75% decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas
journals.plos.org
journals.plos.org
All of those pesticides are designed to kill bugs. Why are we now surprised that bugs are disappearing?
We are sterilizing the planet.
According to this (http://www.beyondpesticides.org/assets/media/documents/lawn/...), we use up to 3.5x more pesticides per acre on suburban lawns than on agriculture.
(Discussed here: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/lawn-largest-crop-ameri...) (original here: http://www.isprs.org/proceedings/XXXVI/8-W27/milesi.pdf)
If you look at aggregate water usage for California agriculture uses 4X "urban" and "urban" includes industrial, golf courses, parks, etc.
So even if lawns are using more area they are much less water intensive than agriculture.
Either way, the point that agriculture takes a lot more water than people watering their lawns still stands.
I used to play with bugs in the yard as a kid.
Unfortunately this solution is a bit like using a nuclear bomb to get rid of gang violence. It does indeed do that, but at the expense of destroying the entire beneficial insect community as well.
Generally pest species recover faster after catastrophe than beneficial species, so by eliminating all of the pest's competitors pesticides are sewing the seeds of future infestations.
A much better, less toxic, and longer-lasting solution would be to provide pest-eating insect predators with habitats. In nature balance is achieved by predator/prey interactions instead of razing the beneficial soil ecosystem[1] with poison.
To take just one example, ticks are naturally eaten by birds (eg chickens), and if productive bird species can be used this has the side effect of producing delicious chicken (vs surface water/aquifer pollution, soil degradation which necessitates fertilizers, and a proliferation of plastic "keep children and pets off this lawn for X hours" signs).
People's instinct to protect themselves from disease-carrying pest species is a good one. The solutions handed to them by the post-war chemical industry are not. Who coulda thunk that redirecting all our WWII chemical weapons output to fighting nature wasn't such a good idea after all?
"By that logic we should steralize the planet of all mamalian life, since rats carry some pretty bad disease."
Uhhh, what happened here...? I've heard some atrocious analogies before but this almost seems like a joke.
I let moss, and local vegetation that grows fairly small thrive in my yard. In some ways, I prefer the moss to my grass.
I do fog my yard, so guilty, but I live in area densely populated with mosquitos which are a problem and they have plenty of wooded areas nearby to thrive if they want. But yeah, if there was some way to be selective, I'd be all for it, but it's not worth 20 mosquito bites when I go outside for 30 minutes to keep bees around.
Maybe if I could hire a service to do this: http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/07/health/zika-virus-sterile-mosq...
Granted I imagine that's not something I could do without having to get EPA or fish and wildlife approval.
We all love to feel guilty about our consumerism and personal choices but this study showing a 75% decline was done entirely in Germany and controlled for habitats.
The authors looked at flying insect populations in various protected areas in Germany, where pesticides are not applied directly and thus are not impacting populations locally. But since those populations are so mobile, the surrounding areas' pesticide levels certainly could be. Many of Germany's protected areas are surrounded by developed land, doubly so for those covered in this study. Most of the data collection occurred in Nordrhein-Westfalen, which is landlocked and surrounded by one of the most heavily industrialized and intensively farmed regions in the world. The rest took place in Brandenburg, which is similar. They're also not wide open plains like much of the American agricultural heartland, where insects can blow through more rapidly.
So, maybe we would see less decline in America, where there are much wider swathes of undeveloped land. That wouldn't disprove the pesticide hypothesis, it could merely indicate that the blocks of pesticide-free land in Germany are too small to form a sustainable habitat for flying insects. That would mean we need to create larger blocks of pesticide free land.
Maybe that doesn't mean we need to stop using pesticides, but does mean we need to reconsider the scope of their use. Deprioritizing non-essential uses such as lawn maintenance, for example.
On the other hand, some types of beetles, ants, flies, mosquitoes, even wasps - are just new. They were not here 20-30 years ago. Now, what are the consequences of all that... I kind of feel we'll find out sooner than we'd like.
Secondly, http://www.countrylovers.co.uk/hort/wildgrdn.htm
> Where 'attracts insects' is mentioned you can assume that birds will also be consequently be attracted
https://www.kingsseeds.co.nz/Kings+Seeds+Blog/x_post/Plants-...
> But what if we are trying to DISCOURAGE insects from coming into our garden. After all, there are some we just get completely sick of. What can we sow to help us to repel the insects we don’t like? Here are some ideas for that:
Thirdly, if all fails, enjoy it with binoculars. You'll live. Heck, most people will even survive insect stings.
Well if you read the link, I believe the point was that some plants attract stinging insects and others repel them. Also, stings. You'll live.
As long as you're not allergic like I am. Sometimes nothing, other times... it no good.
Good luck talking to them about it; you'll be labelled a green wacko one step removed from eco-fanatics who firebomb SUV dealerships. If you don't want or like proper suburban manicured lawns, maybe you shouldn't live around everyone else who does want them, would be their attitude.
Even if you dodge that hurdle by finding stuff that doesn't need mowing or edging, your neighbors are going to think you're crazy if your yard is all monkey grass or vines or cacti.
Yes, and? That's them projecting the weakness they actually do have inside them on you. To the degree you are free from weakness, their weakness will destroy them, so be the wall they splatter themselves against, be the water they drown in.
> your neighbors are going to think you're crazy if your yard is all monkey grass or vines or cacti.
If someone genuinely thinks a person who is otherwise acting perfectly normal is genuinely, clinically crazy because of some vines or weeds... there's a reason for that, too. If you end up with such neighbors, laugh your ass off and go about your day. Walk softly, carry a big stick, and let honesty be your biggest ruse. If you want to please everybody, you're going to be a hostage of the worst and then still die like all of us. So "cut the crap, fuck the rest."
Thanks climate change!
We are doing this to us. We are changing the environment to support short-term wants/needs at the expense of its human habitability in the future.
Well, we don't really know what consciousness really is, so it's hard to say that the Earth isn't conscious. After all, who would have thought a complex network of simple neurons arranged in a particular way would be conscious?
Even a cursory definition of consciousness must include the sum total of all of our sensory perception, and without the biome to augment that perception, it is impossible that our consciousness would not shift to accommodate the inclusion and exclusion of whatever difference in our sensory input would give to our experience of being alive.
We would all _be_ conscious (presuming relative health), but if we were all on Pluto, for example, the lack of light would change our consciousness, and for each individual this change would happen at a rate determined by their experience.
Perhaps this change would happen gradually enough for some that it might be considered an artifact of evolving, but certainly the change would begin the instant we left Earth's influence, and what might be considered our 'normal' state.
I realize it's a little (though I detest this term) 'hand wavy' because it's a thought experiment based on zero examples, but we do know that our consciousness is dependent on what we perceive and don't perceive. Hence the question posed by Nagel [1] "what is it like to be a bat?", as bats are cognitively very close to humans (relative to the entire biome), but without eyesight, it is fairly clear that the consciousness of a bat would be different than that of a human.
I recognize that this point is not necessarily the one central to your comment, but I do think it's interesting to remember that if we were not here, we would not be as we are.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_it_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
You may want to revisit that assumption.
