The sharp rise in the rat population in my city coincides with a new regulation requiring food waste to be placed in a thin, dedicated bag outside. Since collection is delayed, the waste spoils, providing an easy food source for pests. It did not coincide with climate warming, at least not in my city.
In the town where I grew up, the city code required every house to have a disposal in the kitchen. The code stated that the rule was intended to help control rats. Every house I've lived in had one, but coverage is spotty in cheap rental units. I've never had to throw food waste in the trash.
FYI, don’t dispose of food waste in a garbage disposal. It’s good for dealing with a small amount of food, but pipes are not designed for mass undigested food waste.
A clog doesn't quality as something going terribly wrong. Empirically, my plumbing costs are $300 over 10 years. By comparison, rats are actually a big problem in the deep wooded suburbs. We spend a lot more on exterminators, rat traps, poison, and mesh covers to keep them out of the house. Rats smell bad, scare the girls, attack the chickens, spread garbage around the pickup area, spread fleas to the dogs, and are a nontrivial vector for serious human diseases.
So given that rats are a bigger problem than clogs under my current policy of scraping plates down the disposer, I should probably do it even more.
So what are they for? If you scrape your plates so there are only tiny bits of soft food going down the drain you don't need a garbage disposal anyway. I don't have one and I've never had a blockage.
Someone selling a convenience product does not necessarily mean it is not flawed.
The company that sells you a garbage disposal doesn’t really care if there’s plumbing issues ten years down the line, or if the waste treatment plant can’t handle it, they already got paid.
Another example of this in the plumbing world is flushable wipes. They cause tons of issues in plumbing systems.
Of course the increase in rat numbers in cities is caused by climate change. As the ice melts due to the seething heat caused by global warming, the melted ice-water from the arctic chills the air throughout the entire planet and so the rats get cold and they have to move closer to the cities to warm up on the hot bitumen. Also, they have to huddle up together to stay warm and thus they breed more.
The heat causes cooling which creates a feedback cycle thus releasing more heat which melts everything which causes yet more cooling. This makes sense. The science is settled. Trust the science.
You forgot to add that the majority of climate scientists agree on climate change.
This is important because science, like America, is a democracy. And we know democracy is the best thing ever. Period. Therefore, when groups of people agree on something (DEMOCRACY!!), it becomes an inviolable law of the universe. It wasn't until America became the world's greatest nation (thanks to democracy) that we discovered this natural phenomenon, however.
> The most promising integrated pest management (IPM) strategies focus on making the urban environment less conducive for rats rather than outright removal of rats already there
I live in the suburbs and in the last few years have seen an exploding rat population outdoors on my property. It began when my neighbors got chickens back in 2020; when home-steading and DIY food management began taking off. They ended up eventually removing the chickens and scraps, but the rats stayed and their population keeps growing despite the removal of food.
I've trapped and killed SO many of these pests, but they keep increasing and each generation seems to be smarter about traps than the previous. The traps have become ineffective at this point. I've tried many of the suggestions seen on Youtube and they fail or some of them are just downright messy/impractical (the bucket).
The most effective solution I came up with so far is building a custom wooden box that leaves just a small opening (like a tunnel) for the rat's head to get into to reach the bait. I used peanut butter as bait and a snap trap inside the box. I then cover the wooden box with leaves and stuff. This worked for a few months, but unfortunately it's not working any longer. On the last occasion it worked, the rat in the trap got cannibalized by another larger rat. Since then, I can see on my camera that the rats approach the trap, but they never enter. I've tried relocating it and everything, no luck.
My neighbor has a live rat trap that he doesn't need to bait anymore. The rats are doing their thing exploring, they go into the trap looking for food, and triggers the trap mechanism. When he finds a rat in his trap, he removes it to the woods outside of our neighborhood.
Senestech [0] sells an EPA-approved poison that only targets the rat's ability to reproduce. I mentioned this company previously [1], looks like their product line has expanded in the last year or two.
living in an old farm house, where rodents can be a problem, with feed and manure and old buildings providing , food and shelter for rats and mice, this year is exceptionaly cold,and now everything is frozen solid, so rodents can dig and tunnel, and all the water is frozen, so the rodents are having a hard time, invading looking for food and water and warmth, and I am doing my best to be inhospitable, rat, bat, splat.
