A rat in а street of Sofia
CC BY-SA 3.0
File:Street-rat.jpg
Created: 1 August 2011
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to Bloomberg columnist Faye Flam, “climate change” simply isn’t scary enough; so they’re trying new ways to frighten their readers.
Climate Change Is Scary; ‘Rat Explosion’ Is Scarier
Scientists warn of global warming of 2 degrees Celsius. If you think that won’t affect you, think how it may affect pests.
By Faye Flam
31 October 2018, 01:02 GMT+10What’s so scary about climate change?
…
How about “rat explosion”?
As the climate warms, rats in New York, Philadelphia and Boston are breeding faster — and experts warn of a population explosion.
…
The physics of climate change doesn’t have the same fear factor as the biology. Many living things are sensitive to small changes in temperature, so warming of 2 degrees Celsius will transform the flora and fauna that surround us in a big way. Other life forms are also very sensitive to moisture, and so populations will crash or explode as anthropogenic climate change continues to make wet areas more sodden and dry areas, more parched.
…
In recent years, psychologists have accused conservatives of being more innately fearful than liberals, but that never quite squared with the fact that conservatives express less fear over environmental problems. Some social scientists are finally starting to question the broad equation of political preferences with fear, recognizing that different people fear different things depending on their upbringing, education and surroundings. But we’re all sharing this warming planet, and at the very least surely we can unite against a future filled with rats.
One question Faye – why hasn’t this overwhelming rat explosion you say will happen in New York, Philadelphia and Boston already happened in southern states?
Why isn’t the tropical region where I live utterly overrun by rats?
The reason of course is nature abhors an untapped food source. Any explosion in rat population is rapidly followed by an explosion in the population of predators which eat the rats. My town on the edge of the tropics abounds with all sorts of wildlife running around at night – small lizards which eat insects, urban foxes and cats which eat rats or other small vermin.
Climate fantasists like Faye seem to think in straight lines – if a few warm days leads to a rise in rat population, a lot of warm days will produce even more rats. But in the real world, rats are a problem caused by useless city officials letting the sidewalks overflow with trash, not climate change. In tidy, well managed cities, rats are never a problem, even in warm climates.
Paris, France can’t get any worde
That would be useless city officials letting the sidewalks overflow with trash, from what I saw last time I visited Paris…
Any animal that ate dog excrement could make a killing from what I saw, when I visited.
Alas too true.
Gotta fix the title of the article
Climate Change Will [Cause] US Cities to be Overrun by DEMOC-Rats
[Thanks Mod]
You want to bet on that ?.
”’Paris, France can’t get any worse”’
Don’t tell that to Faye Flim Flam, she’ll go nuts trying to wrap her mind around the concept
San Francisco got worse, and it’s not just dog poop, nor rats…..
I am just amazed at how “ratty” Bloomberg is looking now-days in the picture. His tail is dragging.
Ever watched Ratatouille?
Apparently a true story. I swear.
rats outskirts los Angeles –
https://www.google.at/search?q=rats+outskirts+los+Angeles&oq=rats+outskirts+los+Angeles&aqs=chrome.
Thought the coastal ones all ready were, blue ones.
A purely political jab.
Wasn’t the LIA a time when rats moved indoors bringing fleas and the plague? If anything, we need to fear a colder world.
Not the plague, but flea-borne typhus is on the rise in the US, thanks to cities’ tolerating homelessness:
https://www.voanews.com/a/typhus-cases-rise-in-los-angeles-several-other-us-cities/4621679.html
Wouldn’t that be lice for typhus, not fleas?
Typhus is tick-borne
Have you ever heard of Hans Zinsser’s book, Rats, Lice, and History? Typhus is spread by lice, or was primarily in European epidemics.
Epidemic typhus is usually louse-borne.
Murine typhus is flea-borne.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murine_typhus
That can’t possibly be true because democrats seem pretty sure that tent cities are illegal.
Depends upon who’s in the tent cities.
Illegal immigrants can’t legally be housed in tent cities, but US citizens can be.
The article linked also points out that other vector-borne diseases are on the rise thanks to illegal immigration.
Didnt they also say a warmer climate would extend the cat breeding season? So more cats to eat more rats. Problem solved.
Exactly. They need to stop with the catastrophizing (no pun intended)
Actually only Black Rats Rattus rattus spread plague, not the common Brown Rats Rattus norvegicus.
What about the plague of disinformation spread by Rattus Mediocrite such as the Bloomberg rodent Fay Flam? BTW, is that its real name?
Between the faux sience/fake news flim flam and the yap, yap, yapping of the polemic poodles its hard work to find something in the msm worth one’s attention.