Being as the science on this subject is changing very rapidly, as we speak.
http://www.zeit.de/wissen/umwelt/2017-10/insektensterben-flu...
http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/natur/insekten-in-deutsch...
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wissen/insektensterben-dramatisch...
Der Spiegel discusses issues in the methodology of the data collection. The intervals over the years weren't uniform, data was collected by volunteers/hobbyists and they did not measure the dry mass weight. There are differing opinions whether or not those issues have relevance.
SZ gives some details on suspected causes. Neither climate change (warmer weather should yield more insects, not less) nor changes in plant diversity can explain the observed effects alone. Main suspects:
- agricultural fertilizers, especially nitrogen
- pesticides, especially neonicotinoides
If you DGAF about planning and resource management and just do the same thing year after year your fields will soon be useless for growing that one thing you've specialized in and it will suck to be you but none of your neighbors will feel sorry for you because they all saw it coming from years off.
The meadows have been turned into forests and to a lesser extent pastures.
It's not a few percent, it's 30% of the land, probably more in Germany where there are much lest forests than in Sweden.
The bio-diversity in a meadow strikes me as much higher than heavily grazed pastures or a mono-culture wheat fields or pine forest.
Now look what Nestle/other food giants, but also slaughterhouses and animal farms, do: they use groundwater with private wells, and they extract more water than can be replenished... boom.
All these wild weeping willow which had been a signature of Masovian landscape and which I still remember from childhood visits to family farm died soon thereafter. So did the frogs. It is like coming to different country now.
This is mostly clearly seen on the east coast because most of the Midwest is still used for farming.
Edit: in Europe this is visible in coppiced forests. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppicing . Haven't seen one here in the US but I assume they're somewhat common in Europe where they were an early and effective method of sustainable forestry.
Weyerhaeuser, etc. grow those fast growing pulpwood trees and harvest.
The comparison between relatively preserved parks and National Forests (e.g. Willamette) and the rest of the states forests is truly jarring.
For that matter, the same pattern can be seen across the country. Much of Pennsylvania is densely forested, but the entire state has only a few thousand scattered acres of old-growth woods.
I think you mean "before Native Americans arrived". One of the side effects of the European arrival to North America was reforestation due to a disease-driven decline in the population of Native Americans.
But the case in point was that the countryside has changed considerably because of changes in agriculture.
Something that bothers me is the gristly, meager attitude of a certain type of conservation ecology. I think we are really going to start having to cultivate healthy ecosystems from the ground up, regardless of who's originally "from here" or not. I'm very optimistic about permaculture and wild cultivation techniques. I think they deserve more of a shot than people often give them.
And that "ag-tech" oligopoly has gotta go, along with its foolish, ignorant, exploitative approaches to ecology and economics alike.
European deforestation was most extreme during the late middle ages and early modern period. When people were using wood for fuel in a growing economy, before switching to coal, major European nations were running out of trees. Coppicing was adopted out of a desperate need for basic resources.
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0301/Mexico-s-monarch...
Members of the Krefeld society have been observing,
recording, and collecting insects from the region—and
around the world—since 1905. Some of the roughly 50
members—including teachers, telecommunication
technicians, and a book publisher—have become world
experts on their favorite insects. Siegfried Cymorek,
for instance, who was active in the society from the
1950s through the 1980s, never completed high school.
He was drafted into the army as a teenager, and after
the war he worked in the wood-protection division at a
local chemical plant. But because of his extensive
knowledge of wood-boring beetles, the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology in Zurich awarded him an
honorary doctorate in 1979. Over the years, members
have written more than 2000 publications on insect
taxonomy, ecology, and behavior.Afaik most of these are usually invasives species, displacing local populations, which is happening in the weirdest ways and places.
In Germany, our local ladybug species are on the verge of going extinct because an imported Asian ladybug species emits some kind of spores killing them, and the Asian ones generally being sturdier.
Eastern grey squirrels, brought to the European mainland from the UK, are also increasingly replacing local red squirrels. Red squirrels get through winter by hiding food supplies and staying lean and mean, while grey squirrels build up fat reserves.
What ends up happening is that the grey squirrels sniff out the food supplies of the red ones and clear them out to fill up their own fat reserves, that leaves the red squirrels with no food supplies to get through the winter and so they starve.
But I agree with your general sentiment, I remember nature being quite a bit "buzzier" when I was a kid, I always thought I felt that way because I might have paid more attention to things like insects as a kid, but I guess my feeling wasn't all that off.
In more remote places and in the mountains where the winters are harsher you still see the small red native squirrels though.
Someone's related blog: https://www.miss604.com/2015/03/grey-squirrels-of-stanley-pa...
Quote: So how did this squirrel get here just over 100 years ago? Some reports say that the squirrels were a gift from the Mayor of New York City in 1909 but Jolene from Stanley Park History found that in 1909 Vancouver Park Boar Chair, Charles Tisdall, wrote to various American cities in search of purchasing “grey squirrels” for Stanley Park.
And here I was thinking milder winters would benefit the red squirrels because they would have a better chance getting through those without food supplies/fat reserves. Guess it's actually more of an even playground in terms of food supplies, where things like the grey's parapoxvirus tip the balance in favor of more greys surviving.
Are harsher winter conditions harder on the grey squirrels? Maybe their fat-reserves give them a mobility disadvantage that becomes crippling in harsher winter conditions? Or maybe those remote places are so remote that grey squirrels merely haven't made it there, yet.
Things with squirrels are a bit more complex. While the two species do fight over the same resource, the main reason for the decline of red squirrels is disease.
The grey squirrels carry squirrel-pox, which can be fatal to the reds. That's always the explanation I've heard cited for the decline in red squirrels in the UK at least:
I wonder if the grey squirrels adapted this behavior because of previous encounters with red squirrels, displacing them in the process, or if it's just "bad luck" for the red squirrels to run into grey squirrels who just happen to perfectly counter their survival tactics?
Don't blame us, they are an invasive species here too. Proper British squirrels are red.
Various little butterflies would be abundant seem much less now. I wish I knew their names.
How can we determine how much of the change we even have control over?
FTFY.
And, of course, single-family home lawns in any densely populated area are likely to be regulated, many of which aren't high income. I can't get numbers on how many of those ~70% of Americans are under town restrictions, but it's not a trivial number.
So no, it's not just HN's demographics. This is genuinely widespread in the US; I'd estimate that at least 100,000,000 Americans live under some form of these restrictions.
https://www.caionline.org/AboutCommunityAssociations/Pages/S...
http://www.builderonline.com/money/economics/80-percent-of-a...
A suburb of Portlad OR is far more likely to have a bylaw or HOA reg about grass height or some other nit picky thing than the suburb of Portland ME because the OR suburb is wealthier and wealthy people have the time to care about these things, care about what the standards should be and care about how to enforce them.
Yes, many Americans live somewhere one or more rules/laws that control what they do on/with their own residential property. The Americans who are most represented here likely have far many laws/HOA rules with which they much comply.
