional fire season started a few days before this. So we tend to talk about preparing the scene for many fires on a hot day among a line of hot days. We talk in terms of heat waves.
Perhaps history tells a story. Here is a graph showing the heat waves, defined over any 5 successive days in Januaries, for Sydney and Melbourne, going back 150 years.
http://www.geoffstuff.com/HEAT%20WAVES.pdf
By this definition, heat waves are becoming cooler in recent times – if you want to split hairs.
For 2013, Sydney and Melbourne, are way off the bottom of the chart if we take rough figures forecast for the next 4 days, or actual temps for the past 4 days. We have merely a hot system over central Australia, possibly because of a short monsoon disruption near the continental north coast. Some of this heat dribbled east, over to Sydney and Canberra.
As for daily records, think UHI. The temp max for Sydney at 45.8 degrees today, was taken from the Observatory, slap bang in the middle of 4 million people who were not there for the older record of 45.3 deg C on 14 Jan 1939 when the population and development was smaller by far.
Also from history 13 Jan 1939, the bushfires of Black Friday killed 70 people in Victoria, This was the day before Sydney’s hottest day – after UHI is reasonably taken off.
Moral – one swallow doth not a summer make.
What happened to Climate Ace when we had record low temperatures approx 6 months ago?
That would be the “weather is not climate” meme. Guess what Ace – weather is not climate.
Steve B says: January 18, 2013 at 3:49 am
Guess what Ace – weather is not climate.
==============================
No, but what a wonderful opportunity weather presents for panic-peddling, and that is their compulsion and their comfort. See how frantically the Ace squawks and screeches. As the elections approach, the screeching will increase.What these nitwits don’t understand is that nobody believes them. What will they do when cool weather gets here? Makes one smile to think of it.
So, sit back and enjoy. Each screech signals a welter of pain.
Ticks aren’t insects, but arachnids, like mites, spiders & scorpions. They have eight legs, the better with which to quest. (Horseshoe crabs also have eight legs, but aren’t arachnids, although related.)
The first land animal was a scorpion-like sea creature that kept its gills moist with a borrowed mollusk shell, similar to the protective practice of hermit crabs. Some 500 million years ago this adventurous, resourceful pioneering Cambrian arthropod equipped itself with the equivalent of a space suit to exploit by night algal mats covering land that would become Wisconsin.
PS: Cambrian CO2 concentration has been estimated at around 7000 parts per million, versus present (possibly) ~400 ppm of dry air. Climate then was generally balmy, but well within the normal Phanerozoic Eon average upper limit of 25 degrees C, maintained with perhaps at most two brief excursions for the past 543 million years. Earth’s climate is under homeostatic control.
During the following Ordovician Period, with carbon dioxide levels about the same as in the preceding Cambrian, Earth experienced its first Phanerozoic glaciation. Warmunistas jump through some amusing hoops in trying to explain that fact. (Very extensive glaciations had occurred during the previous few billion years, especially in the Snowball Earth phase preceding the Phanerozoic Eon.)
I am interested in the comments by CAce on deliberate firing of riparian monsoon rainforests to protect scare and valuable food resources.
My understanding of the history of the patchwork fire/caring for country story written about Australian Aboriginal people was this story began in Central Australia around the late 1970s. Spinifex and mulga country. The story was later taken up by the Centre for Appropriate Technology (or such), which later was taken up by CRC Desert Knowledge, extensively funded by partners. This was at a time when economic development became essential. 30-40 years of welfare had decimated entire groups of human beings. Additionally a new form of pseudo-employment in the absence of adequate education levels as rangers, tourist guides, caring for country and so on could be envisaged and enacted into industrial awards. And profitable training and research monies.
