Suggestion on Why Biting Mites Are Spreading Now.

It seems that increasing temperatures are affecting the population of bugs. National Geographic reports that at an earlier time with higher temperatures, bugs began to eat plants much more--they got the "munchies" (article here). Other scientists speculate that a warmer climate will cause some insects in tropical areas to die off and for a larger number of species to move toward the warming temperate regions (article here). We are already seeing animals that are used to warmer climates moving their range north. Recently, the BBC reported that the stink bug, which was not able to live in Britain, has now established itself into the British climate. They speculate that growing urban heat islands may be allowing warmer-climate bugs to survive in England (article here).

If I may say so, I do not believe the idea that some tropical insects will become extinct due to warming temperatures. Why? For one thing, they are already moving north. If it becomes uninhabitable in current tropical regions, they will survive in the new tropical regions. Secondly, the warming climate is causing humidity to go up (and glaciers are even growing due to this) which will result in increased precipitation.

In the book, Unstoppable Global Warming by Dennis T. Avery and S. Fred Singer, the authors point out that past warm climate cycles have been warmer than the current one we are experiencing. On this would indicate that our bugs are in no trouble at all. However, we, humans, are in a lot of trouble with these bugs. They record in their book that past warm cycles have seen a change in horticulture to warm-climate plants in northern regions, which seems to correlate with the idea that fauna are also migrating toward previously colder regions. To add to the issue of a growing global humidity (which actually buffers the rise in sea levels), naturally warmer regions received great amounts of rainfall and became very soggy.

So, it appears to me that whatever may be causing a global increase in temperatures, this increase is allowing bugs that normally could not live in more northern regions to live there and it is increasing humidity to allow for humidity sensitive bugs to thrive in areas where they were previously checked by dry air (and cool weather).

The suggestion that vermin and disease spreads with climate cycles is not far fetched (here's one article). Both major outbreaks of the plague can be traced to changes in climate as rat carried climate appears to have broken out at a cooling phase in the cycle, once in the Dark Ages at the end of the Roman warming and again at the end of the Medieval Warming--the plague was directly related to the migration and population size of rats, which were apparently reacting to climate change (and their fleas, which also may have been affected by climate change). Furthermore, malaria has been known to flourish as far north as Scandinavia if the conditions are correct. Some scientists have speculated that malaria could return to the US with the bugs that carry it (yes, there was a time we had malaria here, Washington, DC, was built on a malarial swamp).

So, higher humidity and warmth are allowing bird and rodent mites to fourish. Maybe this has happened before, between 1000 and 1300 AD, when we had a trend toward a warmer world. We just don't read about peasants fighting these crazy mites. The best thing would be to bring back DDT, it will prevent the spread of many anthropod born illnesses and was shown to be quite effective against rat mites, and most likely would be just as effective against all bird mites (article). Then, this long term hell of months of fighting invisible biting crawling monsters could be finally over.

Academic Research on Tropical Rat Mites.

Since I compiled this bibliography on academic sources on Tropical Rat Mites, I've added a few more sources, so I'm posting that post again on this link.