Someone said it's "somewhat common in the US" to be restricted from growing eco-friendly laws. You "fixed" that statement by adjusting it to "somewhat common in the US in the parts of the US that are over-represented on HN".
The initial statement was true, there was nothing to fix. It might be "very common" among HN readers (though I'll bet they skew more urban than you're suggesting), but it really is "somewhat common" nationwide.
And the distinction isn't irrelevant, because this isn't just a parochial HN-reader concern - turf covers roughly 2% of US land. Not all of that is lawns, and not all of those lawns are legally constrained, but as I tried to demonstrate, the total amount is significant. I'm not objecting to the point that this situation has heavy demographic skew, I'm objecting to the implication that it isn't widespread.
In all seriousness, if anyone tells you you can't have a thriving eco system in your yard, fight them on every level. Manicured lawns should be outlawed, not encouraged.
That said, since the drought, there are thousands of dead lawns, and I've never seen these laws enforced.
Sometimes those can be even worse. I lived in a town of 300 growing up, and we often had to deal with the mayor's wife and occasionally the mayor himself coming to our door to tell us we were in violation of some lawn ordinance or another. This is particularly obnoxious considering that the only way to even look up town ordinances is to go to the other side of the county to view the documents at the county office.
This isn't SV specific DC, NYC or pretty much any other large city has a slow drip exodus of upper middle class people from it's suburbs to the less stifling suburbs of some other city with similar results.
Edit: Context: He's a permaculture farmer (one of the first), and has a really compelling solution to modern agriculture, in my opinion.
Of course later we drove by as they were all dying, not quite as dazzling a display lol That noted, I am all for this!
I've seen various flying insects more than a hundred miles out to sea but I accept that not all insects fly.
Not just dumb: as far as biological life goes those trimmed lawns are pretty close to dead useless land.
Now, you don't even need the bags of flower seeds though it helps. Just mow your lawn + remove biomass only twice a year. At max 3, if you've been using fertilizer in the past, or down to 1 if the soil has gotten rid of most nutritients: by cutting grass and removing it you remove nutritients so the fast-growing plants (grasses, nettles, ...) get less of a chance while the slower growing ones (amongst which a lot of wild flowers are, as wel as plants which used to be common before mass-scale agricultuter but are now rare because they don't get a chance mostly due to the abdundance of nitrogen deposition) will florish. For maximum ecological results you'll also leave certain pieces untouched for a year (some butterflies/files/spiders need long grass to survive winter). Do this for a couple of years and your once neatly trimmed green piece of land will turn into an actually valuable piece of colourful nature. I realize this is not for everyone, e.g. it's not an ideal place to play football or teach your kids how to ride their bike, but if you have the chance it's worth giving it a shot.
An ideal tool for applying the above principle is the scythe. It has several advantages over machines like mowers and weedwackers: you learn how to use a nice tool which does not burn fossil fuel, makes no noise except from a satisfying 'swoosh', is relatively cheap yet will likely outlive you. Depending on how you use it it can be a tai-chi-like moment of peace to start the day, or you gan go full-on and treat it as your work-out instead of going to the gym. And in the end it is less work than keeping grass trimmed throughout the growing season (unless you have a robotic mower, or vast amounts of land): mowing/raking for a couple of hours twice a year doesn't even come close to the amount of time I see my neighbours running around with all their mowing devices bi-weekly even though I have more grass to cut than they have.
I'll still want some lawn to play ball and such, but I'm all for keeping some wilder areas in the corners, let whichever flowers want to grow, grow there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukZA4Y7usQk
But in all seriousness, yes.. lawns are evil. Created in Victorian Britain to demonstrate wealth.. "look at me, I can afford to have un-productive land". I try to minimise them as much as possible on my 1.5 acre lot. Veggie gardens, mushroom logs, wetland and lots of dead wood as in the video
That all said, I keep a couple of hives, this might be the last year. For the last couple of year my otherwise very healthy hives have collapsed around this very time of year, I just noticed one wasn't doing well all of a sudden.
Roughly when everyone is putting stuff on their lawns for winter, especially the golf course a 1/4 mile away. I know correlation is not causation but it's an unusual time for hives to fail, they've been working all summer building up and it is this point that they are their strongest.
Frankly, my feeling has been for a while that we, as a species, are at the end of our golden age.
"EU report on weedkiller safety copied text from Monsanto study"
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/15/eu-repor...
So ten years ago when I was 20, I had the chance to go with my rich old friend-boss to a relatively high-end restaurant. He called a noodle dish -- I have eaten the same dish -- that cold noodle with shrimp paste (which smells pungent but tastes good) -- for hundreds of times in my life and I didn't expect anything different. But before we started, the waitress brought up a bottle that has a small pipette and dropped a little drop to the paste. The aroma was warm and fuzzy like how you would think of the cinnamon apple juice for a cold day. When I tasted the same dish, it tasted so warm, so rich, and so aromatic. But that's about as good as words get because it was unlike anything I have had in my life. It transformed the dish and my experience to another level of existence. It was that little bug that made me appreciate the food, my life, and the little heritage in the little country, where, honestly, not a lot of things really made sense. But definitely, that little drop of oil does make a lot of sense.
Fast forward one year ago, life has been so much easier to me. Food is abundant, but I sometimes miss that little dish. I asked my parents if they could get some of the ca cuong oil to me, even if it's expensive (as it always has been believed). They tried then replied that they couldn't source the oil, no one sells it. Further researching revealed to me that the little insect has gone practically extinct and it is now illegal to catch them. I want to believe that it wasn't me that contributed to it, but maybe I did. It was more widely believed, however, that the widespread use of pesticide and insect-resistant rice has pushed the little insect to extinction in just a matter of 10-15 years.
The day I figured that out, I feel died a little bit inside. I feel something was lost when I, and many people around me, was busy pursuing. I am now doing work that has a lot to do with biology, and I go to talks of people having that little spiel with how our challenge for the 8-billion people world is food security. I heard PhD students and faculty talking about how great is insect-resistant plants. The scientists in large agree with the assertion that GMOs aren't harmful. My friends would go great lengths to defend GMOs on their blogs and facebook statuses. They are all hardcore, hardworking, real scientists with good intents. I tend to believe smart people meant goodwill.
Still, the world marches forward for whatever it marches forward for, little insects that eat human's food be damned.
My seven-year-old daughter has never been stung. My ten-year-old son claims he was stung once, but I'm not sure I believe him. By the time I was ten years old, I had been stung at least a dozen times. (I can still remember some of the particular stings, just due to the severity of the swelling.)
This strikes me as odd, and in the context of this paper, frightening.
If you're in the US, we have a great conservation organization for invertebrates that is doing great work on both habitat revival and pesticide reduction, and receives not nearly enough donations: https://xerces.org/
I'm not sure how useful the knowledge is at this late stage. Turning things around would require changes of a pace and scale that we have no idea how to motivate and coordinate. Fork and done, I reckon.
- denier (perhaps the happiest group)
- defeatist (I recycle and cycle to work, but what can I do? I'm just one person, its all so bad, I'm depressed)
- activist (I'm going to do something about this now, they can't do this to my children)
I think one of the biggest problems facing us on climate change is somehow making better use of people who care than letting them fall into defeatist mode.