Imagining the Past for eg
http://tasmaniantimes.com/index.php/article/indigenous-burn-control-a-myth-study
and Chapter 3 which states …’These practices contain cultural references to fire that inform contemporary understandings and as a result are not translated to people outside of that culture.’
http://www.desertknowledgecrc.com.au/resource/DKCRC-Report-37-Desert-Fire_fire-and-regional-land-management-in-the-arid-landscapes-of-Australia.pdf
The only cultural references I could briefly find on riparian monsoonal pathways (aka cleared areas) was this:-
http://www.biodiversity.ox.ac.uk/researchthemes/biodiversity-beyond-protected-areas/riparian-forest-strips-as-a-conservation-strategy/
As they in the place where I come from: Every disadvantage has its advantage, or mutatis mutandis depending whether you are an optimist or a pessimist.
“Climate Ace says:
January 17, 2013 at 11:42 pm
…IMHO, it is possible to design and build houses that would not cost very much extra but which would be largely fire proof. CSIRO has had a go at it.”
Yes indeed. Many of these are being constructed, as I saw in a recent newspaper article.
Where reconstruction of established houses is not an option, survival bunkers could be built very cheaply. It could be as simple as a modern version of the old WW2 backyard Anderson shelters – a semicircular roofed corregated iron structure with a metre of earth on the top. I told a friend of mine that he should install one at his mountain house at Sawmill settlement at the base of the ski resort at Mount Buller. His place was threatened during some fiires a few years ago. Some locals there were staying to defend their properties, but it was thick wooded country with only a single narrow access road going up to the mountain, anyone staying and caught would be toast.
During those fires a couple of guys survived by crawling into a culvert under a road, sharing it with a frightened kangaroo while the fire front swept past and over them. That is what made me think of Anderson shelters.
Is there anything in Australia that’s not deadly poisonous??Now it’s the ticks!
mosomoso:
Yes I am certainly aware of the history of severe fires here in Victoria, in particular in 1851 and on Black Friday 1939. I am aware that the loss of life in 1939 was far less than in 2009 (70 compared to 173) precisely because there were fewer people around then. It is not true that catastrophic fires in the past, like 1851, escaped notice.
As I wrote above, the issue is the increasing frequency of such events and the fact that hot weather records are being broken at a much higher rate than cold weather records.
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/rising-temperatures-make-mockery-of-rising-scepticism-20130114-2cpnz.html
Anecdotally, this assertion is supported by the fires we have discussed:
1851 to 1939 – 88 years
1939 to 1983 – 44 years
1983 to 2009 – 26 years
2009 to 2013 – 4 years.
And with regard to the role my aboriginal ancestors played in changing the landscape, ironically, it is the same Tim Flannery, head of the Climate Commision who wrote the above link who incurred the wrath of the politically correct by pointing out the role that the aborigines had in wiping out the megafauna and changing the landscape that existed prior to their arrival in his book “The Future Eaters”.
It is he who edited and provided the introduction to my copy of Watkin Tench’s accounts of the earliest years of European settlement that we have been discussing.
.
Climate Ace,
It occurs to me in our swapping stories that people who do not live in Victoria, the most bushfire prone state in the world, do not appreciate that these events are not just news stories we read about or watch on the television. They are regular parts of our lived experience. We all have our stores to tell of our own or friends or relatives experiences of threats to, or actual losses of, lives and property.
Philip Shehan, I lived in Victoria until I was 27, my brother lives just outside Ballarat in Victoria – one of the fire fronts came within a mile of his property, which given the speed Australian fires travel, is way too close for comfort.
But unlike you, I don’t seek to lay the blame on a half degree rise in global temperature. I prefer to focus on very real problems with countryside management policies, which are contributing to the severity of fires – such as the relatively recent move to embrace insane green zealotry, which is preventing Australian landowners from cutting proper firebreaks on their own properties.
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/01/in-australia-if-you-try-to-clear-a-firebreak-on-your-land-you-could-go-to-gaol/
Its all very well to say that it wouldn’t have made a difference in this case – in severe enough conditions firebreaks don’t work. But there is no doubt firebreaks can save lives. Australian bureaucrats and their political masters must share culpability for some of the deaths which are occurring because of their mismanagement and prejudice, rather than trying to blame everything on the climate hobgoblin.
