From the “you really should check the data before you invoke the universal boogeyman” department:
‘Very bad tick year’ expected for Alabama in 2017, and climate change a factor
2017 could be a record year for ticks and tick-borne illnesses according to one researcher who studies the arachnids in Alabama. “I would say this is going to be a very bad tick year because it was a very mild winter,” said Tim Sellati, chair of Southern Research’s Infectious Diseases Department.
In addition, Sellati said a warming climate has let certain species of ticks expand their range and those changes are reflected in tick surveys in Alabama and other parts of the United States. “The winters are warmer and the ticks recognize this, they sense this change in their environment,”
Source: https://goo.gl/sgrL0P
Uh, no. It has not warmed in Alabama in the last century according to NOAA’s own data. In fact the average temperature has COOLED since 1895:
The minimum temperature trend essentially flat:
And if “ticks recognize this, they sense this change in their environment,” according to Tim Sellati, chair of Southern Research’s Infectious Diseases Department, you’d think they would sense that Alabama is getting cooler, especially the daytime high temperatures:
Here’s the problem:
Tim Sellati is conflating weather with climate. Weather patterns typically span days to weeks, while climate is defined as a 30 year interval according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO):
Climate, sometimes understood as the “average weather,” is defined as the measurement of the mean and variability of relevant quantities of certain variables (such as temperature, precipitation or wind) over a period of time, ranging from months to thousands or millions of years.
The classical period is 30 years, as defined by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Climate in a wider sense is the state, including a statistical description, of the climate system.
And here’s where Sellati goes really really wrong, note the single end data point, December through February, the “winter” months for Alabama, there’s a nice warm spike there, though not as warm as the spike of 1932. There’s also an ever so slight, though statistically insignificant warming trend since 1895. Note in the legend, NOAA reports that as 0.0F per decade:
Source:
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/us/1/0/tavg/3/2/1895-2017?base_prd=true&firstbaseyear=1901&lastbaseyear=2000&trend=true&trend_base=10&firsttrendyear=1895&lasttrendyear=2017
That one warm point at the end, that’s due to a weather pattern my friends. It’s called El Niño, of which there was a very large one recently that affected Alabama’s winter temperatures and precipitation.
Sellati might be a tick expert, but to quote one of the favorite lines of climate skeptic detractors: he’s not a climate scientist. While the data shows winter was warmer in Alabama, it isn’t part of a long-term trend and in fact, there were three other periods in 1932, 1950, and 1957 that were warmer than this most recent winter.
Seems a correction/retraction is in order.
Note: about 5 mins after publication, the title was changed to correct a misspelling.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
The problem is that ticks do not respond to actual data. They only respond to adjusted data.
…and food
“Deer were rare in most of Alabama until recent years. In the early 1900s, it was estimated only about 2,000 deer existed in the entire state. After decades of restocking and management efforts, Alabama’s deer population was estimated at 1.75 million animals in 2000. In fact, many areas in Alabama are overpopulated with deer and have been for many years.”
http://www.outdooralabama.com/white-tailed-deer-0
Deer are a road hazard in Alabama and Tennessee…the populations are huge…
Deer population growth is clearly due to climate change.
/sarc
Exactly! And he data will be corrected with the next change in algorithm anyway.
I have friends in Alabama, where there are so many white-tails, hunters may harvest a deer per day over a season that stretches from October to February. Only since 2016 have hunters even been required to report their take. Truth be told, a de facto limitless hunting situation exists in much of the state, and no complaints. They’re thicker than ticks on a ‘possum.
Correction: two deer per day.
Yes, indeed. In my own lifetime, deer locally have gone from next to none seen to see them every day. Deer aren’t the only critters very common now, since we don’t actively limit them in the manner we used to do. Boys, the bears are back. Expect mountain lions to be back, too, since there are lots of deer these days.
+1
Last year they made the same pearl-clutching panic prognostications here in CT, because of the mild El Nino winter. Guess what? Never even SAW a deer tick on any of the dogs or horses until October, and then for only about a week. Once again: Nature 1, Ouija board 0. ANYTHING claiming to “predict” the future should be dismissed out of hand as “Fake News.”
Ticks are worldly creatures. The respond to global temperatures.
Sigh /sarc
Q: what’s the difference between a tick and an alarmist climate scientist?
A: ticks stop at some point because they get full.
In ’14 the early spring was fraught with ticks in my woods. This year I have found just one, so far. This winter was milder and deer crowd my woods thicker than back then. Maybe there’ll be less Turkey Gnats too?
Looking at those charts this is obviously Un-Karlized data sources
As an Infectious Disease specialist I know this argument well. People have been claiming an increase of Lyme disease due to climate change for quite some time – especially in the northern Atlantic seaboard. There is an increase in both ticks and Lyme disease but it is easily explained by the reversion of a lot of farm land back to forest and the explosion of the host population of deer. I don’t doubt that real climate changes could play a role but there is little evidence of that in this case. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same issue of vector increase (deer population) isn’t present in Alabama, a location where ixodes ticks are known but Lyme disease is oddly not so frequent. It doesn’t appear these ticks are that tightly bound by temperature since there range extends quite far north into much colder climates than Alabama and most Lyme transmission happens in cooler, not warmer climates. It would appear that cooling would be more of an issue from that observation, but that of course would not be politically correct to mention.