Trust me, even taking small actions against an impossibly large problem feels about 1000 times better than sitting there wringing your hands over it.
What are some things that you are doing?
I don't mean to suggest that I have The Best strategy or tactic that you should deploy right now. These are hard problems we're talking about, and my long-term aims are plotted over 10-30 year timescales, and realistically the chances of achieving those are very tiny. I pursue a political approach because that's where my knowledge and skills seem likely to have the most effect.
I'm not sure that we need to necessarily go back to pre-industrial lifestyles in some sort of neo-primitivism movement. Perhaps I'm wrong and this will be forced upon us, but I believe that our capacities for invention and redeployment of our resources make it possible to change direction as a species. That has never been done before, and it will be fearfully difficult, even dangerous. But I prefer failure to passivity.
I've mentioned the 'deep green resistance' group partly because this thread is focused on ecology and partly because it's a good overview of the different theories and techniques of activism. Maybe if I were talking to one of the authors I'd get castigated for being too focused on political considerations and not putting the environmental issue at front and center of my efforts. But that's where my bets are placed for the time being.
It's a shame so much political activism is protest rather than construction. That's probably inevitable given the configuration of political power and the sheer speed of the destruction (locally for example I certainly don't want the Adani lunacy to go ahead). And protest can develop community which can be a usefully subversive form of construction. But there's something slightly unsatisfying there, and it doesn't suit everyone's predispositions.
Lets assume we're going to survive climate change. After all, we have to.
And lets assume we're going to survive it without needing to go back to our pre-industrial lifestyles:
- we're going to drive around in our EVs, charged from renewable sources
- we're going to sit at home playing video games and living in VR (because that's a nice energy efficient way to spend our days)
- we'll hopefully have access to modern medicine and the other benefits of our existing economy
I think once we start viewing survival from climate change more positively, we can start making better decisions.
For example, if we're going to survive, do we want to do so inside some sealed dome, hooked up to a desalination plant, where our day jobs are manually pollinating the few species of plant that have survived?
Or do we aspire for nature to remain at least somewhat intact, and for our plants to be pollinated in the current way - magically, by insects?
They're rhetorical questions of course. I hardly expect you to come up with a solution for the globe's ills (hats off to you if you can; I certainly don't have a clue). But the exclusive focus on climate change is itself one of the biggest dangers we face. It tempts with the prospect of a narrow technical fix while leaving current ideologies and institutions intact. We know where that road leads, with or without further climate change (in addition to that already locked in).
But I feel we might make more progress if we can tell people that they will be able to keep playing their video games, rather than have to fall back to some peasant existence where they till fields from dawn to dusk.
Because we do have technology on our side, we will need to travel, and its impossible to imagine us living in anything other than a capitalist structure where people are still working, enjoying themselves, competing with others. Even if its competing for the best quarters within the biodome rather than the biggest beachfront house.
I feel that talk of the death of "current ideologies and institutions" is probably scary to many, and (I don't know if you're suggesting this) starting from the point of having to stop all economic growth will alienate many.
> (I don't know if you're suggesting this) starting from the point of having to stop all economic growth
I sort of am, except that I put "economic growth" in scare quotes not as a childish jibe, but because I believe it is a fiction. The 'growth' is just a transfer of matter from living ecologies to dead technologies. A certain amount of that could clearly have been managed, but as (from most accounts) we're already roughly at 200-300% of the earth's carrying capacity, degrowth (ie. reducing matter transfer out of real complex ecologies so they can re-establish themselves) is now the only thing that could save us. And it won't happen, presumably.
Facebook as one example has seen enormous growth. Was it bad for the planet? (apart from the incalculable cost of being an attack vector against the more easily manipulated members of society, leading to an anti-environmental administration).
Maybe not. Facebook users sit quietly, hunched over their phones, sipping small amounts of energy. Comparing them to someone who drives their 4WD for a hobby, they look good.
There was much talk in the 90s of decoupling economic growth from 'resource use' (sorry about the scare quotes again: I also think the term 'resource' masks a related myth). There were even individual companies that claimed to be getting there (eg. IIRC a carpet company that leased carpets to offices so they could control the whole lifespan?).
But evolution has had millions of years to explore state spaces using recycling. Carpet companies notwithstanding, on a planetary scale I doubt we can do it any more efficiently than evolved systems do, without developing systems of comparable complexity. And we're clearly centuries (at least) away from being up to that, and we don't have centuries to play with.
> I do recognize that it's not enough and we all need to basically go back pre-industrial lifestyles to really make enough of a change to matter.
Bah. Charge a dollar per kg of carbon released and the problem will almost solve itself. It's much more a problem of political will than it is a problem of technical capability.
Sorry, if humanity allows it to come as far as requiring mineshafting for pure self-inflicted ecological overexploitation, it does not deserve survival.
Things like electricity, the automobile, air travel and the internet went from nonexistent to universal in developed countries in phenomenally short time spans. Renewable energy appears to be following a similar trajectory, leaving all the estimates in the dust and emerging faster than most people realize or can keep track of. Fast enough? Well, we'll find out. But at this point you can't say it's slow.
Oh, hey, thats about the same "phenomenally short time span" that everything started going to shit.
Too late for that. And I don't see anyone offering easy answers.
But pretending that what's happening in the real world isn't happening, or frantically waving totems of electronic consumer satisfaction about, won't make those physical realities go away.
But everyone wants to live on an island of asphalt with a sterile, depression patch of grass in front, at least three miles away from the nearest place to buy a cup of coffee (a disposable cup, natch).
Actually, not everyone does, but those who do, made it illegal to build anything else. At least in the US.
... I love how the cliche environmentalists worldview is to reduce these problems to entirely the result personal choice. As if consumers chose petroleum as the most efficient and widespread fuel in the earth's crust, and the combustion engine, then decided they wanted highways and suburbs, etc. Instead of thousands of small choices over a century (or more) based on circumstance, central planning, present needs, etc - things largely out of their control. Combined with other biological human flaws like short term thinking and favouring political populism and emotion when voting/buying.
Not to mention, the widespread adoption of suburbs was not a product of market capitalism or consumerism... it was the result of government zoning and regulatory policy:
https://www.amazon.com/Zoned-Out-Regulation-Transportation-M...
You may be convinced and have deep knowledge of the subject but it's far from common knowledge. Understanding of climate issues is very low and it's not entirely the result of ignorance or malice or compromise because someone loves having a big lawn.
I tried to educate myself on the subject, I love to read, but even I found it difficult to find good books on the subject, specifically books that were balanced and scientific instead of sounding like the ravings of an ideologue.
I've asked on HN for book recommendations on climate change multiple times and each time I've been pointed to websites with dry 150 page reports by non-profit organizations. It's far from easy to know better.