Eric Worral:
I have no argument with you on the necessity of firebreaks.
The premise of this thread is that a warming Australia is good news because ticks don’t like it.
I have pointed out that there is a downside to a warming Australia.
“The premise of this thread is that a warming Australia is good news because ticks don’t like it.”
Go to top of page. Read Eric’s words. Clearly, the premise is that the recent hot spell has killed ticks, which is something Eric likes.
As to there being a downside to a warming Australia, I’m with you on that, Philip. I feel lucky to had my first thirty years from 1949 to 1979, as opposed to the half century preceding that period. I didn’t like the period 1980 to 2006. Too many westerlies, too many El Ninos or whatever. Was that the warm PDO doing that to us?
However, the period 2007 to 2012 has been my favourite of all. A couple of dry and hot early springs, a couple of cold winters in 2007 and 2008, some floods, but otherwise nice, with strong oceanic influence and mild summers. And no fires! Summer 2011 to 2012 was far too cool for holidayers and beach lovers, but I liked it. And we now get thunder in winter again, with stronger southerlies and weaker westerlies. Hope this present crappy summer is just a blip in my favourite climatic phase.
Can’t hope for too much, of course. This is Australia. The last five or six years haven’t been as great elsewhere on this vast continent. (Spotting those variations is how Kidman made his money!) Though Eastern Australia started to get much wetter again in the fifties, drought was already creeping back by the end of that decade. But then the stormy seventies! Who knew? At the end of the decade, the hydrologists were thinking only about flood mitigation…and then all the floods stopped. Australia. Gawd.
What is amazing to me is that the people who talk most earnestly about climate change never seem to notice when a marked climate change actually happens.
Philip Shehan says:
January 18, 2013 at 5:44 pm
Climate Ace,
It occurs to me in our swapping stories that people who do not live in Victoria, the most bushfire prone state in the world, do not appreciate that these events are not just news stories we read about or watch on the television. They are regular parts of our lived experience. We all have our stores to tell of our own or friends or relatives experiences of threats to, or actual losses of, lives and property.
Certainly if you have lived in the Victorian country, bushfires are part and parcel of your extended family histories. They are integral. If you have lived in inner urbia without country relatives, bushfires are santized by the MSM and you are unlikely to have much of an idea at all about the reality that you cannot control a eucalypt crown fire in certain conditions.
No control at all.
Jessie says:
January 18, 2013 at 7:07 am
I am interested in the comments by CAce on deliberate firing of riparian monsoon rainforests to protect scare and valuable food resources.
My understanding of the history of the patchwork fire/caring for country story written about Australian Aboriginal people was this story began in Central Australia around the late 1970s. Spinifex and mulga country. The story was later taken up by the Centre for Appropriate Technology (or such), which later was taken up by CRC Desert Knowledge, extensively funded by partners. This was at a time when economic development became essential. 30-40 years of welfare had decimated entire groups of human beings. Additionally a new form of pseudo-employment in the absence of adequate education levels as rangers, tourist guides, caring for country and so on could be envisaged and enacted into industrial awards. And profitable training and research monies.
Monsoon patches along the Top End Coast, and rainforest-type riparian strips, and rainforest patches in sandstone canyons in Arnhem, unlike eucalypt forests tend to be fire-sensitive. (This is, inter alia, one of the reasons why Australia is now covered mostly be eucalypt forests and not by rainforests, as it once way.
These patches also tend to have disprorportionately high variety and volumes of things like tubers… aka traditional gathered foods. I can’t provide links but you might want to start with the Kakadu National Park Plan of Management which probably has links to the relevant research.
Climate Ace:
In your post at January 20, 2013 at 2:14 am you say
Yes, everybody has noticed that.
You fail to provide anything to substantiate any of the nonsense you post on WUWT even when pressed to do it.
Richard
So you’re not ticked? Are you ticked off?
Global warming my ass!!! Indigenous plants here in Australia RELY on there being fires in order to shed their seeds and bark.