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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US academics missed their target
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2015/09/18/anti-racketeering-initiative/
Just more …. Crap On Parade … for COP21…..
I am afraid West Greenland killer mosquitoes already had an inexplicable feast in the 1930s.
http://www.climate4you.com/images/NuukGreenlandAirTempSince1866.gif
Berényi Péter, I’ve never been to Greenland but I’ve spent a good deal of time in northern Canada and talked to a lot of people who live there. There has undoubtedly been warming in the period from the 1980s to about 2000, but it appears (anectdotally) to be almost entirely due to winters being less cold. Summer temperatures have stayed more or less as they have been for many decades. This is the problem with using “average annual temperatures” in a region where annual ranges are from -50°C to +30°C – it hides any seasonal trends. In fact, those temperature variations in your graph might well be caused by no change at all in temperature ranges, but winters being a few days shorter and summers a few days longer, and vice versa. Such is the magic of averaging it hides most of the things that you need to know. And the mosquitoes were just as horrible (and just as big) in the “colder” 1980s as they are now.
On a similar theme, warmers talking about warming, pay no attention to how “global average” temperatures conceal variations between seasons and at different latitudes. “Global average temperature” (adjusted or not) tells you absolutely nothing about how temperatures vary diurnally, seasonally, spatially, and let’s not forget variations in altitude.
The 300 ml of blood in a day story is probably very true. On a windless, warm day on the tundra (of which there are about 5 in an average summer in Nunavut) I can recall taking photos of my bare hand covered with literally hundreds, perhaps a thousand, mosquitoes. Most people find working outside without a head net intolerable. And you can see caribou tiring themselves out running, just to stay away from the clouds of mosquitoes that surround them.
Smart Rock see this.
Note to Royal Soshulists: I worked in Yukon for several years back in the late 60s to 1970 and mosquitoes had alrealdy been brought “into phenological synchrony with caribou” and exploration geologists. Up there they used to call it the Yukon Air Show. Actually, having worked in northern BC, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador (these three words are the actual name of the province), I have to admit the Air Show didn’t compare with the taiga spectacle, and possibly north of Lake Superior may hold some kind of global record.
The worst aren’t the mosquitos. They get a parasite in August in northern Canada – a few tiny scarlet spots that magnified, looks arachnid-like (spider-like). I’ve tried to find reference without success and wonder if I discovered this? Surely not likely, but I have a penchant for examining my surroundings in detail with a geologist’s hand lens to see what makes things tick. I’ve often lay down on an outcrop with my lens to examine details of a rock outcrop. The late season mosquitoes get weak and listless and seem to become a much lighter brown. They are only bad for about a month -mid june to mid july and then taper off with the parasite I mentioned and the arrival of dragon flies etc.
The black flies are a quantum worse than mosquitoes. These meaty little bugs are legendary in the northern region – a clever acquaintance of mine (he became a federal deputy minister of mines) wrote an autobiography “From black flies and mosquitoes to black ties and tuxedos”. The flies don’t use a syringe, they actually bite with a pair of pincers. The big flies “moose flies” and the deer fly (a delta wing brown spotted medium fly with big green eyes) are more annoying with their orbital swings around your head. The warble flies go into the fur of caribou and lay eggs on the skin which the larva penetrate and winter over while they develop. Inuit skinning caribou take these “knots” out of the hides and eat them – very nutritious!
Hard to alarm me about a few northern mosquitoes. My first born at one year contracted malaria in Nigeria – that was scary.
Yes, the black flies are by far the most annoying mainly due to their tiny size and their desire to go up your nose and into your eyeballs. Yes, a fine mesh veil is the only way to stop them and their bites really hurt.
I suppose locusts would have been too obvious, so they went with mosquitoes.
Easy, Bring back DDT. I have long believed that the first sign of sanity in the world will be when I can buy DDT, either liquid or solid again.
Florida here…
We’ve got mosquitoes of all sizes; from so small they’re just a blur before they bite, all the way up to the really big ones. We call them ‘swamp mosquitoes”
Mosquitonado polar vortex!
Manmade Global Warming:
Why is it that the things that will thrive are things we hate – mosquitoes, hurricanes, bad breath,
but the things that will disappear are things we like – wine grapes, cocoa beans, coffee beans, mild summer evenings?
The Royal Society is the Climate Hysterics’ Shill
The Royal Society used to be the gold standard of scientific objectivity. Yet in December 2014 it issued a report on resilience to extreme weather that, in its 100-plus pages, could find room for not a single graph to show recent trends in extreme weather. That is because no such graph shows an upward trend in global frequency of droughts, storms or floods. The report did find room for a graph showing the rising cost of damage by extreme weather, which is a function of the increased value of insured property, not a measure of weather.
The Royal Society report also carefully omitted what is perhaps the most telling of all statistics about extreme weather: the plummeting death toll. The global probability of being killed by a drought, flood or storm is down by 98% since the 1920s and has never been lower — not because weather is less dangerous but because of improvements in transport, trade, infrastructure, aid and communication.
The Royal Society’s decision to cherry-pick its way past such data would be less worrying if its president, Sir Paul Nurse, had not gone on the record as highly partisan on the subject of climate science. He called for those who disagree with him to be “crushed and buried” – hardly the language of Galileo.