Also the preditors are finding it easier to get them as rodents are forced to expose themselves, I even had a close encounter with an ermine, which is one tiny sleek, fancy killing machine, huge eyes for the size of the head.
Rats can not survive outside of areas without human development in areas with hard winter freezes, and face heavy predation by snakes further south, so are again limited to human and snake(other preditor) free areas, like islands.
Also rats are essentialy imune to poisons that were deadly to them, and are likely becoming imune to whatever is thrown at them now.
So numbers will be up, and the reasons for that will vary.
I dont like rats at all, and study them, as I hunt them, and other vermin.
During The Plague of 1665 in London they culled 200,000 cats thinking that they were the root cause. It turned out that the rats were the cause and cats were their natural predator at the time. So they made things worse.
The OP article does mention cats as a predator. Insignificant compared to the medieval times. Still interesting.
> “Parsons et al. (56) documented less than a 1% predation rate between feral cat carnivores and rats in an urban setting.”
Rats only live a few years, so they're not a good model for long-term effects. For instance, if microplastic exposure over 60 years causes dementia, it won't affect rats.
Yeah and global warming is due to the steep decline in the number of pirates over the last hundred years. Keep cranking out the misleading clickbait, you propagandists.
This reflexive cynicism is anti-science, because what you claim is not what's happening here. The authors have a sensible causal hypothesis, which is supported by an empirical correlation. A lot of the value seems to be the hard work they did collecting years of urban rat data from various different countries.
Individually, sensible causal hypotheses and correlations aren't worth very much. But when they align and the hypotheses are supported by additional evidence, that's usually a good indication of real causality.
Your comment might sound trite to some but is not without a basis.
I recently followed a rabbithole on media reports that the recent California wildfires are due to climate change. The underlying study driving the report worked like this: They took a time series of the number of acres burned each year in a part of northern California and used a regression to predict it based on a number of climate figures-- air dryness, wind speed, mean temp, max temp, etc. After finding coefficients for their regression they took an off the shelf counterfactual climate model that predicts the climate without human input. The difference in acres burned according to their regression were then attributed to climate change.
An obvious issue, out of many, with this approach is that if you plug in any inputs with a trend over that time-- say hours spend viewing porn online-- the regression is going to end up with non-zero coefficients on it and you could walk away with conclusions like "internet porn viewing is causing wildfires".
If you knew ahead of time that these climate stats were actually the main drivers of wildfire then this approach wouldn't be a crazy method to estimate what might happen under different conditions. But this approach cannot tells us if those inputs are drivers, much less the main ones.
A generalization that threw in a bunch of additional predictors around population densities, forestry management data, etc. might get closer-- but the data being fit was already so sparse that it was probably already overfit. And at best the result would still only be as good as our ability to speculate and measure possible causes.
The question of human climate change's impact on things like wildfires is an interesting, important, and very difficult one. I don't fault the researchers for trying a method that might say something useful, but to take that kind of result and treat it as an established fact and drive public policy from it seems foolish indeed.
I'm sure that not all of these sorts of conclusion are equally dubious but unfortunately with media, politicians, and the general public so science illiterate that they're unable to engage with this research on its own terms we really can't trust that they're not without going and looking case by case.
It shouldn't even be possible to compare wildfire severity/frequency to climate change. There was no forest "service" or firefighting 100 years ago and prior. The forest and wilderness were wild. But now we play superhero and put out every fire we can (then the government parasite takes over and needs more funding to justify their bloated existence). Then the fuel level reaches unprecedented levels. We need to start logging to thin the forest to its natural levels, and stop putting fires out. We have known for decades they are part of the natural cycle and essential to some species to reproduce. But how will we justify our jet air fleet?
The problem with climate change and wildfires is a moral risk.
