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.
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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.
Over run by DemonRats, i mean Democrats.
How, exactly, does that work Ms. Flim Flam!?
1) The gestation cycles is shorter?
2) Mother rat grows a few extra nipples?
3) Father and Mother rat eat less of their young?
Nope, just another delusional activist making things up by taking one from column A and another from Column B, then blaming climate change.
May her residence be invested and infested by rats, forever. Along with multitudes of their smaller kin.
Rats are as successful as they are because they are adaptable to all circumstances and are mainly limited by food supply. I can’t believe the temperature is a significant influence.
There is not much rats will not eat, including rats cannibalizing other rats.
This willingness to eat almost anything, makes it hard to “limit” a rats food supply.
The limiting factors on rats are disease and predators.
Whether ‘rattus rattus’ or ‘rattus norvegicus’:
* Rat litters are usually 7-14 rats per litter; average is 7 or 8 per litter.
* Rats reach sexual maturity at 50-60 days old.
* Pregnancy last 21 days.
* Eyes open in 14-17 days.
* Breeding period is 22 days, weaned by 3 or 4 weeks old.
* Postpartum fertilisation is likely; which starts the next litter for birthing as the current litter weans.
It is claimed that rats reproduction slows during fall and winter, but I doubt that claim.
Fall marks the harvest season, which provides a great deal of nourishment.
Fall also marks when Hawks migrate South and reptiles hibernate, greatly reducing local predator numbers.
When rats reach sufficient population density, it is nearly impossible for a person or several persons to set enough traps every day.
Especially since any rats killed in a trap are immediately high protein food for the rest.
It’s why farmers appreciate cats that hunt rats and why many farmers will not kill snakes.
Even after last night’s frost, my dog surprised a black snake trying to catch enough sunlight to warm up. I held the dog to allow the snake to reach the rocks.
Here in Virginia, ‘black snake’ is the local name for common rat snakes. Every one of them is welcome around my home. Inside or outside, I’ll catch them and move them to where they and I will be happier; usually in the garden, orchard or my berry bushes. Unless, someone really irritates a rat snake, they rarely strike and are relatively easy to pick up.
I even catch the local poisonous copperheads and release them deep in the woods. Those I prefer away from where I am barefoot.
I have zero love for rats, while I do love a lot of their predators.
New York is already over run by rats.
Some of them the 4 legged kind.
Rats v CO^2
https://www.catseyepest.com/blog/dry-ice-rats-bostons-now-prohibited-plan-urban-pest-control
Rats v CO^2
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2016/12/28/how-dry-ice-kills-rats/IAbsL2Nef63zQ8a4cSwr1L/story.html
Apologies for first post which is an ad but relevent.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2016/12/28/how-dry-ice-kills-rats/IAbsL2Nef63zQ8a4cSwr1L/story.html
With such an assertion, one might think that rat populations in various US cities might have something to do with their respective weather. Look at https://clark.com/health-health-care/worst-cities-in-america-for-rats/ and you will find that among the 50 “rattiest” cities, there is no readily apparent correlation. The top 4 cities include two in cold climates (New York and Chicago) and two in warm climates (San Francisco and Los Angeles). The remaining 46 are a hodgepodge of warm and cold.
I am certain only that the “researcher “was well paid to come up with his findings.
She is apparently a journalist not a researcher. In other words a professional liar.
but I thought the people would have to migrate out?
Misunderstood ?
I’m going to go out on limb here and assume she doesn’t get to many men to stick around after the first night !
Rats make way cute pets, we had some pet rats for a while. But they don’t live long, and you can’t toilet train them, so you need to clean everywhere pretty thoroughly when you let them out for a roam, and our cat kept wanting to play with them – you might say he made it his life’s mission to get some quality private time with the pet rats…
Rats? Meh. They aren’t even trying. How about giant spiders? Or even Itsy Bitsy ones?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHHA!
Why whenever I hear Itsy bitsy do I think
It was an itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini
That she wore for the first time that day
We’re going to have to tear down those wind turbines so the predator birds don’t get killed off and can consume the exploding rats. How hot do you have to get a rat before it explodes? I’m thinking over 200 degrees F.
Rats are not very climate sensitive, living almost everywhere on Earth — once introduced to an area, all they need is food and shelter. Outdoor weather then is not a factor.
“Once established in a community, rodents can be tricky to get rid of, in part because it requires a concerted effort to cut off their supply of food and shelter.”
Eliminate access to food sources, and they rapid vanish (well, move on to someplace different where there is food). Unfortunately, modern suburbanites inadvertently feed the rats by “being kind” to feral (or neighborhood) cats and dogs — food bowls placed outside for all to enjoy and by feeding birds through the winter (suet and bird seed are rat food).
Hint: Feed your pets indoors where they belong. Do NOT leave food bowls out with food in them — when you pet is finished with its meal, pick up and put away the bowl and any leftover food. Store pet foods in metal containers with air-tight lids.
Keep your kitchens clean with no food (even in the trash) left out at night. Cupboards containing food not in cans need to shut tight. Even fruit bowls can attract rats and mice — hanging fruit from the ceiling in a decorative basket eliminates this problem and creates more open table space.