In September 2014 Sir Paul Nurse (a geneticist by the way, not a climate scientist) said: “We need to be aware of those who mix up science, based on evidence and rationality, with politics and ideology, where opinion, rhetoric and tradition hold more sway. We need to be aware of political or ideological lobbyists who do not respect science, cherry-picking data or argument, to support their predetermined positions.”
If he wishes to be consistent, he will therefore condemn the behaviour of the scientists over, amongst other things, neonicotinoids and the WMO over temperature records, and chastise his colleagues’ report, for these are prime examples of his point.
I am not hopeful. When a similar scandal blew up in 2009 over the hiding of inconvenient data that appeared to discredit the validity of proxies for past global temperatures based on tree rings (part of “Climategate”), the scientific establishment closed ranks and tried to pretend it did not matter. Now a further installment of that story has come to light, showing that yet more inconvenient data (which discredit bristle-cone pine tree rings as temperature proxies) had emerged.
To be fair, Murmansk had a huge malaria epidemic in the 1920s. For those of you whose Geography is a bit spotty, that’s on the northern coast of Russia.
Mosquitos, like malaria, were never just confined to the tropics – ask a Shakespeare fan what the ague was.
Pointman
Oh the humanity! (actually this is from my back yard in)
The Godzilla Mosquito Global Warming mass murder! 🙂
Nothing to worry about. Mosquitoes are attracted to CO2. By the time CO2 (man-made, of course) levels rise enough to raise the temperatures in the Arctic enough to melt all the ice and release the meglasquitoes from their frozen tombs, all you’d need to to avoid them is stand still and hold your breathe when you hear the mega-buzzing. You’d blend right in to the background CO2.
(That or move close to a coal-fired power plant.)
Of course, the stacks on the plant would have CO2 lasers mounted on them. For even more protection they could put up some wind turbines. Useless for reliable energy but they might make good meglasquito swatters.
I live on one of hong Kong’s outlying islands and we have big and little black bastard mosquitoes. As a subjective observation I have noticed that during the summer with temperatures around 30-35C the mosquitoes seem to aestivate. But, as soon as the temperature drops below about 25C they become a menace.
Fables and Fantasies. That’s all that’s left of the dying AGW agenda.
It should be very easy to verify this claim. Just go south until you reach the temperature that you think is the magical number, and make some observations. That is if your science allows observations instead of computer models.
I thought getting warmer was supposed to drive all animals further north, now they are telling us that getting warmer will enable this mosquito to live further south?
Does anyone check for internal consistency anymore?
It’s my understanding the mosquitoes have ALWAYS been deadly in the Arctic and surrounding areas. There’s a sub-arctic region of Siberia where the Ket people live. Their language still has links to Native American tribes in Alaska, even though they’ve been isolated for centuries because the mosquitoes are so bad that reindeer travel was impossible. They survived by adapting to what they called the “month of mosquitoes” (July) by living on boats out in the river, and hunted and fished instead of raising reindeer. They are STILL pretty isolated, as there are no roads into the area because few people want to live there.
http://www.gi.alaska.edu/alaska-science-forum/language-link-between-central-siberia-and-alaska
There is no comment box available on the World court thread. Is this intentional?
Yes, obviously a glitch our hosts will eventually notice.
Ok….I can understand larger “Giant” swarms of mosquitos, but where does it say the mosquitos themselves will be “giant”?
Give them time. I’m sure they’ll come up with a model that says they will even bigger than those prehistoric dragonflies that had 2 foot wingspans.
Off topic but has anyone else noticed that latest topic about a brit lawyer who wants the International court to rule on the “science” of climate change is not taking comments and the script to WUWT is freezing and acting up more than usual?
In the northern parts of Norway mosquitoes are already so big, when they suck, it actually feels good ..
But how can (man made) global warming, that we don’t have, cause anything to happen? Where’s the science, evidence, data, and what about the truth?
https://roaldjlarsen.wordpress.com/
My uncle Sven kept one as a pet. Most of the time It was fairly docile, and even responsive to voice. One night it chewed through its chain and escaped out the window.
But seriously, the mosquitos I encountered in Alaska, off the coast, were tiny little things with giant, seemingly iron, proboscises (proboscis ?). The could penetrate through cotton shirts or blue jeans.
As a traveler to Alaska many times, let me assure you that those d*mn mosquitoes are already “giant” and so are the swarms thereof. The joke is that the mosquito is Alaska’s state bird.
DDT
With respect to DDT do read this superb piece by pointman about just this. An early example of alarmism which could easily have been AGW hysteria if it had been invented by that time.
.
https://thepointman.wordpress.com/2015/07/17/why-we-fight-malaria/
One night during the wet season we were slathered in repellant so strong our skin burned. Still, the mosquitos were so thick our RTO pulled out his 45 threatening to blast em away. Vietnam 1970.
siamiam
The people who trekked through northern Siberia looking for evidence of the Tunguska explosion fought months of mosquitoes. Some of them, at least, had the nets and head-covering hat cloths, but I wonder how many USSR/Tsar GULAG prisoners suffered for years with no protection at all from mosquitoes and insects. Leningrad/Petrograd was infamous for the tens of thousands of prisoners/slaves/serfs who died of malaria and diseases digging in the mud and freezing water that far north.
Look! It Global Warming Godzilla!