Post by marchesarosa on Mar 13, 2012 16:17:57 GMT 1
Where would the BBC Science correspondents be without "Climate Change" scare stories? Last year it was some noxious insect invading our shores that was tied to "climate change" but only in the last paragraph were we told it was imported with some product from far, far away! Tossers.
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Chiefio comments here chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/model-science-predicts-more-model-scientists/
I was looking at this map of present disease outbreaks:
outbreaks.globalincidentmap.com/home.php
And noticed a disease I’d never heard of before: Schmallenberg
Doing a quick search on the name, up pops a BBC article about this “new disease”… Seems that it’s a disease of sheep and may be spread by ‘midges’. It is named for the town in Germany where it was first discovered.
Now, last I looked, Germany could be fairly cold. Sometimes even colder than The UK. Yet the article was talking about how this disease was spreading to the UK due to warming caused by, you guessed it, “Climate Change”… Reading further, the article says they don’t really know how it is spread, but that programming a model of midges with projections of temperature rises can yield an alarming rise in personal research importance….
www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17223445
Climate change is raising the risk of diseases such as Schmallenberg in the UK and northern Europe, say scientists.
Schmallenberg virus affects sheep and cattle, and is probably carried by midges. It was identified in Germany last year, and in the UK in January.
Until 1990, Europe’s midge-borne viral diseases were found only in Spain and Portugal; but two have emerged within the last six years in northern Europe.
Experts say the path of Schmallenberg is currently impossible to predict.
Schmallenberg virus – named after the German town where it was first identified – causes fever and diarrhoea in adult animals, but they recover.
However, infection during a critical stage of pregnancy leads to lambs and calves being born with deformation of limbs, spine or brain. Many are stillborn.
Currently it has been found on 83 farms in the UK, mainly in the southeast.
Unpredictable future
The next few months will almost certainly see the birth of more affected lambs and calves resulting from infections their mothers picked up last year, as farms progressively further north go through the calving season.
But after that, it could “burn itself out” or become a regular threat – or anywhere in between, according to leading scientists speaking at a briefing in London.
“There are these two scenarios,” said Matthew Baylis from the Institute of Infection and Global Health at Liverpool University.
“The key question is whether the virus will be picked up by the vector (midges) from the calves and lambs that will be born later in the spring, after the midge season starts.”
If that happens, he said, more cows and sheep will be infected, with problems emerging next year when they give birth.
But the path is very hard to predict as so little is known about a virus that was only identified a few months ago.
“There is the possibility it will simply die out, but I think that would be too good to be true,” said Peter Mertens from the Institute for Animal Health in Surrey.
“There’s a lot of virus about, and I think it’s quite likely it won’t simply go away in one year.
“Is Culicoides (the midge) the only means of spread, or is there something else on a local level – fecal-oral spread, or aerosol (airborne) spread?
“We don’t know.”
So a new virus shows up in Germany. They have no clue how it is actually spread. The don’t know for sure what the vector might be. The admit to not knowing at all how it might play out.
One part of the puzzle that scientists have put together is the influence of climate change on the risks of midge-borne viral diseases.
A higher temperature means an increase in the number of midges, and that they feed more often. It also allows the virus to develop faster.
Using weather and climate models as well as information on the biology of viruses and midges, Prof Baylis’s research group showed that recent climatic change in northern Europe has significantly increased the risk of viral midge-borne diseases.
“Temperature changes in Europe which to most of us have felt relatively small have in our model led to a large increase in the risk of viral midge-borne diseases,” he said.
The modelling results, he said, reflected what has actually happened across the continent.
“Culicoides infections were first detected in Europe in the 1920s, but only in Spain and Portugal and on the eastern borders, around Turkey,” he said.
“Then in 1998 we saw cases in Italy. Bluetongue then emerged in northern Europe in 2006/7, and now we have Schmallenberg.”
The modelling suggests other similar diseases should be expected in future, said Prof Mertens, adding: “The doors are open.”
Yet Another publication of the form “Given these conclusions what assumptions can we draw?”
So they start from the assumptions that heat will give more disease, then run models that predict more heat, and golly, The Computer Says there will be more disease.
This is just such crap. Fantasy masquerading as science.
How about doing some field work to find the actual vectors and demonstrate the virus in them? How about looking at the midge populations MEASURED over time? Perhaps some historical work to show past midge infestations? (Any records from the MWP or the Roman Optimum?) Perhaps even looking at the midge range in other continents to see if they have historically had greater cold tolerance than expected? Or if housing animals in heated barns has let the midge survive in modern farms? Or how about this; check to see if there is a foreign midge introduced into Europe. Or doing some contagion tests with midge free sheep to see if the ASSUMPTION of midge as vector is even warranted? You know, actual Science…
Doing a web search on ‘midge cold tolerance’ turned up a slew of papers about the Antarctic Midge, so at a first blush it looks to me like there is little problem with midges living in cold places.
There are so many interesting and useful bits of Science that could have been done, or at least proposed. There are two genuine mysteries here to be explored (what is this disease, and its limits, its evolutionary history? what is actually happening with disease vectors on European sheep farms?) yet it’s all tossed out with a wave of the Computer Model and the Global Warming Scare Story.
