Saw six butterflies last night while walking in a highly developed area. I’ll probably see six more tonight. Are anecdotes really how we want to measure this?
It would be better to do a systematic study, and publish the results in a scientific journal like Current Biology. Then maybe to help get the word out, publish a summary on a website like Science.
edit: There is even a "Butterfly Count" section on the wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_science
First off, anecdotes have extreme speed. You can get some sort of answer much faster and at a hugely lower cost then a "study".
Second, studies are not to be trusted either. There's huge incentive to doctor these things and with the replication crisis this "doctoring" has been shown to be common place.
Third, even an "honest" study can be wildly off depending on the data gathered and most of the time these studies only find correlative associations rather then causative (most people don't even know how to conduct a causative experiment).
A good example of this is smoking Cannabis and Tobacco. Depending on the time both were deemed healthy to consume by research via multitudes of biased research and and a lack of unbiased studies.
But with a little anecdotal common sense it's easy to see that breathing burnt plants into your lungs is likely just bad overall.
The charts going down to the right and the maps showing territory shrinking are both important. That’s why they’re posted here frequently.
It’s also important to remember what those charts and maps mean, which is future generations having magic and beauty and wonder stolen from them. The destruction of the environment is heartbreaking on its own, but the destruction of the human experience is a whole additional layer of tragedy.
Do you know why it's so cramped? To maximize the number of people on the flight and therefore reduce the per-passenger carbon emissions and cost.
I can tell you've never traveled if you think every place is like every other. The creek in your podunk town is not the same as the beaches in French Polynesia.
You must be joking. It is solely and completely for profit. Airlines could care less about emissions.
Dialing in on how it benefits the airlines when low prices also benefit flyers and lower per-passenger emissions benefit everyone shows you just have a bone to pick.
Many, many flyer hate this. It absolutely does not benefit flyers, not when you see seat price static, or going up, and airline profits up (prior covid).
It. does. not. help. consumers. Airlines care not about emissions.
You claimed it was done to reduce emissions. This is completely false. No hand wavy logic will change this.
Or customers.
It's not. It is to help airline profits.
Whether lowering emissions is a direct consequence or an indirect consequence, increasing seat density does just that so suck it up.
No.
Airlines in my country (Canada), exhibit the behaviour I described. Greater profits, zero real savings for consumers, and cramped seats.
Thus, again, hand wavy stuff re:environment, is not the cause. Assertions otherwise are 100% wrong.
Airflight does not need to be cramped. If you wish to push this narrative, the narrative of "good! cramped is good cause environment), then I suggest you start with more effective places.
Such as, limiting hot water usage, temperatures in homes, the size of homes, the size of cars, bus seating, the ability to use anything but your feet, for short (1km) trip distances, and on and on and on.
All of these will do far more, immensely more for the environment. And will be far less onerous that cramped airline seating.
EG, drip all indoor temps, by law, to 60F in winter, and just wear a sweater.
No.
Airlines in my country (Canada), exhibit the behaviour I described. Greater profits, zero real savings for consumers, and cramped seats.
Thus, again, hand wavy stuff re:environment, is not the cause. Assertions otherwise are 100% wrong.
Airflight does not need to be cramped. If you wish to push this narrative, the narrative of "good! cramped is good cause environment", then I suggest you start with more effective places.
Such as, limiting hot water usage, temperatures in homes, the size of homes, the size of cars, bus seating, the ability to use anything but your feet, for short (1km) trip distances, and on and on and on.
All of these will do far more, immensely more for the environment. And will be far less onerous than cramped airline seating.
EG, drop all indoor temps, by law, to 60F in winter, and just wear a sweater.
Of course, you'll get little traction making people take lukewarm showers, so instead, you want me to have aching knees for a week after an airflight. And no, this problem isn't rare in my country.
Shame on you!
Since you seem to be missing the point, let me make it simple for you. If you have 100 passengers and two plane types, one can seat 100 passengers in a economy configuration, and another can seat 50 passengers in a business configuration with more room, and all 100 passengers must fly, which is the more efficient one? Which one is going to be double the price? Which one makes the airline more money (hint: neither)?
Aching knees? You poor thing. Fly business class then, it's available to you, but don't pretend like you care about the environment.
Don't confuse asset write down, and other chicanery, for loss. Not when they're buying up airline after airline.
I care about the environment, yet you're making my point here. You equate "caring about the environment" with "making change no matter how small, everywhere, in every thing, without focusing on big issues first".
An example, getting the US, for example, to reduce hot water usage even mildly, would do more for the environment than decades worth of "make people's knees hurt", "adding two seats to rarely full planes" mentality.
Hell, here's an idea which would save, in one month, more than those extra few seats in a decade (which are only used on full flights.. a rare thing).
Pass a law, that airlines must share flights if not full enough. That is, if a flight is less than.. 65% full, then the flight by law is cancelled, if competitors have a closely timed route, but, also by law, a competitor must take those passegers and kick a commission to the originating airline.
That's actual change. That's actual savings. That's less convenient, but no, you'd prefer to make my knees hurt. And care to assign cost to the poor, if people don't want that.
And again, I have flown plenty, and have only once seen all seats occupied.
How many flights have you been on, fully seated? Be honest!
No. The truth is, profits (force people to pay for seats with more legroom, like as doors and such).
End of story.
I have a strong suspicion if our descendants learn that we traded butterflies for 9 hour plane flights for business meetings that are completely feasible over the Internet, they'll think very poorly of us.
My position is that every day people make tradeoffs without even considering what those tradeoffs are, because the benefits are so immediate and local while the costs are externalized both in time and space.
It's important to connect everyday decisions (and their real benefits) to their externalized costs (which are also real, and probably ~impossible to recover once incurred).
Once our cohabitants are gone, they're likely gone forever. We have no reason to believe we'll ever be able to recover a meaningful portion of them. Ecosystems are astoundingly complex and the more we learn about them, the more we learn how subtle they are.
>if our descendants learn that we traded butterflies for 9 hour plane flights for business meetings
Makes it seem like that's all flights are good for. It's not any different than if you said "quinceaneras" instead of "business meetings". They are probably a non-zero percentage of why people fly but even without these things, there would still be demand for air travel and the problem would remain.
I share your doom and gloom about the situation but hope we can focus on changes that have material return. There are many optional things in life that we can cut out but then what would be the point in living?
Environmental harm is both multicausal and overdetermined which means we do in fact need to pick (many) specific things which individually do not seem extremely substantial (because they’re not) and start reducing them.
Anecdotes aren't always bad, or even inappropriate. We're on an internet forum having a casual discussion so my expectations for intellectual rigor are quite low.
I haven't seen either one since early covid, when they were suddenly more common for whatever reason.