Mosquitoes, Avocados, & Olives Tell the Tale of Global Warming

Tiger mosquitoes live in the tropics and are known to carry unwelcome diseases: encephalitis, West Nile virus, and Chikungunya -- a rare, tropical disease that causes a fever and joint pain that can last months. Now because of the warming climate, the mosquito is making a new home in the temperate world in towns from Ohio to Northern Italy.

This is not science that Senator Inhofe can dispute with misinformation.

Ask any of the 300 people in Castiglione di Cervia who, thanks to the mosquito, came down with Chikungunya last August during the first epidemic of tropical disease to strike modern Europe. Or closer to home, ask the public health authorities in Ohio -- a swing state, don't forget. They're aware of what happened in Italy and are keeping an eye on the pest that can now shrug off the local winters.

Here's how the NYT tells the story from Italy:

Canceling their traditional mid-August vacations (in Italy, a true sign of panic), health officials sent off blood samples, called national infectious-disease experts, searched the Internet and set out traps to see what insects were in the neighborhood. The first surprise was that the insect traps contained not sand flies but tiger mosquitoes, and huge numbers of them.

That was from the news pages. The paper also devoted most of its op-ed page - Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal, please take note -- to four climate dispatches from around the world.

From Washington State: Who Moved My Glacier?

Out West we are looking at wetter winters and drier summers, higher spring stream flows but for shorter periods, longer fire seasons and bigger fires, forests filled with dead trees and pest infestations, and species on the move everywhere. That’s just the big picture. Up close, the situation can be even more disorienting, and dangerous.

From rural France: The Olive Tree Doesn't Lie

The routines around here go back to ancient Romans who planted our back hills with olive shoots in their baggage. Late each winter, the trees are cut back hard. In spring, buds cover the new wood. By fall, branches droop under the weight of green fruit. As they turn purplish black in December, the olives are pressed into oil to remember.

It is December now, and my trees should be heavy with olives. But they’re not. Like last year, rains fell at the wrong time, too hard or too soft. When it mattered, there was no rain at all.

A warming trend with freak cold snaps confuses plant metabolism and emboldens killer pests. Last January, my trees budded, convinced it was spring. Then it froze. In June, the Dacus fly bore into the fruit, causing it to drop off the tree.

From Chile: Chile's Rising Waters and Frozen Avocados

The beautiful Andean glaciers of southern Chile are also melting before our eyes. Latin Americans tend to exaggerate, but I don’t think I am overstating things when I say that for an environmentalist the sight of those breaking glaciers is as distressing as the collapse of Notre Dame would seem to a Parisian....

The climate change has done serious damage to fruit and vegetable crops, most particularly my favorite, the “palta,” or avocado. An exporter I know told me that this season’s uncharacteristic frosts ruined 40 percent of his crop. Among farmers a feeling of apprehension has taken hold; the weather has always been slightly capricious, but of late it has become altogether unpredictable.

From China: Searching for Local Heroes in China

But in China’s rural heartland, away from wealthy urban centers, evidence suggests that climate change is already beginning to disrupt harvests: at a village near the Great Wall where my fiancé and I spend weekends, the corn farmers complain that the summer rains came six weeks late this year, while the winters are steadily becoming warmer. A stream that runs just beneath the crumbling watchtowers of the Great Wall has dried up, and the farmers say less snow is falling on the jagged brown peaks nearby.

Can't you just imagine the Presidential debates? Wonder how the candidates would respond to this: "To what would you attribute the epidemic of Chikungunya in Columbus, Ohio and what would you do about global warming if elected?

And maybe the good people of Oklahoma would do the nation a favor and keep Senator Inhofe from yet another term.

• ‹ previous
• up
• next ›