Firstly: climate change is only one of the problems caused by a culture based almost entirely on the ecocidal fantasy of stolen-from-the-future 'economic growth'. We are losing topsoil at a dizzying pace. Fresh water is disappearing. The habitats on which natural systems depend are being ripped apart. Novel substances are being created and released into our air, water and land with unknown consequences. Climate change is a single crisis piled upon multiple others. Case in point: Australia's Queensland inner reefs are almost completely gone, and the outer reefs have only a few decades left. Causes: multiple, from nutrient-rich agricultural runoff (largely from pointless vanity sugar cane production), to wholesale destruction of coastal ecosystems including mangroves, which are crucial nurseries for many reef fish. Increasing ocean temperatures deal the final blow to already critically weakened ecosystems. This is our planet in miniature. Climate change isn't the problem. It's yet another symptom of the same fundamental dynamic, delivered as just the latest and largest of a series of blows many ecosystems will not survive.
Secondly: the changes needed are not only (and perhaps not primarily) technological. They require planetary coordination and cooperation to handle on political and social levels, and the defeat of a crazed unthinking ideology of unhindered 'economic growth'. Fundamental changes of attitude and societal organisation need to be agreed upon in the next few decades, and implemented without delay. Yet we can't even agree on obvious tiny measures like removing nuclear weapons, and rogue wealthy nations resist nearly every attempt to do anything meaningful about any of the critical issues. We just don't know how to do what's needed, and there are no solutions on the horizon. And we are still locked into fantasies of national government and sovereignty, despite being (factually & physically) a global civilisation.
Look at the political convulsions happening now as a consequence of current worldwide refugee crises. But that's minuscule compared to what's coming. Imagine what happens when ocean level rises cause two billion refugees to seek somewhere to live. Given our level of global immaturity, what do you think will happen? It will be all wars and walls. And our capability, in the midst of such convulsions, to make (and keep) difficult international agreements? Nil.
I'd absolutely love to be wrong. But all physical and social indicators are pointing in the same direction.
I suspect that crispinb deems something much more paradigmatic necessary than just a bit of reprorization in economic policies and everybody using less plastic bags. Some paradigm shifts are so big that it is very difficult to even think about them loudly without getting universally shunned.
What if, for example, you are convinced that for long term planetary survival (on a level that can support the human species), individualistic basic human rights will have to occasionally take a second place? That's what tyranny is made of, but that's also what desperate measures are made of. You won't win any popularity contests with that...
> individualistic basic human rights will have to occasionally take a second place?
One could argue that this is the case right now. That the lack of protection of individual human rights is what got us into this mess. It wasn't individuals in communities that asked for their lands to be taken by a wealthy few or by corporations, to be used for generating profit through environmental destruction. Many people actively struggled against the acquisition and destruction of local ecological habitats. They were a majority opposing a small few powerful people or businesses. But the "individual rights" of those few were valued more and now the many must suffer the consequences...
Yes everything leads to that question: How can a problem of global scaled be solved, if it seems to be almost impossible to make some progress domestically?
I think I begin to see what the "solution" is going to be like.
The good news is: The planet is not going to die. The bad news: I guess you not gonna like the solution.
I'm convinced that in 10-20 we are going to live much more eco friendly. It will become much more expensive to waste natural resources. But as a downside of this we will loose a lot of personal freedom. Our highly individualized society will come to an end and we will live in a much more controlled environment.
Harmfull behaviour will either be punished with legal sanctions (like corruption) or in some form of social disaproval.
TLDR: In the next 20 we will see a greener but also more unfree world.
Over the last year, reading the news had made me more passive and worried. I want to dedicate a slice of time to doing something to solve the problem, but I'm not certain if there's anything pragmatic to be done against big areas of environmental concern like this, global warming, ocean acidity, and etc.
Have a read on the Bronze age collapse - when the global economy collapses, the main danger won't be environmental but due to human migration. In a functioning economy I'm very liberally minded towards freedom of movement (and in fact this lessens the danger I'm describing), but in a collapse, global inequality will come back to haunt the developed world in an apocalyptic fashion.
1) Japan's population is falling and I expect it to have fallen further, maybe to half or two thirds of current, until a global economical collapse.
2) There are ways to heavily increase the land use intensity with modern technology, which I'd expect to happen when the situation gets dicey. The Netherlands are a good example of how this can be done, essentially green houses everywhere. The actual bottleneck is how much energy you have, not the amount of land - Japan has lots of space in the sea for wind and solar energy, plus lots of unused geothermal.
See how almost everyone's reply to the original post has a different recommendation? If they all worked hard to make those things happen, there would be a symphony of screams and no consensus and effective action. It's possible the right answer isn't even in there. It's possible the right answer even is, "Oops, wasn't a problem." When you act in uncertainty you make things worse.
Yes, getting the right answer is hard. It may take a good chunk of a lifetime. If you really want to change the world for the better, though, it's not a step you can skip. Saving the world over lunch while you're young is a fantasy.
You're never going to persuade everyone. There are people who know how dirty fossil fuels are, how risky pollutants are, and so on. They know that research costs money and that preserving a healthy environment will require major changes - and they don't care. Maybe because they're old and bitter, maybe because they're selfish and figure they'll ride it out while the rest of the world goes to hell, maybe because they have a death wish. You're never going to convert that group, and in fact they'll oppose you every step of teh way because they're assholes. Too bad.
The large mass of uncommitted people in the middle want to be told what to do, and the best way to tell them is to lead by example. You don't have to rush out and start dismantling pipelines, but you do have to do something - whether that's raising awareness, embarrassing a political opponent in public, blocking the loading of chemicals you've decided are especially toxic, establish a weekly neighborhood cleanup crew or whatever.
Carrying on with your own life while waiting for something you can just vote or donate to is not working very well, is it? I don't mean that as a criticism of you, but of the system that purports to offer you environmental policy as a set of consumption choices that you can choose and feel good about. I've been doing recycling and conscious consumption and 1-1 advocacy for maybe 30 years. Those efforts are great, but we're not going to conserve our way out of the problem any more than you can become wealthy by saving a few $ a week. You can outsource it by making donations to organizations you approve of, but let's be honest here, unless you can throw large sums of money at a cause on a rolling basis you might as well be flinging quarters at an oncoming steamroller. Devoting some of your time and labor and investing a bit of your capital if you can is more likely to be effective, because people are primarily motivated by the example of others. And you need to think boldly, or you won't have any impact.
Of course people who are predisposed to study and able to do so should consider academic routes. But we already have lots of highly qualified scientists, while the head of the Environmental Protection Agency likes to do photo opportunities with coal miners to show he's not a creature of the evil science lobby. There is a political conflict here and it needs activists as well as researchers, because just having the correct answer isn't enough.
Do not do something. Do something effective.
To suppose that the insect biomass is reduced because of problems with the environment, and that doing good things for the environment will help fix it, is sloppy, superstitious thinking. Will recycling help? Dunno. Will establishing a neighborhood cleanup crew help? Seems unlikely. Will raising awareness help? Only if it serves to better identify the problem or uncover a real solution.
Back when leaded gasoline was poisoning everyone, no amount of recycling, environmental advocacy, neighborhood cleanup, embarrassing politicians, etc., would have helped. The problem had to be understood well enough that people could be persuaded to agree to act in concert to solve it specifically and at great cost. This takes time and study.