There is some evidence, tty, that Rattus rattus aren’t that important in plague (well, maybe in Madagascar). Certainly, in Asia and the US sylvatic plague has nothing to do with Black Rats – and they seem to die very quickly from plague (like prairie dogs) and so aren’t really likely reservoirs. If Black Rats were important, then why don’t we see plague in Western cities? I’m neutral, and the study discussed here does use tree rings so caveat, but I wonder about the consensus:
http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bugbitten/2015/03/16/rats-exonerated-reservoir-hosts-black-death/
No, it’s true that Black Rats probably did not transmit the medieval plague epidemics. They spread much too fast for that and affected areas where Black Rats did not occur. However those were due to an extinct variety of Yersinia pestis that apparently was more easily transmitted person-to-person.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1931312816302086
This form apparently became extinct in the 18th century:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4798955/
The extant Yersinia pestis have natural reservoirs in a variety of rodents and lagomorphs. Transmission in Asia is still largely through Black Rats. In the Southwestern US mostly from rabbits (frequently by hunters who happen to cut themselves while skinning a rabbit) though rat-transmitted plague occurred as recently as 1925 in LA.
https://www.cdc.gov/plague/transmission/index.html
Gollly gosh! And to think that all these years I was thinking it was their pets which did the spreading: their fleas.
Never mind, New Yorkers should look back to the nineteenth century and its plagues of rats living in the horse manure piles and on the horse carcasses. They owe fossil fuels for cleaning up their city to the point where people can only complain about a very few rats.
Back then, the newspapers used to speculate how far above two stories the manure piles would reach that year.
tty
The problem here is a severe infestation of Rattus democraticus in all US cities, worst of all on university campuses.
These cities are already infested by rats disguised as global warming experts. However, this species will soon be eliminated by facts and will be gone forever.
No. As long as their food source remains (easy money for doing little to no work and no useful work) then they will just adapt to a new environment. They will be as versatile as rats (and also the common house cat).
They surely have a strong survival instinct and behavior. Lacking of a natural predator in the cities, these rats multiply easily.
Is that a spelling error,Faye Flam,I keep seeing Flim Flam.
Bloomberg is full of Burning Stupid, so much so I simply flick past it when sampling news.
Of course on this amazing theory, San Fransisco confirms it,due to Global Warming their streets are full of human faeces and rats?
So climate change will make it as if one moved several hundred miles south. Really, really scary?
Tom is 1c every 100 miles closer to equator.
Dang, is it 1c etc, i t was question, not a statement.
Daytona Beach is 1,000 miles from London, Ont, Canada..
As of right now…
Daytona Beach is 27c
London, Ont, Canada is 7c
(20c difference)…so…
1,000/20=50 miles per 1c ?
I think !!
It’s 2C up here in Barrie, ON. 🙂 London’s in the “banana ” belt.
That would explain their politicians.
It is about 1C every 333′ in elevation. Most species of life can flourish across many 1000’s of feet of elevation, so I really don’t see what the big deal about something even as large as the impossible, yet presumed, 3C increase caused by doubling CO2. The mystical 3C only represents 1000′ of vertical elevation which is significantly less than what I would typically ski in one lap of KT22. What I see as a big deal is that the 3C being claimed is wildly over stated and lacks any legitimate theoretical basis.
Or 500 feet vertically….
And mountains are higher nearer the equator. Problem solved.
Tom Halla wrote, “So climate change will make it as if one moved several hundred miles south. Really, really scary?”
Not even that much.
If you look at the growing zone charts you’ll see that at mid-latitudes 1°C is roughly equivalent to an isotherm / growing zone shift of just 50 to 90 miles, a distance which is utterly dwarfed by the range of growing zones for most crops:
For annual crops, away from the coasts, 1°C of warming can be fully compensated for by advancing planting dates by about seven to nine days:
In James Hansen’s famous 1988 paper (in which he predicted a 0.5°C per decade warming trend for his business-as-usual Scenario A), he wrote:
From the growing-zone charts, I think 50 to 75 km (31.1 to 46.6 mi) per 0.5°C is a bit high for mid-latitudes, but even if it were correct 2°C would be correspond to an isotherm shift of only 124.3 to 186.4 miles.
The fact that these fringe theories get media attention tells you all you need to know about the MSM and their support of AGW.
I’m very tired of MSM (main stream media) editorializing lies as if they were reporting the truth, a big reason for me to come here. I’ve come to the point where I consider MSM (methylsulfanilmethane) to be more useful than, what might be called, marginally sentient media.(MSM).
Due to the geomagnetic storm, the jet stream will press strongly in the north of Pacific.
http://tropic.ssec.wisc.edu/real-time/mtpw2/product.php?color_type=tpw_nrl_colors&prod=alaska×pan=24hrs&anim=html5
Yea, and besides the mafia knows how to deal with rats.
A good example of the climatariat’s KISSASS approach.
Keeping It Simple And Sufficiently Scary. 🐀🧛♂️
ROFL
I make my living in alpine skiing. I will have to remember that one.
