Scientists find there are 70% fewer pollinators, due to air pollution
openaccessgovernment.org
openaccessgovernment.org
"Scientists studying air pollutants from both urban and rural environments found that there are up to 70% fewer pollinators, up to 90% less flower visits, and an overall 31% in pollination reduction in test plants when there were several common ground-level air pollutants present – including diesel exhaust pollutants and ozone."
That's just not going to be the most common interpretation of "Scientists find there are 70% fewer pollinators, due to air pollution" as a title.
Anyhoo, air pollution is very bad and governments should be laser focused on selling the benefits of reducing fossil fuel burning for transportation as a personal health benefit more so than as a climate change mitigation strategy.
Its fascinating to observe people believing that mega-corporation and paid-politician promoted value systems are looking out for the interests of you and me.
It is unfortunate that the previous US administration was rolling back air and water pollution standards and I agree with you that it should get more press, along with the dangers of microplastics - but I really don't think this is about "mega-corporation promoted value systems".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations
Anecdotally, remember when you would drive any distance on a freeway and your windshield was just COVERED with smashed bugs?
I do, now that you mention it. It's weird how much we don't notice those small changes. I remember I used to see Monarch butterflies all the time, as a child, and I, until this last year, would never see any in the wild.
"In 2017 the annual March count of monarchs "overwintering" in Mexico's mountain forests — where 99 percent of the world's monarchs migrate for the winter — showed that numbers had fallen by 27 percent from the previous year's count and by more than 80 percent from the mid-1990s.
That drastic decline was attributed in part to more extreme winter storms that killed millions of monarchs the previous March. Monarchs need a very large population size in order to be resilient to threats from severe weather events, pesticides and climate change.
In 2020 the yearly count of overwintering monarchs showed an even more dramatic decrease of 53% from the previous year’s count. The numbers are now well below the threshold at which government scientists predict the migration could collapse.
The western monarch population, which overwinters in California, is in even greater peril. Numbering some 1.2 million in the 1990s, it declined to fewer than 2,000 butterflies in the 2020 count. This is way below the extinction threshold estimated by scientists and has to be turned around soon if the species is to be saved. "
https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/species/invertebrates/mo...
We splattered them on windshields incidentally, but the stuff coming out of the tailpipes probably did more damage.
I'm not sure that every single bug is like that, but the exponential growth is pretty crazy. As your parent said, the carrying capacity of the environment is all that really matters. If a population can multiple 125,000x per month, it is basically guaranteed to fill the environment's carrying capacity no matter how many you kill.
https://www.cdc.gov/dengue/resources/factSheets/MosquitoLife...
it's amazing the effect these words had on me. i fully knew the context here but still did a double take.
Cars and trucks don't burn bunker fuel so thick you have to heat it with steam just to pump it into the engine. Local hotspots of pollution on land have gone down, but globally there's still plenty of heavy polluters out there.
EVs are certainly a step in the right direction, but if we are burning fossil fuels to generate the electricity to power them, then the EV has just shifted the point where the greenhouse gasses are produced, not lowered the total amount of greenhouse gas
(exceptions for people who use solar power to charge their EV)
Discovering we're unintentionally doing a domino style wipe out of ecosystems sounds like a "stop everything now" level problem.
Yet here we are. I'm going to go to work tomorrow on stuff unrelated to these urgent society collapsing problems we're facing. Pulling a salary from some company as if these crisis don't exist.
It's totally insane
My one data point is that on a 2-hour rural drive with a friend my 90s SUV’s windshield and front bumper splattered a lot of bugs. While my friend’s sleeker more modern car with a sloped windshield had barely any.
It won't really help the problem though. Honeybees are good at polinating comercial crops but there are tons of other flowering plants that requires specialized polinators, like moths.
There is also some worry that honeybees might push out some of the endemic bee species (mostly solitary bees) from an area.
Such machines already exist: https://www.fastcompany.com/90463417/in-our-dystopian-future...
At a smaller scale, my parents were pollinating the tomatoes in their car-sized home greenhouse using an electric toothbrush!
I'll show myself out and accept the downvotes.
I probably live in a much more different world than I imagine.
See i.e. https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/why-are-frog-and-toad-populations-...
The bottom line is that many things might have already collapsed without us taking notice because nature is very complex and under studied. By the time things are bad enough for us to be directly impacted we're already way too far to do anything about it.
But TBH it seems better also in big European cities. :-)
Elon Musk.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1483486559336910850
How anyone can believe the future of humanity is to push ourselves to breed in order to fill in more planets is beyond me.