If you have a serious problem, call in an expert.
PS: If you have rats, get an expert to trap one and identify it. In rural or suburban areas with woodlots, you may have wood rats — which naturally live in the forests and swamps of the Eastern US and are pleased to move in with you during the winter.
The Wood Rat is not the same as the Norway or Black Rat of the Big Cities.
In NY State (rural) we have the Allegheny Woodrat. It takes some careful planning and action to keep them from moving in every winter, but if we have kept them out by Christmas, they will have found somewhere else to live for the duration. (They always move out in the Spring — as the prefer to wild foods then available over our human food).
Kip,
You remarked about the rats found in “swamps of the Eastern US.” I presume that the type locality is Washington, DC. 🙂
We lived near a wooded area and there was one thing that kept the rats out of the garage during the winter. When we had cats, the rats stayed away. The years we didn’t have cats, there were rats and I had to set traps.
20 years in my house (with at least one cat) & 1 acre property … no rats (lots of tiny headless mice … the oldest cat had a preference for only the heads … the rest he would leave on the front mat as proof he was doing his job).
The last cat went outside to die early this spring and the rats rolled in. Big suckers. Peanut butter and an industrial size trap in the garage. I thought the trap was maybe too big … it tripped four times without catching anything, and the peanut butter was gone.
Then I heard it out in the garage when I was home. Big 10″ rat (not counting tail) … trapped across the shoulder … bleeding out the side of the head … struggling ….
It was cruel, but I decided to just let it die before messing with it. Went back in the house (from the garage). After about 5 minutes heard some more noise/struggling. Went back into the garage to put it out of it’s misery. It was gone. It got a second wind and pried itself out or the trap. Big rat.
I was kinda wondering if the industrial poison boxes had big enough holes.
Which is less hassle … adding fencing so the dogs can go anywhere, or getting another cat?
Hi Kip,
Your advice is sound for urbanites and suburbanites, but the ‘Black’ Rat (they are brown here and probably better called Roof Rats to distinguish them from that Sewer Rat Rattus norvegicus) is feral here in the Sunshine Coast Hinterlands of Queensland. It does fine without pet food (although one reason I don’t keep chooks is the feed and scratch attracts rats which then attract Brown Snakes). Except for fallen fruit I keep my hectare clean of feral food sources, but I still have periodic invasions by Rattus rattus (Sewer Rats seem to stick pretty much to cities in Australia). They would establish if I let them, but I keep a block of Rat Sack out and when I see nibbles I set traps (trapping is not as cruel as letting them slowly bleed to death, but I bait the traps with Rat Sack just in case – they are very clever animals). Clever and also interesting animals, very adept at climbing (they like nesting in palms), and if they didn’t have such a negative effect on wildlife (eating nestling birds for example) and a tendency to invade my home, I’d probably try to coexist.
DaveW ==> On the top ten list of destructive invasive species are domestic dog, domestic cat, the rats (Norway and black), pigs and goats. The last two easily go feral and destroy whole ecosystems.
Feral domestic animals, all of them — cats, dogs, goats, pigs — should be rounded up and euthanized or hunted out.
My understanding is that virtually all feral pigs in the new world descended from a small herd(?) that escaped the Spaniards near Tampa, Florida in the 16th century. Good luck wiping them out.
Well, when global warming really takes hold we will all be starving and won’t be leaving waste food for rats! And we will be glad of any extra protein source. (Sarc)
Well, if nobody else is going to say it, I will:
“You DIRTY RAT!”
Aargh. Yersina pestis. We’re all gonna die
Excerpted from the Faye Flim Flam quote:
Do ya pose someone ought to tell Flim Flam Faye that there is a noticeable deficiency of “flora and fauna” in the above cited cities and that a Springtime temperature increase of 30 to 50 degrees will cause a big transformation in the flora, and besides, the resident rat population therein don‘t give a “squeak” about daytime surface temperatures because they mostly live and breed “underground” where the temperature never changes.
Liberal infestations are like rat plagues.
The vermin infestation are Liberals who destroy one nice city after another with their progressive politics. Like a plague of locusts, they began to descend on well run Conservative Red cities like Bend Oregon and Austin Texas. What brought them there were well run municipalities, low crime, affordable living. But they brought their politics with them and destroyed the very things that attracted them.
Right you are. They flee the Hells on earth which they’ve made only to inflict Hell on Heavenly realms. They just don’t get it.
Yup, just like the vermin infested plague of illegal immigrant criminals that have been sneaking across the USA’s southern border for decades ….. with the blessing and approval of the socialist thinking “bleeding heart” liberals, …… and the thousands of immigrant INVADERS that are currently marching toward the USA’s southern border, ….. proudly waving the Flags of their home country at the head of their invading plague.
Just like all the other human “invasions” throughout history, ….. the appointed “flagbearers” of the invading horde were always upfront leading the “wannabe” conquers and/or destroyers.
Happy days for cats ! Really the only rats are disguised as climate con-men .
