By Robert Vislocky, Ph.D.
Direct from the manual of “let’s run models and scare the world without checking actual data” is this recent piece from our favorite fear mongering news outlet, The Guardian, titled “Risk of snakebites increasing as reptiles adapt to changing world, says study.”
As can be guessed from the title, the article reports that rising temperatures from “climate disruption” will cause all sorts of venomous snakes like the spitting cobras, vipers and cottonmouth moccasins to shift their habitats into areas where they have not been seen before and potentially affect billions of people. The trend is projected to get even worse in the coming decades and is expected to predominantly affect those in poorer nations according to the study published last week titled “Climate change induced complex shifts in snake distributions expose people to snakebite and threaten biodiversity” which was referenced within the Guardian article.
https://journals.plos.org/plosntds/article?id=10.1371/journal.pntd.0014030
So how did the researchers compute the effects of future warming on snake migration? Through computer models of course! And guess which data the authors used to estimate future climate conditions by 2090? You got it … they used CMIP6 with the SSP5-8.5 emissions pathway and tested no others! That’s the same emissions scenario that was declared unrealistic by the IPCC.
Regardless of the modeling result and poor choice of emissions pathway, the obvious questions remain … have actual observed snakebites been increasing as the planet has warmed and is this really a growing problem of concern? While I was unable to find a good long-term dataset regarding snakebites, the following article from the journal Nature Communications provides global snakebite mortality data over the last several decades.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-33627-9
Have people nothing better to do..? Are they gaining money by their declarations..?
no.
yes.
I can see only one reason why this study is wrong, despite its impeccable methodology and the candid integrity of its motivations…
Yes, it stands to reason: people will be all the less likely to be bitten by snakes if they remain confined to their homes, for fear of turning into carbonized jelly because of apocalyptic global warming.
Is there anything climate change can’t do?
Convince Mad Ed to abandon his goal of Net Zero by 2050!
Yes.
Make sense.
Anything?
There’s so much it can’t do.
Exactly 50%.
Why?
Have you ever heard that Climate Change can do any good?
No – it can do only bad things.
No matter where or how the climate is – things get always worse as soon as it changes.
And that’s very strange as the chances are 50:50 wether things turn out to be better or worse after the change..
Actually, logic tells us that the weather will improve as the climate gets warmer, since based on *how* the Earth warms, temperature differentials (both tropics vs. high latitudes and day vs. night) SHRINK as the climate gets warmer.
And it is temperature DIFFERENTIALS that make for the most violent weather, NOT a higher AVERAGE temperature.
It cannot fix the frayed laces on my shoes.
I don’t know how much of the mainstream media can publish such nonsense and retain their credibility. Almost every day one source or another comes up with some off-the-wall climate-related theory and tries to get the populace to fall for it. Meanwhile the weather does the usual: it varies from day-to-day, while the global population goes about its daily business and continues to ignore the alarmism.
“…. and retain their credibility.”
They haven’t. !
Well this was the Guardian so no credibility to retain to begin with.
This was so silly I went and read the new ‘peer reviewed’ paper the Guardian article is commenting on—so you don’t have to. Expected waste of time.
It was published in PLOS: Neglected Tropical Diseases. It is not obvious that snakebite is a neglected tropical disease, so the new paper simply declares it to be so right up front. Journal problem ‘solved’—tropical snakebite no longer neglected.
The findings are models all the way down. Despite their best efforts to show otherwise, the fancy new climate/snake models say “most species will show a decrease in predicted range (under RCP8.5)”! In fact, more than 50% of all studied venomous snake species show a decrease in ALL 3 predictors (of venomous snakebite). Oops—wrong answers. Of course, a few don’t, so be very afraid. Those are the few both the paper and the Guardian illustrated—such as spitting cobras and US water moccasins (aka cottonmouths from my 25 years living in South Florida).
So I looked up US venomous snakebites. In the US there are about 7000 per year. Only 6% (225-255) are from cottonmouths. And of those, Florida accounts for just 9-12 per year, almost all in ‘high risk’ South Florida. None fatal, as there is a good antivenin for this pit viper. Your ‘dumb’ climate skeptic South Floridian commenter somehow wasn’t afraid—new paper climate/snake models say I shoulda been.
And of course this ridiculous new snakebite climate alarm was amplified by the Guardian—who apparently didn’t read the paper, only the ‘alarming’ abstract.
How does that work? Reptiles prefer warmer conditions.
Dunno. It is what their paper said was their models results.
That was rather rhetorical, really.
It is pretty impressive to reduce a species’ range by making a larger area suited to it 🙂
Perhaps they should have consulted some biologists after their model runs gave them that result.
Well remember, this is yet another “modelworld” study. It most likely assumes that areas will become “too hot” for the snakes because in modelworld, daytime high temperatures probably soar as a result of “amplification” of imaginary greenhouse gas induced warming which of course has never been demonstrated to occur here in the thing we call reality.
In reality, warmer overnight low temperatures are responsible for most of the rise in “average” temperatures, which won’t really move the needle much on the “range” of snake species.
Did they quote this?
https://ktla.com/news/california/3rd-californian-dies-from-snake-bite-this-year/
I had two courses in herpetology, one taught how to handle poisonous snakes. No cobras. Class was taught the necessary collection cautions but one student thought incorrectly it was by the nape of their neck, threw a cottonmouth water moccasin over us in a circle, no bites. I grew up a lot on my grandfather’s farm in central Texas in a area where rattlesnakes were collected for museum exhibits. They were under his house where my dad used a pipe from his exhaust to run them out. Once slowly passed a fairly large rattlesnake in west Texas at night, stopped and saw it raised behind us apparently smelling the exhaust, didn’t strike. I recall at least three instances being within inches of being bitten, none as also have been too close to cottonmouths since. It has long been well known that they don’t waste their venom unnecessarily unless they must. Check Klauber’s Rattlesnakes. Bigger eastern has been claimed to be worse than western.