I would like to think of some more suitable term, but I can’t. Only one word shouts at me. They are: Idiots. Publishing propaganda and pretending it has meaning.
---------------
Chiefio comments here chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/model-science-predicts-more-model-scientists/
I was looking at this map of present disease outbreaks:
outbreaks.globalincidentmap.com/home.php
And noticed a disease I’d never heard of before: Schmallenberg
Doing a quick search on the name, up pops a BBC article about this “new disease”… Seems that it’s a disease of sheep and may be spread by ‘midges’. It is named for the town in Germany where it was first discovered.
Now, last I looked, Germany could be fairly cold. Sometimes even colder than The UK. Yet the article was talking about how this disease was spreading to the UK due to warming caused by, you guessed it, “Climate Change”… Reading further, the article says they don’t really know how it is spread, but that programming a model of midges with projections of temperature rises can yield an alarming rise in personal research importance….
www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17223445
Climate change is raising the risk of diseases such as Schmallenberg in the UK and northern Europe, say scientists.
Schmallenberg virus affects sheep and cattle, and is probably carried by midges. It was identified in Germany last year, and in the UK in January.
Until 1990, Europe’s midge-borne viral diseases were found only in Spain and Portugal; but two have emerged within the last six years in northern Europe.
Experts say the path of Schmallenberg is currently impossible to predict.
Schmallenberg virus – named after the German town where it was first identified – causes fever and diarrhoea in adult animals, but they recover.
However, infection during a critical stage of pregnancy leads to lambs and calves being born with deformation of limbs, spine or brain. Many are stillborn.
Currently it has been found on 83 farms in the UK, mainly in the southeast.
Unpredictable future
The next few months will almost certainly see the birth of more affected lambs and calves resulting from infections their mothers picked up last year, as farms progressively further north go through the calving season.
But after that, it could “burn itself out” or become a regular threat – or anywhere in between, according to leading scientists speaking at a briefing in London.
“There are these two scenarios,” said Matthew Baylis from the Institute of Infection and Global Health at Liverpool University.
“The key question is whether the virus will be picked up by the vector (midges) from the calves and lambs that will be born later in the spring, after the midge season starts.”
If that happens, he said, more cows and sheep will be infected, with problems emerging next year when they give birth.
But the path is very hard to predict as so little is known about a virus that was only identified a few months ago.
“There is the possibility it will simply die out, but I think that would be too good to be true,” said Peter Mertens from the Institute for Animal Health in Surrey.
“There’s a lot of virus about, and I think it’s quite likely it won’t simply go away in one year.
“Is Culicoides (the midge) the only means of spread, or is there something else on a local level – fecal-oral spread, or aerosol (airborne) spread?
“We don’t know.”
So a new virus shows up in Germany. They have no clue how it is actually spread. The don’t know for sure what the vector might be. The admit to not knowing at all how it might play out.
One part of the puzzle that scientists have put together is the influence of climate change on the risks of midge-borne viral diseases.
A higher temperature means an increase in the number of midges, and that they feed more often. It also allows the virus to develop faster.
Using weather and climate models as well as information on the biology of viruses and midges, Prof Baylis’s research group showed that recent climatic change in northern Europe has significantly increased the risk of viral midge-borne diseases.
“Temperature changes in Europe which to most of us have felt relatively small have in our model led to a large increase in the risk of viral midge-borne diseases,” he said.
The modelling results, he said, reflected what has actually happened across the continent.
“Culicoides infections were first detected in Europe in the 1920s, but only in Spain and Portugal and on the eastern borders, around Turkey,” he said.
“Then in 1998 we saw cases in Italy. Bluetongue then emerged in northern Europe in 2006/7, and now we have Schmallenberg.”
The modelling suggests other similar diseases should be expected in future, said Prof Mertens, adding: “The doors are open.”
Yet Another publication of the form “Given these conclusions what assumptions can we draw?”
So they start from the assumptions that heat will give more disease, then run models that predict more heat, and golly, The Computer Says there will be more disease.
This is just such crap. Fantasy masquerading as science.
How about doing some field work to find the actual vectors and demonstrate the virus in them? How about looking at the midge populations MEASURED over time? Perhaps some historical work to show past midge infestations? (Any records from the MWP or the Roman Optimum?) Perhaps even looking at the midge range in other continents to see if they have historically had greater cold tolerance than expected? Or if housing animals in heated barns has let the midge survive in modern farms? Or how about this; check to see if there is a foreign midge introduced into Europe. Or doing some contagion tests with midge free sheep to see if the ASSUMPTION of midge as vector is even warranted? You know, actual Science…
Doing a web search on ‘midge cold tolerance’ turned up a slew of papers about the Antarctic Midge, so at a first blush it looks to me like there is little problem with midges living in cold places.
There are so many interesting and useful bits of Science that could have been done, or at least proposed. There are two genuine mysteries here to be explored (what is this disease, and its limits, its evolutionary history? what is actually happening with disease vectors on European sheep farms?) yet it’s all tossed out with a wave of the Computer Model and the Global Warming Scare Story.
I would like to think of some more suitable term, but I can’t. Only one word shouts at me. They are: Idiots. Publishing propaganda and pretending it has meaning.