Since ticks are parasites living on their hosts, deer as claimed in some articles here, their “climate” is the number of hosts available, and whether the weather is warmer or colder it would be irrelevant since their immediate “climate” is generally the body temperature of the host in any case.
So now I want to see a graph plotting both Alabama winter average temperatures and Alabama Tick populations.
Oddly, I was thinking about this in the shower today. How can ticks “ticks recognize” warming? They clearly do not have high enough functioning brains to do that. If Alabama winters were warming, the way ticks would increase on population is by not dyeing over the winter. Not by any ‘recognition’ or ‘sensing’.
I hate when so called ‘scientists’ try to use personification in this way. It is not just this guy; health ‘experts’ often use it to describe how our body responds to various nutrients and toxins (e.g. “then the liver starts looking around to find more fatty acids…”). Drives me nuts.
Personification is only acceptable when applied to your mate’s genitalia, from my perspective.
I expect that the tick population is responding to the same environmental programs as the mosquitoes —
1) Reduced pesticide use
2) Preservation of wetlands
3) Recovery of natural areas
You can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you take actions to protect species, then those same actions will probably help protect all species — even the ones you don’t like.
I should add that the deer tick started in Connecticut because warming is not really the driver behind the disease. Otherwise it would have started in Mexico and made its way into Texas in Florida.
I am very surprised indeed to learn that the Deer Tick “ixodes scapularis” originated in of all places Connecticut!
While it is native to the and temperate forests of eastern North America, I believe that is was Lyme’s disease which was first diagnosed in Lyme Connecticut, not the deer tick.
Rocketscientist,
I believe you are correct.
Well, the tick is the vector, the disease is due to the spirochete Borrelia burdonferi
Sorry,
I did not mean to confound the issue. I was referring to Lyme disease which originated in Connecticut, not the actual tick. I apologize to the over-simplification.
Deer in CT are known as “rats with hooves.” That’s how many we have. Fortunately, at least they’re good eating!
So are rats – if you tenderize them right. 🙂
lorcanbonda,
And as Latitude pointed out above,
4) Expanding/exploding deer populations.
Yes, I think it is fair to add the fourth point in reference to the deer tick.
If you do the Maximum summer temperatures June – September it becomes obvious that summers in Alabama and the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys have gotten cooler.
http://oi68.tinypic.com/95vcec.jpg
If there is “no significant decline”, does that mean that there may or may not have been an increase?
Mostly there was no decrease at all or in other words and increase since 1895. Was a decrease of 11 years significant? Ah, I found the file:
ST YYYY
CA 2016 0
CT 2016 0
MA 2016 0
NH 2016 0
RI 2016 0
NJ 2011 5
FL 2010 6
So 7 states less than ten and 5 an increase since 1895
The real question is how are modeled ticks responding to modeled climate.
Without a 2 week span with temps below freezing at night the fleas will also continue to be real bad here in GA.
Mac
Climate change has been a blank slate for years now in the funding game. Honestly, I’m not aware of a single study pertaining to arthropods + climate change being turned down. It’s become comical at the annual entomological society of America meeting to see how many papers now relate to climate change. I can’t fault the presenters for presenting, it’s often a condition of the grants. But the luke-warm results are always disheartening because the “may”, “could”, “might” caveats abound. Many, as in the case presented above, actually directly contradict their own findings i.e. their data do not support the conclusions.
Good post, buggs. I love those kinds of insights.
The really stupid thing is, in CT you find ticks on you and pets in the early spring and late fall, because the thing that apparently triggers them to notice and target you and latch on is the temperature DIFFERENCE between the ambient air temp. and a warm-blooded animal. Once the daily highs get into the 70’s and above, you barely ever see a deer tick until the first frosty nights of fall. Sometime these “researchers” should consider actually going out of doors . . . but they’re probably afraid they’d “catch” TICKS! 😉
Actually, its because the third stage adults molt out of the second stage nymphs in late summer. The nymphs feed on white foot (field mice) in late spring and summer. Adults feed on you and deer starting in November, and through the winter whenever its above freezing. The last ones for that ‘years’ batch will feed, lay eggs, and die in early spring as temps remain above freezing. Why we always hope for cold and tracking snow during our Wisconsin deer hunt. When its above freezing with no snow we have to ‘tick check’ every evening.
But AGW causes cooling! It’s in all the consensi!
can you have more than one consensus????
Sure, between two consenting adults. Threesomes are another story.
Err… wait.
“The classical period is 30 years”
This always gets me. Is ‘classical’ a scientific term?
Andrew
Only in classical science.