Nature is not a moral agent. It will not heal and be kind simply because we act piously toward it. We must understand problems in the specific and fix them in the specific. If you want to help with this insect biomass thing, begin by studying it. Is it really happening? Is it really a problem? What is the cause? Then ask what we can do. Then try to persuade people to do it.
You can't skip steps. It sucks that it takes time and effort, it sucks that you can't just solve everything overnight, but it is the only way to be an agent of effective positive change rather than an agent of chaos.
I am committed to acting vigorously on problems that I know are real, in ways that I am convinced are effective. There is plenty of that to go around!
I don't care about insect biomass in particular. I care about it as a possibly-wrong indicator of general environmental degradation, of which we have numerous indicators. I also have a possibly-wrong model of the root causes of this and other problems.
You can't skip steps. It sucks that it takes time and effort, it sucks that you can't just solve everything overnight, but it is the only way to be an agent of effective positive change rather than an agent of chaos.
You can't solve everything overnight, but you can lose everything overnight while you're fretting over whether a problem exists or vacillating over its severity or dithering between a multiplicity of unpleasant solutions. An ounce of practice is worth a pound of theory, and my exhortations to act, which will sometimes lead to unproductive or ineffective results, are the product of decades of observation and thought.
I'm sorry that this doesn't lead to a neatly wrapped General Unified Theory of Sustainable Sociopolitical Development - because I too would love to have a verifiable roadmap to a brighter future - but chaos is preferable to predictably circling down into a drain. Overall, I have concluded that the world is getting shittier, that this trend is accelerating, and that the costs of your gradualist approach exceed the benefits.
- so many people don't understand statistics or science and
- some beekeepers in Germany wrote a paper. Here's one of the original papers: https://www.farmlandbirds.net/sites/default/files/Orbrioch%2...
The 75% decline number appears to be from two data points from a 220-acre plot.
- People panic, post it here and everywhere else, presuming that:
- proper scientific methodology was used and
- what applies to a 220-acre plot in the German hinterlands must apply to the whole world.
I suppose reducing spending and food waste is one way an individual can help.
Or for specific problems like insects, if you have a lawn, don’t use pesticides, and cultivate areas of local plants. Grass only lawns aren’t very helpful for insects.
Eat less meat (huge environmental impact!), bike more, don't consume as much non-local food, etc.
I don’t know if it ever happen, but we really should support capture fisheries, fish farms, and captured game.
Properly Managed Captured Fisheries (Mostly more prosperous nations have well managed fisheries, outstanding fisheries would be in Alaska & New Zealand) allow us to extract protien we all need without destroying ecosystems. Same goes for captured game but that scales significantly worse.
Fish farms are in a unique position because unlike farming animals on land, it can be done without radically changing the part of the ocean the fish are farmed in.
I think recently there have been some problems with fish farms and antibiotic / illness spreading but I really think these can be overcome and that long term aquaculture would be the most environmentally conscious option. (In a similar position to electric cars today).
I guess if you HAVE to eat meat that is a better option, but we don't need it anymore. Its such an inefficient way to get calories and its not as nutritious as plant substitutes.
Fish farms are a little like farming rabbits in packed, huge fenced in areas.
You get a lot of disease, use a lot of medicine and antibiotics - and get a lot of feces. And escaped, diseased rabbits that breed in the wild.
Fish farms on land are likely better - but at any rate, fish farms are far from being without environmental impact.
Better to avoid monocultures by buying organic/biodynamic, shopping at farmers' markets, CSA, growing your own food, etc. Eat less processed and make more from scratch. Better health, better for the environment, and you can still enjoy meat :)
When I visited Manhattan/Brooklyn recently I didn't get the sense that they were lacking in locally-sourced foods either. Main problem I can think of are food deserts, but those are more of an economic problem than scale. When I used to live in one in Baltimore though it was possible to find local food, it just took more effort.
> growing your own food
I should have quoted that directly in my original comment.
> don't consume as much non-local food
http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2015/06/the_biggest_myt...
What the article is asserting and what the science shows is that even if you have Avacados being grown literally next door the environmental impact of buying them locally is often higher than shipping them from abroad.
For example, the SGU podcast they link to [1] (around 55m:50s in) discusses that the net environmental impact (carbon emissions) of shipping beef to the UK from New Zealand is less than consuming UK beef in the UK. So if you're an environmentally conscious UK consumer you should be spending extra to buy NZ beef instead of buying locally produced beef.
This is because the carbon impact of the transportation generally hovers around 10%, which leaves the other 90% for actually producing the product "locally", and some locations on earth are vastly more efficient by every environmental metric in growing certain crops or raising certain livestock.
From the podcast: "An acre of land in Idaho can produce twice the amount of potatoes as an acre of land in Kansas".
Which leaves two reasons to buy locally.
Firstly you may be living in one of the places that's efficient at producing a given product, e.g. you'd buy local beef in New Zealand instead of importing it from the UK.
Secondly there are certain products that don't ship well, e.g. heirloom tomatoes. There you simply don't have the option of buying anything except local varieties.
“environmental impact” and “carbon emissions” are not the same thing; the latter is a very limited subset of the former.
I put "carbon emissions" in parentheses there because the reason for this "buy local" fallacy to begin with is because people intuitively assume that it's the transportation of the good that makes all the difference, when the reality is that that's just 1/10 of the cost.
The environmental impact of the transportation is almost exclusively carbon emissions.
No, most of the environmental impacts of agricultural productions besides carbon emissions are still externalities, usually time-shifted, that aren't priced into the product.
This is what puts me into the defeatist group. As long as people won't even put their reproductive urges in question (and rather discuss how flying is bad), how are we even supposed to achieve anything ? This should be one of the first logical moves, yet it's so frowned upon it's never brought up. Depressing.
I see it the opposite. Only if I change can I expect or hope anyone else will.
My list includes:
- Flying less
- Driving less
- Eating low on the food chain
- Avoiding packaged food
- Owning and acquiring less stuff
... things like that.
My life has never been better. I wish I had started this change decades earlier.
http://gscleanenergy.blogspot.com/2013/04/how-much-gas-does-...
I posted about it here -- https://www.inc.com/joshua-spodek/365-days-without-flying.ht..., although my views have continued to evolve since then -- and on my blog.
But it's not enough, right? We're completely dependent on cheap sources of fossil fuels to drive our economy. How much carbon is released in the atmosphere from just me eating food?
Flying 5000 KM apparently produces approximately 1 ton of CO2. The 2010 rate average CO2 footprint per capita was about 7 tons a year, and the goal by 2050, if we mean to have a reasonable chance of keeping warming by 2100 to less than 2 degrees centigrade from pre-industrial levels, is a bit over 2 tons. So if you fly at all, making a conscious decision to fly less will help.[1]
Yes, the requirements to meet that goal of sub-2-degree warming by 2100 are pretty severe.
[1]http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/carbon-targets-for-your-footp...
This makes no logical sense. Only if I fly to the moon can I ever expect anyone else too? Some things require collective action at the government level.