No, because rattlesnakes were not on their ‘special dangerous snake’ models list.
Two ‘fun’ rattlesnake stories.
Once I was (as an Eagle teen) leading a group of younger Boy Scouts on an Appalachian Trail weekend hike. We sat on some trail side rocks for lunch, and a rattler crawled out from one right between a Scouts legs. I dispatched it and we had it as part of dinner. ‘Tastes like chicken’— but very bony like an eel.
My youngest brother owns a remote, large, very mountainous rural property just over the Georgia border in western North Carolina. Largest Eastern timber rattler I ever saw (easily >6 feet and more than 6 rattles (one per year is added when the rattler sheds its skin to grow) was sunning beside his mountain stream. His wife’s large summer garden has no rodent problems. He has had to kill two copperheads over the years that took up residence in his wife’s flower beds on the flagstone walkway to his cabin front door. Better safe than sorry.
They are good eating. I’ve been to the Mathis, Texas rattlesnakes races, but there is much bigger round-up in Sweetwater. Guess they survived concern about increased traffic road kill, saw a deer yesterday paused for a car, don’t know about rattlesnakes.
My gosh, how many Nature article GBD [Global Burden of Disease] 2019 Snakebite Envenomation Collaborators. Several from US, one, Amir Radfar, from College of Medicine, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA. Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake has a range much farther north, saw it in Georgia. Hope we don’t go back to the ‘cut and suck’ days but probably no model data.
Years ago there was a pizza place near the University of Cincinnati campus that sold some odd pizzas. I never had one but I remember one was a peanut butter and jelly pizza, another was a rattlesnake pizza.
In places like India, snake bite is the “cause of death” sent in to the District Offices when a death is embarrasing. So the ups and downs are determined by social conditions, not the number of snakes.
In Australia (a continent noted as home to many of the most venomous snakes in the world), one fifth of fatal victims were reported to have been bitten while trying to pick up snakes.
Ergo, if the world’s snakes need more prospects to increase their bite numbers statistics, they could no better than all moving to Oz.
(of course they’d have to be good swimmers to get there, and with the oceans all boiling from global warming, they’ll lose a lot of skin in the game)
“bitten while trying to pick up snakes“
Hold my beer and watch this.
And there’s another point. “Pre-industrial” human population – One Billion. Today’s human population – EIGHT Billion.
There’s an eight fold increase in “risk of snake bite” right there (all else held equal).
And it has NOTHING TO DO WITH “CLIMATE CHANGE.”
“Climate change”™
Gives more opportunities to be bitten by a snake-oil salesman !!
Oh that was funny, thanks for the laugh!!
In arizona, you’re more likely to be bitten (or shot) by a homeless person while the liberal mayor adds salaried positions for climate change. The snakes have long since retreated from urban heat island climate caused by asphalt.
According to Australia’s ridiculous public broadcaster, ABC News, shark attacks are increasing due to “global warming”. 🙄
https://twitter.com/BrianBellia/status/2055963428003652033
I can ‘explain’ that just like snakebites. Global warming heats the oceans, which speeds up shark ectothermic (cold blooded) metabolism. So they have to eat more Australians because they are hungrier.
Shark attacks are increasing because they are incorrectly claimed to be going extinct which as top predators will kill the ocean. Now worry about orcas that eat them, but we still treat them like pets. There are even swim with great white’s dives, one diver was killed, maybe Mediterranean. Besides more people swimming, catch and release is the current duty.
I may have been thinking about this, not a white but one old ignored theory is about “accessory populations” out of their better adapted range.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0964569125003102
Warmer weather does indeed cause an increase in snakebites, a 50/50 mix of lager and hard cider (proper UK west country scrumpy) served chilled.
Hey guys, hold my beer…happens here in the states, too.
Starting today any science or academic study done using RCP 8.5 or SSP 5-8.5 should automatically be withdrawn.
I’ve noticed very close correlation between media attention and climate claim absurdity. My posit is that zero media attention would directly lead to near zero ridiculous climate claims.
Of course there are more snakebites when anti-FF activists go wandering around in fields and bush trying to stop FF pipelines from being laid. The rise in purple-haired nose-ringers showing up in ERs for snakebites should have been a big giveaway. But NO! That little detail was left out of the stats sheet. HeeHee…
Can we take it as an iron-clad law (meaning no exceptions) that everything written in The Groaniad is simply false? I have yet to see an article in it which bears even a passing resemblance to truth or accurate.
Surely there must be one, but after all these years I feel like Diogenes bearing a lamp in search of an honest man.
I suppose the date at the top of the page will be correct, or most of the time anyway.
I am not so sure about snakes, but one thing is clear to me. As CO2 in our air climbs, my arthritis gets worse, my muscles weaken and get sore more frequently, my mind doesn’t work as well as before and other negative changes are happening. What else could it be?
I notice it’s from the guardian…..toilet paper already covered in shite.
Assuming they were right (I don’t buy it)
Snakes prefer to live where it’s warm
Humans prefer to live where it’s warm
Check: Rainforest near the equator has people and snakes, Antarctica has no indigenous population and no permanent residents.
IF the same number of snakes move away from the warm
are they not also moving to where fewer people live?