Not enough S’s in the first S pair.
Perhaps:- Keep it Super Simple And Sufficiently Scary.
Or
Keep It Simply Stupid And Sufficiently Scary
Aren’t rats edible?
Ribs ‘n Crickets mmmm’m
(see 1960’s movie “King Rat”)
Hoefully solves the methane flatulence problem from beef!
Legend has it that the French Foreign Legion ate rats sauteed in white wine during the siege at Dien Ben Phu. I haven’t tried them, but they may taste a lot like whatever they have been eating.
We should capture some of these non-native invader Burmese Pythons from the Everglades and release them in the Boston and New York sewers for rat control. But just don’t get too comfortable while you’re sitting on the throne, as both the escaping rats and the pursuing snakes might just come up between your legs while you’re doing your business.
Most cities are already overrun with rats – oops – I mean democrats
You would think that even a dimwit would know that the temps they fear already exist at lower latitudes.
18 grains at 800 FPS
Snakes work silently 24/7, and stay mostly out of sight. They also don’t leave the carcasses lay around, like my barn cats. I save ammo for Muskrats in my pond dam and Possums in my hay barn. 🐍🐈
Helpful tip:
Please don’t kill snakes unless they are poisonous. No snake has ever transmitted disease to humans, even after consuming rats that do so. They are just as scared (or more) of you, so just back off and they will run and hide. I have seen a Massasauga Rattler do that in Missouri, although other Rattlesnake species and copperheads are less likely to flee and will strike in range.
A few Blacksnakes can keep a midwestern US home free of rodents if left alone.
I tried and tried to explain that to my wife when she found a four-foot Black Snake in our flower garden one afternoon. She would have none of it. I ended up cajoling and/or forcing it into a large Tupperware storage tub, and transporting it over to the park next to the river, a win for everyone involved, I hope.
It’s a well-known fact that if climate change benefits anything, it will only benefit things that are bad: rats, diseases, crop devastating insects.
Hivemind,
My thoughts exactly. If it is cute and cuddly like a pika, or penguin, (polar bear, not so cuddly), they will suffer. If it is something that humans hate, they will evolve into something like Godzilla. It is so obviously biased that it is ludicrous!
You have successfully exposed a primary M.O. of the climatariat socialist movement. Too bad you don’t have clout in the press…
Conservatives aren’t more afraid than lefists. They have a realistic view of risks, because their Amygdala works properly, whereas leftists’ doesn’t.
Besides which, they tend not to live in big cities, so they really don’t care if the left turn those cities into rat-infested hellholes.
Half of these mainstream news articles about conservatives having xphobia, the other half about the dangers of global warming, nuclear plants, Russia and the flu (don’t forget your vaccine).
The Houses of Parliament in Westminster, London, is infested with rats.
I dare-say the White House is much the same. Just identified more accurately by President Trump as swamp rats.
Fortunately, because of Bergmann’s rule, a warmer climate means smaller rats.
US cities are already overrun with rats………..Democ-rats!
Funny, I thought most large cities were already majority Democrat.
It’s getting a little hard to keep track. 🙂 In 12 years the Earth is destroyed, and in the mean time 60% (or is it 97%?) of the species will be killed off, except for the rats? I think these people aren’t even trying to be scientific, rather it’s a game of “my predictions are much worse, so look at me me me!”
I would venture a guess that Flam is not a Wildlife Biologist or any kind of Biologist. As a Biologist I can say that Flam does not know anything about Biology.
No, she is some sort of journalist at Science and apparently not a scientist at all.
Flam apparently has a B.Sc. in geophysics. Although, perhaps her main claim to fame is being an expert about sex. She has written a book on the role of sex in human evolution. I don’t remember any such topics being covered in my undergraduate geophysics courses! I’m sure I would have remembered!
All predicted by Hollywood nearly 50yrs ago.
Judging from the image proferred at the start of the post, all rat lovers must be distressed by the appalling effects of global warming on the poor creatures. Something must be done – money to WWF please.
My dog is a rat cranium crunching little biatch. This will make her very happy.
Craig
My dog is the sweetest mutt you could ever meet, a Staffordshire Bull Terrier, Jack Russell cross.
Seriously, she is the gentlest dog you could imagine, until she suspects a rats around. Then she visits the local phone box and transforms into Monster Mutt, with agility of a Jack and the jaws of a Staffie.
I’ve worked on farms that used Jack Russell’s to hunt rats, none of them come close to my Monster Mutt! Hand on my heart, she ripped up a substantial tree root one day in pursuit of a rat.
That’s an awesome cross, having known both breeds well and admired their mental and physical abilities.
That is AWESOME!!
And totally believable, knowing even what little I do about those breeds. But then, that is why they exist, nu?
-Kevin
Totally off, but do you have a pic?