When I want to fry a Warmist’s brain, I wait until they’re wringing their hands about it being “so much hotter than normal.” I say innocently, “So what’s NORMAL?” Not a ONE can give me an answer. Average of the last 30 years has what validity? Um, not much!
climatological standard normals
As the world became more “connected” discussions about reporting weather information (& climate) became international in scope. This was back in the 1920s and 1930s. It was also before digital computers so working with massive sets of numbers was time intensive. [With modern computers and automated systems there is diversity in how reporting is now done.]
People reporting weather information wanted some consistency and wanted to report numbers a person reading a newspaper could relate to.
The 30 year interval was selected by international agreement, based on the recommendations of the International Meteorological Conference in Warsaw in 1933. At its 1934 Wiesbaden meeting the technical commission designated the thirty-year period from 1901 to 1930 as the reference time frame for climatological standard normals.
Now there is the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
It was decided to use a 30 year interval for comparisons, only when a decade ended (years ending in ‘0’).
Examples: 1971-2000; 1981-2010; and next 1991-2020
The following page shows (on the left) three sets of “normals” from which you can select. The table supplied if for the Period of Record : 09/06/1946 to 06/09/2016.
http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/cgi-bin/cliMAIN.pl?wa9465
Many people question the use of the word “normal.”
In fact, ‘normal’ also means perpendicular and has been used in giving title to a school where teacher training is the main goal – places such as Clarion State Normal School [now Clarion University of Pennsylvania], and many others.
There are definitions of sand, silt, and clay. There is a definition for vampire and another for doppelgänger.
There is a definition for climate normals. You may not like the definition nor the word, but you did not get a vote.
This is a really simple thing.
The density of ticks depends only on temperature. It is the most reliable proxy known to climatobiologists.
so what’s the tick density in the middle of the tropical pacific ocean and the sahara?
I live in the woods, and there are lots of ticks about, but I noticed during the extremely hot summer of 2010, when I went out every day to water the trees, and walked all over the place, through all sorts of tick country, for over a month and never got one tick on me. In fact, I didn’t see hardly any moving living thing during that period. I did see one lone raccoon perched up in one of the trees I was watering, and that’s it. Everything, even the ticks, were laying low during this heat wave. I think I spent $130 dollars on my water bill that month where it is usually about 30 dollars.
Alarmists could be easily replaced by robots. The template is so simple.
Global cooling is one of the many symptoms of global warming.
I think you are giving this guy too much credit. He’s not conflating weather and climate, he’s just reading from the “everything is due to climate change” script.
Remember that he has to “save the world”
…but don’t get hurt, don’t confront, don’t this, don’t that…
And his mama had the city hospital doctor “slap his butt”
…and placed him, as a babe, in an isolation chamber for weeks!
Is it any wonder that he is a bit overbearing confused?
There is some evidence that moisture is a primary control factor for ticks, not temperature. Without adequate moisture they dehydrate rapidly and die.
For copious information about ticks see http://www.tickencounter.org/
That may go along with the lack of ticks I discovered during the heatwave in Oklahoma in 2010. I walked all through the woods for over a month watering distressed trees and never got one tick on me during that entire time. The 2010 heatwave was as hot a summer as any I have ever experienced.
The year 2010 is what CAGW looks like, except this kind of extreme weather would have to continue year after year and encompass the whole world. Happily, it didn’t do that, and it seems CAGW is just a fantasy.
I’ll bet John Cook would count Dennis Pillion as one of the 97%.
A good example of why the junk science coming from government departments must be fixed. Bet if you ask this guy where he gets his climate info it would be NOAA or another government agency.
The comment about much higher deer populations is also on the money.
These days if you know what to look for (gratuitous scare headlines, weasel words) it’s possible to see Fake News from SPACE. If you took all the Fake News and babbling moron opinions by “celebrities” out of the papers, there wouldn’t be much between the front page and the classifieds any more.
Would it be unfair to say Mr Pillion(?) is a t(h)ick scientist?
The global warming mafia are a giant tennis ball 🎾 sized tick on the skin of the world economy.
any tick expert knows better:
http://www.heraldtribune.com/zz/shareable/20170329/whats-causing-surge-in-lyme-disease-this-year-video
“The winters are warmer and the ticks recognize this, they sense this change in their environment”
Stop the presses! Critters have the ability to respond and adapt to changes in their environment! This is amazing news. They should get a Nobel prize for this discovery.
This is the kind of lax reporting that ticks me off.
particularly vulnerable are people in the wild without head cover and inadequate footwear.
Som one should tell Sellati.
Some critters will breed in response to environmental conditions. Musk deer, for instance, don’t breed well in captivity due to crowding conditions. link
That isn’t the case for ticks. If they get a blood meal at the right time, they lay their eggs. That’s it. ‘Recognize’ and ‘sense’ don’t come into it. link
The worst area for ticks that I know of is Bratsk in Siberia where winter temperatures are regularly below minus forty.
On the other hand where there is a lot of deer there is a lot of ticks, irrespective of climate (and the species of deer).