For the US you have a lot of work to do before you have a moderately decent working political system.
I'm not sure it will catch on fast....
More seriously, we need to be pursuing sustainable agricultural practices. I believe that means treating crop fields as the complex microbiomes that they should be, instead of highly-tilled, species-restricted biomes. Read up on how no-till and low-till farming practices change the soil communities of worms and microbes. It's huge. We need to move away from heavy reliance on pesticide and herbicide for the health of the soil and environment neighboring the fields, not to mention our own.
The thing is, we got to heavy chemical agriculture in part because of a drive to lower fuel consumption by making fewer passes over the field doing mechanical weed disruption. Of course, mechanical weed disruption is the kind of tillage that disrupts the soil biome, so we shouldn't go back, anyway, even if you could magically make diesel fuel cost $0. We need a new way forward to feed a hungry planet in a sustainable fashion.
Now deliciously enriched with 35% more of weedkillers
Pesticide resistant super bugs could probably breed and eat all our crops in no time.
I wonder if we could infuse it with some Octopus brain matter? Also, I'd like it to have the ability to remember across generations, but Octopus probably already do this.
Build a time machine, and instill this sense of dismay, terror, and dawning realization into everyone then.
Barring that, a series of technological miracles would help, but we needed them yesterday.
Don’t have kids.
Yep, stop focusing on the movie-style end-of-the-world apocalypse, where it's just you and your guns versus the raiders. Instead of planning what you're going to do when it all turns to crap, do stuff now. In short, fix the world you're in, rather than planning for a world which really isn't going to happen.
Talking to politicians is the first thing you can do - if they don't hear the noise, they're never going to do anything about it, and they're the decision-makers. Change your behaviours as other commentators have stated. Talk to your friends so they at least have heard the issue.
But don't pretend that you're going to go off into the woods and survive like in a movie - if society ever did go that far, then you're fucked anyway - no doctors, no hospitals, no emergency services, no entertainment, no travel, so on and so forth. Few of us are actually comfortable with the idea of living permanently off the land (those survival rations won't last very long).
Edit: Also, a simple step: leave parts of your lawn unmowed for a full year. This gives insects and certain endangered birds much needed habitat in what is otherwise a wasteland of suburbian lawns.
Where I live, the city has the power to abate nuisances, which involves notifying the property owner with a period of time given to bring the cited issue into compliance. If the property owner fails to correct the issue, city workers correct it and the property owner is billed an (outrageous) hourly rate, minimum 1 hour.
That said, "Florida friendly landscaping" (creating a yard that can adequately handle Florida's natural irrigation, which is not necessarily grass oriented) has been steadily growing in support. In fact, it's actually illegal for an HOA to prevent a Florida friendly landscape (https://www.volusia.org/core/fileparse.php/4163/urlt/HOAs.pd...), although in practice a lot of HOAs still enforce a "thou must have a large thirsty St. Augustine grass front lawn" code.
Serious question: Did you only get serious with news reading in the last year or so?
- Moved closer to work to minimize driving
- Take the train downtown (on nights out)
- Bike to work on occasion (it's a huge freaking hill)
- Bought programmable thermostats, LED bulbs, vent louvres. Dropped electric use 20%
- Eat organic (helps my IBS), cook at home, buy in bulk, freeze
- Started composting and recycling more. My city has good programs for such
- Ask for paper bags at grocery store, avoid plastics. Use glass storage containers, etc
Note, though this won't scale, you need to take political action to make a real change.
Yes it will. If everyone does it that's called scaling.
Find or form a group in your area, consider dumping or downgrading your existing career which may well be meaningless anyway, and take up activism. At least you won't be subject to suffocating feelings of futility and guilt. Start tomorrow, it'll take you a year or two of work to figure out your new job so you'd better get busy with it.
I'd recommend reading earth first! or black and green press for some better politics on a similar wavelength
Now it rarely happens.
And with the last 2 cars I've had, I know it's not an aerodynamic issue because one of my hobbies is to do track days.
I go to Michelin's wet track something like once a year and it's bugs' paradise: fields, grass all around and very humid because the track is wet so you can hydroplane easily. Bottom line is my car gets plastered there and we don't even drive that fast (something like 80/90 km/h or 50/55 mph).
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/where-have-all-insect...
Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14323533
They mention it as a potential cause, but did no research to that effect and even state they made no attempt to measure such things.
It's working, but perhaps a little too well?
It's a policy that should be scrapped in spite of the risk of West Nile and Lyme Disease.
Why? They're not spraying some broad-spectrum pesticide.
In the Pacific Northwest, on the coast of Olympic National Park, (Ruby Beach, Kalaloch, etc) 30 years ago (when I was a kid) the beaches were teaming with seagulls. On a given day you would see hundreds.
The last two years I've taken my own kids there, we are lucky to see even 1 seagull each day.
Maybe it's something else, heck maybe there was an open garbage pit 30 years ago and it's since been closed, but as discussed, most of these ecological changes (even human caused) are too slow for individual humans to detect.
So thought I'd share my own anecdote :P
I have been in Japan during summer this year and (gotten used to the central-European ecosystems where the data for this paper has been collected) was surprised by the amount of insects and especially butterflies, which I had rarely seen for years. Is this just the climate (which also grows some giant insects) or could there be something different at play?
Still happens for me in Romania. In fact, I've just noticed it today after an 8-hour trip in my car through half of the country. Could be caused by the fact that we're not that "advanced" when it comes to use of insecticides.
Don’t know if you’ve ever read this, but here you go: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima
I deem probable that civilisation collapses before 2020, and almost certain before 2030. What's your bet?
But I'm not sure that's the end of civilization.. in terms of energy the EU goal is 20% renewable by 2020. Some countries are already at 40% of electricity.
There is a lot of work to do, but it's not game over yet.
Just like the fall of the Roman Empire has been dated to some more or less arbitrary date, but actually was a many years process, actually beginning a century or more before the point we date the "event"; and for people of the time, the Empire wasn't actually dead before several decades at least (and Justinian failure to capture back Rome).
So we date the "fall of Roman Empire" to september the 4th, 476; but it was in the making for a century, and wasn't a done deal for another century. Similarly, the "fall of the thermo-industrial civilisation" or "American Empire" or whatever else we'll call it will be set up to some day at some later date in the future.
I think we can solve it like this: if the S&P 500 drops below 50% of today's value (which is 2,562, so the trigger number is 1281), I'll send you $100 immediately, which is hopefully enough time to use that money for buying survival supplies before everything collapses. If that hasn't happened by January 1, 2020, you donate $100 to GiveWell[1].
It's an imperfect measure - I might accidentally lose it due to a nuclear war, but you still might pointlessly win it in a world where the collapse happens extremely quickly, and have a worthless $100 if I'm even still alive and able to use PayPal. But maybe it's good enough?
Want to take that bet, or suggest something else?
-- Walter Benjamin
My wife hates spiders in the house, but I love them - they take care of all the other critters I hate more, and they are interesting little buggers, especially the jumping spiders and wolf spiders.
