When something like this is proposed, remember Mao's Four pests campaign.
The ecosystem is way too complex for us to understand. This might finish very badly.
The ecosystem is way too complex for us to understand. This might finish very badly.
Even if the ecosystem is too complex for us to understand now, that's not to say it's to complex to ever understand, and if we're ever to understand it, how should we go about that? Tests.
The human body was once considered too complex to understand. We may not know everything about the body, but we do know quite a bit, to the benefit of everyone alive today.
Caution is beneficial. Immediately discarding avenues of research and testing benefits because of incautious approaches of the past is not. This is not a case of people ignoring history repeating it, this is a case of people trying to learn from history and do it better next time, which is really the story of the human race.
Might this end badly? It's possible. None can say it isn't. Even if it does, I'm not sure that means this approach should be abandoned. The eventual benefit of what they are attempting, even if limiting it purely to what we might get from controlling some breeds of disease spreading mosquitos, is massive.
This is an act of eco-terrorism done by corporations. It shouldn't be treated better than oil spilling.
This is an absurd line of thinking. You can always make up some infinitesimally unlikely outcome for any action. The fact is mosquito-transmitted diseases are a real problem, the risks you are talking about are not.
There are many different ways and degrees of "badly". What you you thinking of when "ending badly" is mentioned? How accurate and likely is that an outcome? Is it based on knowledge of possible outcomes based on the science, and extrapolations, or on popular science and/or cultural depictions, or something else?
For many possible outcomes, we have real data. We have many cases of a species being removed from an ecosystem, and of a subspecies being removed. Some of those are because of humans causing extinctions (or near extinctions), some of it is from humans causing the removal of a species from an area, and some of it is from natural change in ecosystems that is not the cause of humans (the world is not static, species evolve, evolutions and natural phenomena such as weather patterns allow species to spread to new areas).
No one's fussing much about the ecological impacts of getting rid of smallpox, polio, and guinea worm.
Sure, after purging hundreds of thousands of "counterrevolutionary" scientists and other intellectuals.
We're in a slightly different scenario now. Our understanding of ecological impacts from this sort of action is well advanced past that of Maoist China. It may not be perfect, but it's certainly better.
We can't look into the future to realize how much or little we actually know right now. You can only look back and remark on how foolish people were a few decades or centuries ago.
The only way to "undo" this I can think of is to introduce large enough swarms of natural mosquitos to overwhelm the population of GMO mosquitos. Now, you're worse off than before. So fingers crossed that it works. It'll be a great achievement though if it does.