When the air is very dry it is not unusual for a build-up of static electricity to cause sparks to crackle from a cat's fur when it is stroked. Sometimes, however, the effect is more dramatic. It can happen, apparently, in very thundery conditions and when the air is highly charged with electricity, that a process similar to that which causes "St Elmo's Fire" may result in a "brush discharge" from the tail; you have what used to be called a "firetail" cat.
Firetail cats were not popular in olden times. It was widely accepted that the phenomenon occurred because the cat was full of wicked demons, and that their presence led to the universal application of Murphy's Law in the vicinity: anything that could go wrong inevitably would. It was for this reason, my sources tell me, that Manx cats were very popular with mariners, since for obvious reasons they never ever displayed such "firetail" tendencies, and were therefore thought to be immune from evil spirits.
Let us move on, however, to the broader issue of the effect on cats of global warming. Traditional weather lore has it that,
When fleas do very many grow
Then `twill surely rain or snow.
But the accepted wisdom nowadays is rather the other way around. It seems that the cat flea - the little mite referred to by scientists as Ctenocephalides felis - increases and multiplies with great efficiency when there is a prolonged spell with temperatures above normal.
Most cats have fleas. Indeed, shocking as it may seem, a typical cat will have about 10,000 fleas in tow, at various stages of its complex life cycle. However, only 25 of these, on average, are actually on the cat at any time. The rest lie dormant, very often in the carpet, until such time as they feel the faint tremble that tells them a cat is passing by; then they rapidly emerge. They hop onto the prospective host, guided by the cat's body heat.
When the adult flea lays its eggs on or near its host, they hatch after about three days and larvae appear - a stage which lasts for anything up to eight weeks. Then the larvae spin themselves a small cocoon in which they hide as pupae for up to nine months. And the trouble with global warming is that high temperatures shorten all these spans - so mild winters and summers with above average temperatures, which have been very common recently, make cats susceptible to a massive explosion in the cat flea population.