Maybe our romantic adoration could be rediscovered if we admitted more things as being 'natural'? People, too, provide a kind of undergrowth, and their greater structures form some very fetching accretions.
Planet is doomed :(
bitcoin is literally drop in the bucket.
Here's one of the original papers: https://www.farmlandbirds.net/sites/default/files/Orbrioch%2...
The 75% decline number appears to be from two data points from a 220-acre plot. From that paper:
"What follows is a description of measured Insect-Biomasses from samples collected in the Orbroich Bruch Nature Reserve, near Krefeld, using Malaise Insect Traps. The results show that, in the same two areas, sampled in the years 1989 and 2013, there was a dramatic fall in the number of flying insects. Using the same traps, in the same areas, significant reductions of insect populations, of more than 75%, were found. Our data confirms, that in the areas studied, less than 25% of the original number of flying insects collected in 1989, were still present in 2013."
"The Orboicher Bruch, to the Northwest of Krefeld, is a designated Nature Reserve of around 100 hectares (220 acres). Due to the reserve’s relatively remote location and its rugged landscape, intensive farming came to the area only recently."
So alarmists are extrapolating from two data points (years 1989 and 2013) for a 220-hectare plot of German farmland to the entire world. I think that is a bit of a stretch, even for statistics.
since different bugs breed in different seasons, and numbers depend on the fruitfulness of previous generations, food supply, predation, disease, temperature and so on, this bug weight could vary considerably from year to year (or site to site) for any number of reasons. While one year cicadas thrive, the next year there may be none. Shocking, simply shocking!
BTW they're measuring the weight of dead bugs - not how many bugs or what species of bugs - just the weight of bugs. Actually they're not even measuring that, they're measuring the weight of dead bugs' soaked in 70-80% alcohol.
I could go on and on about controls in statistical experiments but I think you get the idea.
See the original HN posting for discussions pointers to the earlier papers.
Actually the study is couched in a lot of careful caveats and they _don't_ extrapolate to the rest of the world. I didn't see any extrapolation. And, if you read the actual article that you linked above, a decline of 2/3 from 1970 was measured in Scotland. That's corroborating evidence that ought to be carefully considered.
> Actually they're not even measuring that, they're measuring the weight of dead bugs' soaked in 70-80% alcohol.
Are you f'in serious? You don't even trust them to be able to properly factor out the weight of alcohol? That's not being critical, that's just disbelief.
> I could go on and on about controls in statistical experiments but I think you get the idea.
I think it's easy to throw out such statements on HN but I think you get the idea.
Others are using the article as support for far-fetched claims. AFAICT a 220-acre study in the hinterlands of Germany with two data points (two samples, one in 1989 and one in 2013) is causing worldwide headlines claiming a collapse of bug population:
https://www.google.com/search?&q=75%25+decline+over+27+years
titzer sez: " You don't even trust them to be able to properly factor out the weight of alcohol?"
You missed my point: My point was that they measure the weight of a mass of unclassified insects + alcohol + whatever else was in the trapping fluid and that they weren't presenting statistics based on insect count or insect species or insect age, health, etc. Beetles weight more than mosquitoes for example but we aren't being presented statistics for specific insect species/age/health/etc, we're being presented statistics for a mass of unclassified insects + absorbed alcohol + whatever else. Any gross measure of insect biomass is highly variable depending on bug species, population, location, predation, food supply, season, disease, etc. If you do your harvesting immediately after , say, the cicadas emerge, you'll get lots of insect biomass. Do it a six weeks later and the biomass will plummet precipitously. So you must design your experiments to take such possibilities into account.
titzer sez: "That's not being critical, that's just disbelief."
And that is a poor attempt at use of a broad brush to tar someone.
I _am_ skeptical of the studies, as any scientist should be. You may, like others, read confirmation from your car's front bumper, but I prefer experiments with proper controls and measurements when we're speaking of good science. And, of course, I am always wary of field experiments that may involve the use of ethyl (drinking) alcohol:
Hans: Sorry, Hauser, I yust panicked and ran. Does it hurt much? Hauser, Hauser, are you drunk???
Hauser: My hands are on fire. Zat's the last time I try to throw a hornets nest! Good thing we have a handy pain-killer available! Zis bug juice is hardly working though; zese stings are killing me! Pass me zat other bottle.
Hans: Scheiss, Hauser, you're drinking ze bugs from ze data collection!! Vat the hell we gonna use for data?
Hauser: Zis trip is a catastrophe! Scheiss! I know what! Ve can give the data to Schneider. He said he can prove anything with almost any data. Once he told me, Schneider told me, "ze less data, ze better!" He says no one pays attention to real statistics anymore.
Alarms have a very useful function: to alert you to impending danger. That's why it's useful to conduct fire drills and spend some time/money on tools and methods that you hope never to have to use, notwithstanding the cost of occasional false positives.
I've noticed that people who say 'oh you worry too much' are never around to help when things actually go wrong, so I pay increasingly little attention to drive-by naysayers.
There's a saying, "You don't have a bug problem, you have a lack of (insert appropriate bug predator here) problem."
It has to be disconterning to see these kind of changes.
Edited: there’s more with linked articles elsewhere in the thread that I just saw.
Yes ...
> total insect biomass using Malaise traps, deployed over 27 years in 63 nature protection areas in Germany
One impression I got was: For a place with some many water around, there were no mosquito and extremely quiet- no bird noise and no cricket noise at all.
Also, for a 1998 novel, it had a pretty decent future scenario of people somewhere around now using all-powerfull 'pads' for their web and mail and video chats and general computing.
However, because the area round us is rather hilly it is all low intensity cattle and sheep rearing. It's probably at least 15 kms (mostly over sea) to the nearest arable farming - who are presumably the heaviest users of insecticides.
Mind you finding a house we liked with a decent internet connection was very difficult.
[Weirdly we did find a house in rural Perthshire that had 450Mbps - full BT FTTP - but we didn't like the house!]
Sure, people defend all kinds of things with stupid arguments, but just because stupid arguments may be used to argue for something doesn't mean that other arguments are not correct.
http://www.businessinsider.com/butterflies-appear-on-weather...
is there really no non-apocalyptic perspective on this? consider: any other "apex" predator in history never stopped to research and ponder on effects of him demolishing the ecosystem.
the fact that this makes rounds in media and grabs attention and creates social pressure gives at least a glimmer of hope that something will be done about it.
if it's not too late.
Are there large enough areas of the country that you could control for areas that don't spray for mosquitos to see if the populations have also declined in those areas?
It wouldn't surprise me at all to find out that the spraying over the last 10 years to control the mosquito population due to the media induced West Nile panic followed by zika panic has contributed to this.
I'm wondering if there aren't environmental factors like the rise of plastics or other chemicals in the environment that are slowly degrading insect populations.
But I definitely remember fireflies being everywhere at my parents house and turning the sky into a shimmering display... and I rarely see more then a few fireflies at all these days.
Same with gnats, but I don't get nostalgic about those.
This is not the only study detailing this observation; several have been floating around for the past few years.
Lol. Go outside. Read about the success of the endangered species program. Stop living in fear