Fuel poverty deaths caused by these con artists should be prosecuted .
Politicians and lobbyist’s pay for fake science to justify policies to tax and kill people .
Trump is right again . It’s simple … a globalist agenda or a nationalist agenda .
He picked a nationalist agenda rather than cave into ultra left wing globalists
who are really self dealers .
Vote Tuesday . Save your country USA . The Democrats are serving their hedge fund owners .
There have always been lots of rats in the big cities so just release lots of alligators in the sewers and drain pipes. Alligators gotta eat too and they will already be established when global warming gets here!
Whilst walking home after taking a girl friend home.
Late at night after the buses stopped running.
I was privilege to see several hundred rats moving
As if like a river across the road in front of me.
To say I was impressed is to make little of the experience.
This was only 60 odd years ago.
Since then I have only seen them. Singly.
Then only when I was searching for them with a 410.
Oh F**K me backwards….. Rattus Norvegicus has flourished wherever mariners have deposited it from Svalbard to Tahiti provided it can find food and a place to nest…. Control of rats requires shutting off the food sources.. sufficiently sealed bins and regular garbage collections…. Don’t do that and they’ll eat the cockroaches to survive the nuclear armageddon….
Hey, at least the advertiser’s algorithm finally got something nearly right: this WUWT article was accompanied by ads for London Pest Control. In reality this is just an indication of how bad computer AI normally is. (I did recently clean the mousetraps in the garage, but I don’t think any member of the household has an Alexa-type listening device that could give succor to theories claiming that adverts are targeted, based on what our cell-phone microphones can pick up.)
I’m tipping San Francisco will lead the rat plague race , with or without temperature rise. You know, just because it sort of fits. Look for to rat wranglers, rat welfare officers, rat rights protest, rat research grants and possible an LGBTIQetc Pied Piper.
Apparently some residents say Rome is becoming unlivable.
“Romans to hold mass sit-in to protest at the sorry state of the Eternal City
Fed up with seeing wild boars trotting down busy streets, giant seagulls dismembering dead rats and perilous potholes in the roads, Romans are to stage a mass protest against the parlous state of the Eternal City. ”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/10/18/romans-hold-mass-sit-in-protest-sorry-state-eternal-city/
It has nothing to do with climate change, just poor maintenance.
My favorite account of rattus populations in NYC is Joseph Mitchell’s in Up in the Old Hotel. Incredible.
I don’t know about rats, but we’re being overrun by rabbits where I live. I had to put a fence around my zinnia garden to protect them. Wish I could borrow someone’s cat.
Or a kid with an air-rifle. Win/Win.
They should maybe look at the facts, the poisoning has been so effective that rats with a genetic mutation are thriving.
The Genetic Basis of Resistance to Anticoagulants in Rodents
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1449767/
Rats will follow human populations, they only get out of control when public local authorities neglect controlling their populations due to budget allocation.
Evolution makes it hard to control species with short generation times and lots of offspring, whether microbes, like MRSA, or multicellular organisms, like rats.
The NASA website has a graph that puts 5 different temperature datasets on a single graph from 1880 to 2017 or so (hard to tell what latest year is) . Of course all these datasets are fake because they have suppressed the warming of the 1930s. 3 other things stand out. 1) The data sets are almost exact matches of each other 2) One of the datasets is GISTEMP which includes water temperature data along with land air temperatures. 3) Another one of the datasets is called Cowtan and Way.
So I go to their website to find out what the heck is that dataset? Lo and behold I find this caveat on their website. I quote: “Maintaining a scientific data set to professional levels of quality assurance is beyond our resources. These results are therefore presented as a best effort. ”
So it seems that NASA will accept data submissions from private individuals even if you admit that you can’t keep the data up to professional standards. I guess this isn’t too surprising in the climate science field when you realize that there isn’t any data standards in climate science. It is a wild west free for all of “HIDING THE DECLINE, JUXTAPOSING TEMPERATURE DATA FROM LAND STATIONS TO WILDERNESS AREAS 1000’S OF KM AWAY, USING PROXY DATA AND REAL DATA ON SAME TIMELINE IN A GRAPH, ADJUSTING TEMPERATURES DOWNWARDS 80 YEARS AGO SO THAT YOU CAN CLAIM AN INCREASE, USING 2 DIFFERENT TECHNIQUES TO MEASURE SEA RISE AND PUTTING THEM ON SAME TIME LINE, USING A BOGUS CONCEPT OF glacial isostatic adjustment TO ADJUST LAND LEVELS FOR SEA LEVEL MEASUREMENTS, MIXING SE WATER TEMPERATURE DATASETS WITH LAND AIR TEMPERATURE DATASETS, FAILING TO COMPLETELY ACCOUNT FOR UHI EFFECTS, AND WHOLESALE READJUSTMENT OF TEMPERATURES 20 YEARS LATER FROM GRAPHS THAT WERE ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED TO PRESENT NEW FRAUDULENT GRAPHS. Did I leave any other climate science data fraud procedures out?
To think that billions of dollars are being spent on this fraud and because of this fraud boggles the mind.