If climate change can be blamed, it means bad management of forests is not the problem, so there is no need to spend money and effort on it.
In fact, anything that raises the risk should mean that you put more effort into better management.
The other problem is that the models are extremely complex and there are limits on the data available for back testing. Its similar to the problems with economic modelling, rather than those typical in say physics. We also do not have enough planets or time to test hypotheses!
>the regression is going to end up with non-zero coefficients on it
This is just not true. Plenty of regressions have coefficients that arent statistically distinct from zero.
>But this approach cannot tells us if those inputs are drivers, much less the main ones.
Again, untrue. There are plenty of statistically appropriate ways to estimate causality. You might consider looking into the latter-day work of Judea Pearl, a well known computer scientist. "The Book of Why" seems like a decent place for you to start, because ut is for the layperson, and you have a ton of fundamental errors in your statements of "fact."
>unfortunately with media, politicians, and the general public so science illiterate that they're unable to engage with this research on its own terms
You should also add "the confidently incorrect" to your list!
> This is just not true. Plenty of regressions have coefficients that arent statistically distinct from zero.
Sure. But you are responding to something I didn't claim, or at least didn't intend to claim. If you throw in a spurious piece of data that happens to exhibit the same trend, it's going to end up a non-zero coefficient. But that doesn't mean there is a causal relationship.
> There are plenty of statistically appropriate ways to estimate causality.
I didn't claim otherwise, but that doesn't help for an extremely underpowered analysis which not only didn't even consider causality but didn't consider alternative hypothesis. (In particular, it didn't even consider the null hypothesis except perhaps in some p-hack sense that they may not have published at all if the none of their coefficients had significance according to R's GLM or whatever package they used). That wasn't it's goal, I'm not even accusing the authors of bad science (at a minimum it passed the bar to get published)-- but the conclusions the media were drawing from it couldn't be supported by the work. It's an easy error to make because there is a gap between what we want to know and what we have the data to tell us.
> The question of human climate change's impact on things like wildfires is an interesting, important, and very difficult one
Perhaps it is difficult to prove scientifically, but as humans we can operate on common sense if we choose to, and it's common sense to anyone that has interacted with wood and fires a few times that making a forest drier due to warmer temperatures will increase the flammability of it. I personally don't need scientific proof that climate change makes forest fires more likely. It's f***ing obvious.
If you're going to policy reason on gut, that's fine-- most policy is set that way. But we shouldn't disguise gut as "science" and make it unquestionable or just offensive to debate. (Or instantly resorting to personal attacks and accusations of ignorance.)
Your gut analysis isn't as obvious to me: Fire can't happen without fuel, drier forests grow less fast. In climates where wildfires are a regular and natural feature, all that grows will eventually burn-- and it's literally impossible for it to burn unless it grew first. On that reasoning one might expect that drier climates might lead to fewer wildfires. At least at the reasoning level of "gut". Not too many wildfires in death valley after all, even though it is very dry and hot there while there are wildfires in Seattle which is usually wetter than a sponge. :)
Moreover magnitudes matter a lot-- I'll accept your 'obvious conclusion' but it doesn't set a magnitude. If wildfire activity is modulated only a small amount by dryness but a large amount by where we choose to build, our irrigation practices (e.g. creating pockets of growth in naturally dry places and diverting water from wildlands we don't care about), our forestry practices (aggressively suppressing small inconsequential fires, until they run out of control), and so on-- then that calls for different interventions (and would also be really good news because if existent climate change really were the only cause of recent activity we're screwed because there is no plan to turn back the clock on that, only plans to decrease the rate).
There is also a definitional question: What is a wildfire? The things most people care about under that banner aren't just the metaphorical tree burning in a forest with no one there to hear it... they are incidents of out of control vegetation burning leading to mass property damage and loss of life. And by that definition of a wild fire where we build and how is obviously a determinative factor over which we have a lot of influence. And so a premature fixation over factors which we have less ability to influence and may have a much less significant effect in what we actually care about could result in poor decisions that ultimately lead to a lot more damage and loss of life, which we can all agree would be terrible.