EDIT: there are more humans and we are living longer than ever before. Our science helped us survive one of the trickiest virus ever with a death toll of barely 1/1000th of the world's population. Our technology allows us to monitor asteroids. And yet people are more worried that we might go extinct from that in a few thousand years, instead of the more obvious and glaring impacts on our for-now only planet that is undergoing the climate crisis, biodiversity collapse, ocean fish depletion due to overfishing, chemical pollution, literal overpopulation of many countries in the sense that they cannot feed themselves within their nations' borders.
We have millions of years to conquer space. But only 50 years to protect our cradle planet from becoming inhospitable.
Planets like Mars are empty and waiting to be filled with life, as far as we can tell.
I see no good reason why we should give up as a species and die. If other species have a right to exist, so does ours. If nobody is currently living on Mars, why don't we?
If we go back down to 5 billion [per planet], the same number of people we had in 1985, that's not a bad thing.
Edit: Okay, do people disagree with the first sentence or the second one?
Unlikely. As a society we’re not nearly as tolerant of knowingly sending people to their death as they were in the 1500s. A safe job of simply working a coal mine in the 1800s even would be more risky than what we end up subjecting the first mars explorers to.
EDIT: I missed out on something. "Knowingly" is a strong word for this case. Nobody knew for 100% certain if an early American colonist was going to die or achieve prosperity. Nobody knows the same about a hypothetical martian colonist. We've become more culturally sensitive about risk in this exact way, thinking we "know" the outcome based on scrutinized likelihoods. We didn't suddenly become rational in the face of nigh certain death, where before we were just being silly about it. We're not necessarily silly in either case to most heavily consider the risk or the benefit, I'd say it all really depends on what's called for at that time.
The only people who went were doing under the promises of vast riches or having literally no other options. There was no welfare to keep them alive in Europe so a 1/4 chance of dying on the journey as a deck hand with only a 1/100 chance of ever coming back was still appealing.
We know way more about what a Martian colonist will experience even now than the people in Europe did about the various risks even after a smattering of successful journeys.
Modern society is very intolerant of unknown risks like that.
An aircraft worthy of passenger travel in the 1950s is considered barbaric by todays standards. The risks incurred by astronauts on the international space station are lower than the passengers that took flights in the 1930s.
So because of that, the "elephant" I'm riding is a complete behemoth. You're never going to convince me that the modern world will always be and should be so intolerant of these kinds of risks. You left behind google to work in a startup, so you've experienced something about a real economic risk if not a deadly one. Beyond that I don't know what kind of elephant you're riding on about this kind of thing but it's probably also too strong for me to expect to influence you into adopting my thoughts about risk epistemology. Possibly, precisely because they are my thoughts; they're not for you.
Having taken that step back, I don't see why I need to care so much if you really want to stick to your heuristic of approximating risk confidence into a functional "knowledge" that it's 100% or 0% at the margins of the infinitesimal. That's your choice. Maybe those are good guardrails for you. I'd hope to speak as a check and balance to stop you from pressuring (whether deliberately or inadvertently) other people who feel the same way I do into these boxes, but It would be arrogant of me to assume I know best for what you should be thinking.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/World-po...
The thing is we have an almost unlimited numbers of issues to solve right here and right now instead of anticipating the death of the sun or a on in a trillion chance asteroid collision. Problems which are easier and cheaper to solve and would have a direct measurable impact on billions of people.
The earth is 4.5 billion years old, and by most estimates has only 0.6 billion years left before the sun's light is insufficient to sustain photosynthesis. Even if some life survives that, earth will eventually burn up as the sun expands.
Some catastrophic event, human-caused nuclear warfare, asteroid, bioweapon could easily destroy all intelligent life on earth. If that happens it is very unlikely intelligent life will have time to evolve before the earth is destroyed.
Why gamble on an event like that not happening given how close we've come? The universe is vast, why don't humans have a duty to protect life and bring it to other planets asap? It's so strange that environmentalists want to preserve natural life but steadfastly oppose colonizing other planets (the only way to actually preserve it).
This sentence is equally true if you put a full stop after “dies” and delete everything following.
Getting off the planet in the next 600 million years is a much, much smaller concern than how we can actually keep the species going in the immediate future. While, yes, at some point we need a 'plan B' to earth, the reality is we still first need a plan A; despite how far away we are from it, we are much closer to being able to maintain equilibrium on this planet than we are to colonizing another (and if we don't fix the first in a relatively short period, but somehow manage the second, we just doom two planets anyway).
We're two centuries in the industrial revolution and everything points to the fact that we're destroying our home planet, which means two things:
- 0.6 billion years is plenty of time
- if we fucked up so bad on this perfect planet how likely it is that we have anywhere close to a comfortable life on a dead planet that we haven't evolved to live on ? We had the best conditions possible to start with and we destroyed a good part of it for petty things in an extremely small amount of time
No, this isn't because we "exported it to China".