What happens when you have the warmest year on record and come through winter with more or less no winter? Stuff like this.
The scorpions that scurry around this desert region emerged from their winter slumber early this year.
Usually dormant until late March, the creatures came out in February as temperatures soared, making a month that is generally pretty pleasant the second-warmest February on record.
Arizona is home to the Bark Scorpion, which is small and about as innocuous in appearance as anything that is basically nature’s horror show can be. But being stung by one is … uh … memorable.
Israel Leinbach, a biologist for the United States Department of Agriculture in Hawaii who spent years in Phoenix researching bark scorpions, described the pain as “the feeling of being stabbed with a hot knife.” It may last anywhere from a few hours to several days and resist all efforts to make it go away quicker: cold compresses, over-the-counter pain medication, antihistamine.
My personal experience from being stung in one hand: think of accidentally grabbing the handle of a red hot skillet. Then imagine you can’t let go for the next twelve hours.
A plague of scorpions is just one of several biological effects of climate change. And by many measures, far from the worst.
Across the American West, warm winters are expanding the range of Bark Beetles, which are devastating not just forests, but entire ecosystems.
In the high alpine forests of Montana outside Yellowstone National Park, Jesse Logan, a skier and biologist, has watched ancient whitebark pines, the region's mountaintop guardians, die off one by one. These long-living pines once provided highly nutritious seeds for grizzly bears. Logan says that he sometimes feels as if he is watching the collapse of a great and remote ecosystem.
Bark Beetles are just one of several insect species which were once held in check by cold winters, but which are now moving not only north but into higher elevations. Pests are not only plaguing forests, but crops, causing increased use of insecticides.
And disease vectors of all types are spreading, multiple species of ticks and mosquitoes are expanding their range, bringing the threat of new diseases like Zika along with old standbys like malaria.
As Europe and the United States brace for the likely arrival of the Zika virus from Latin America this summer, experts warn global warming may accelerate the spread of mosquito-borne disease. ...
Since 2014, Aedes aegypti, known as the “yellow fever” mosquito, has been the main carrier of Zika across Brazil, Columbia and other parts of Latin America, where it has infected several million people, according to the World Health Organisation.
The yellow fever mosquito also brings … well, you can probably guess.