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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

> He pointed to the rapid disappearance of insect species around the world, including those that pollinate 75% of the world's crops, as a result of climate change and other pressures.

Hmm. Do those other pressures involve massive use of insecticides? Climate becoming warmer isn't about to stop insects; little blighters are resilient as an evolutionary approach. I'm sure wiping out a species is possible but a new one would pop up in no time to fill the gap if they aren't being actively exterminated.

Water and food crisises are not new risks. They are inevitable outcomes of population growth and variance in the supply chain. The evidence is that we are much better at dealing with such threats now than we were in the past because we have all this cheap energy we can use to recover.

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> Climate becoming warmer isn't about to stop insects

I don’t think this is right. A good friend of mine is a PhD Entomologist. I asked her about the article last year that talked about the global crash in insect populations _including_ some remote islands.

Clearly chemicals and habitat are huge issues, but she immediately said “probably climate change”.

That surprised me and she said a lot of insects have quite narrow temp ranges and timelines under which they can reproduce.

Looking at islands is a great way to test the idea. I hadn't considered that at all.

"Hmm. Do those other pressures involve massive use of insecticides? Climate becoming warmer isn't about to stop insects; little blighters are resilient as an evolutionary approach."

Insects on the whole are resilient. Specific pollinators aren't. Climate change is causing massive problems for insect life. Neonic pesticides are also devestating. Both are bad, and are not mutually exclusive. As a matter of fact, more pesticides are used as climate change stresses crops more and weakens them.

If the conditions are so harsh that no new pollinators can evolve then they are too harsh for plants to grow anyway (eg, desert conditions).

Plants have an evolutionary strategy where they give away food (nectar, fruits, etc) to any animal that is willing to help them reproduce. Evolutionary speaking; when free food is on the table there will be takers at any temperature.

How, if our crops are being routinely doused in horrific poisons designed to kill all insect life I can see why that might cause all insect life near humans to die off. Maybe I'm just being a cynic on that.

You have misconceptions about the time scale at which evolution occurs at. There is coevolution between plants and their pollinators. People study this https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5537349/

Neonicotinoids should be banned (among other compounds), but climate change will cause plant coextinctions.

> Evolutionary speaking; when free food is on the table there will be takers at any temperature.

However there speed of the change this time could be unprecedented for long enough that there's no time for new pollinators to evolve fast enough for us, humans interested in extremely short term results, compared to the time frames on which evolution works.

Crops are generally loving climate change though, as more food will be produced than with colder temperatures, so I don't think more pesticides will be used because of climate-change induced crop stress

>Crops are generally loving climate change though, as more food will be produced than with colder temperatures

This is not true.

"each degree-Celsius increase in global mean temperature would, on average, reduce global yields of wheat by 6.0%, rice by 3.2%, maize by 7.4%, and soybean by 3.1%." https://www.pnas.org/content/114/35/9326

Right - It's very rare that the availability of carbon is the limiting function in plant growth. You can force more greening by providing a higher-carbon environment but it's almost always other combinations of nutrients, sunlight, or water that limit plant growth.

This (above) is so simple minded, but please don't downvote it into oblivion, because such ignorance should be exposed and countered.

And yet... it’s true. It always amazes me the degree to which people become anti scientific in their dogmatic cheerleading for climate change advocacy.

Over the short term it's not though. The areas that were too cold to grow human foodstuffs that are becoming warm enough do not have sufficient biomass in the soil to immediately start being utilized in that way. Meanwhile many places that have sufficient biomass to be productive are having their water availability disrupted.

It will stabilize eventually, no question - it's the transitional period that's inconvenient.

Weeds are also loving climate change, so your conclusions are off.

That's not entirely true - if it were, most food would be grown in the tropics. Some climates suit some plants better than others.

You might get some benefits from a suitable climate moving into a fertile area, but equally you could get disastrous impacts from a suitable climate moving away from a fertile area.

You can see the impact of increased intensity of weather events on food availability already, for example, the horseradish crop failure this year means Burger King is out of Zesty Onion Dip until spring: https://dailygreenworld.com/2019/11/22/earth-changes/climate...

I think it’s important we don’t let confirmation bias muddy the discussion. It’s a trap I see is easily fall into, e.g., some uncommon weather event happens and we point the finger immediately to man-made climate change.

Inclement weather has been destroying crops since before the plow was invented.

The right way to look at extreme weather events in the climate change context is via Attribtion Science. Stated simplistically this looks at "how often would these kind of extremes happen in a world with normal normal levels of CO2" vs. "how often would they happen at current human-caused CO2 levels". If a certain extreme of heat-wave happens once every 10 years now, but would only happen once every 1000 years without human-contributed athmospheric CO2, than wouldn't that justify calling the extreme weather event in question as likely human-made?

Of course that depends on the availability of accurate climate models for the event in question.

Here is a non-paywalled text on the subject:

https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Papers/extreme_wea...

Some insects sure, cockroaches aren't going anywhere soon for example. But plenty of species exist only in a particular ecological niche for which a few degrees of average temperature change can absolutely seriously affect their population.

A goal of slowing down climate change is to keep current species from going extinct. It's about stability, not just continuity.

> Climate becoming warmer isn't about to stop insects

Maybe, maybe not. CO2 increases have been decreasing the amount of protein in pollen, requiring bees to forage with greater effort.

https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2016/Q2/rising-co2-...

So many issues here, but consider that the rate at which humanity is changing the planet is not commensurate with the rate of evolution and natural recovery.

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