Insect Collapse: 'We Are Destroying Our Life Support Systems' (theguardian.com) 401
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientist Brad Lister returned to Puerto Rican rainforest after 35 years to find 98% of ground insects had vanished. His return to the Luquillo rainforest in Puerto Rico after 35 years was to reveal an appalling discovery. The insect population that once provided plentiful food for birds throughout the mountainous national park had collapsed. On the ground, 98% had gone. Up in the leafy canopy, 80% had vanished. The most likely culprit by far is global warming. "It was just astonishing," Lister said. "Before, both the sticky ground plates and canopy plates would be covered with insects. You'd be there for hours picking them off the plates at night. But now the plates would come down after 12 hours in the tropical forest with a couple of lonely insects trapped or none at all."
"We are essentially destroying the very life support systems that allow us to sustain our existence on the planet, along with all the other life on the planet," Lister said. "It is just horrifying to watch us decimate the natural world like this." Lister calls these impacts a "bottom-up trophic cascade", in which the knock-on effects of the insect collapse surge up through the food chain. "I don't think most people have a systems view of the natural world," he said. "But it's all connected and when the invertebrates are declining the entire food web is going to suffer and degrade. It is a system-wide effect." To understand the global scale of an insect collapse that has so far only been glimpsed, Lister says, there is an urgent need for much more research in many more habitats. "More data, that is my mantra," he said.
"We are essentially destroying the very life support systems that allow us to sustain our existence on the planet, along with all the other life on the planet," Lister said. "It is just horrifying to watch us decimate the natural world like this." Lister calls these impacts a "bottom-up trophic cascade", in which the knock-on effects of the insect collapse surge up through the food chain. "I don't think most people have a systems view of the natural world," he said. "But it's all connected and when the invertebrates are declining the entire food web is going to suffer and degrade. It is a system-wide effect." To understand the global scale of an insect collapse that has so far only been glimpsed, Lister says, there is an urgent need for much more research in many more habitats. "More data, that is my mantra," he said.
AGW (Score:2, Insightful)
The most likely culprit by far is global warming.
Really? The most likely culprit?
Re:AGW (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, really.
It couldn't be tons of pesticides or hurricanes. It couldn't be invasive species. It couldn't be human tourism trampling the ground.
The temperature went up 1 degree and that is the REAL OBVIOUS cause. You must not question the church of global warming. Back to re-education camp for you!!
Re:AGW (Score:4)
Re:AGW (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? The most likely culprit?
Of course not. The most likely culprit is experimental error, and the 2nd most likely is outright fraud.
So far AGW has warmed the earth by 1.3 C (2 F). That is a serious trend, and a big concern for the future but is unlikely to wipe out 98% of insects today. It is also implausible that nobody has noticed this massive worldwide catastrophe before this lone researcher stumbled onto the evidence of our life support systems "collapsing".
This sort of shrill hyperbolic alarmism is counterproductive to getting people to take climate change seriously. This is so over-the-top that I suspect this guy is on Exxon-Mobil's payroll as a false flag operation to make scientists look incompetent.
Anyway, we will soon find out. If he is right, we will all be dead by this time next year.
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Little Island are different to big Island, as in small locations with only one climate and large locations with many. Little they die off until eventually evolution allows new mutations to take their place. Big and of course populations, migrate, north or south as the case maybe.
For most places, the concern is cities, for small places, well, collapse is likely to be total and human populations must relocate, depending upon the nature of environmental collapse. Bugs, simply bring in new species for more nor
Re: AGW (Score:4, Informative)
"Little Island are different to big Island, as in small locations with only one climate and large locations with many."
I live on a small Island and there is quite large variation in climate between valleys. For instance, we cannot grow stone fruit yet the next valley can. Also, it got 30mm of rain yesterday while we sat in bright sunshine.
Re:AGW (Score:4, Informative)
> It is also implausible that nobody has noticed this massive worldwide catastrophe before this lone researcher stumbled onto the evidence of our life support systems "collapsing".
More than merely implausible, you can go and look up the previously found results. :-) Thankfully insect geeks do exist, and guess what...
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/germany-s-insects-are-disappearing ... they found similar declines. What makes this new data-point particularly informing is, aside from the scale, its location and how that was not an area previously expected to be hit so badly.
> So far AGW has warmed the earth by 1.3 C (2 F).
That's a world average, but that same level of warming can bring local extremes more like +/- 4 C
As the article states: “The number of hot spells, temperatures above 29C, have increased tremendously,”
Re:AGW (Score:5, Interesting)
This sort of shrill hyperbolic alarmism is counterproductive to getting people to take climate change seriously.
I keep saying that.
If anybody's wondering why folks like me are skeptical, it's because of decades of shrill alarmism.
If you were trying to make skeptics, you couldn't have done a better job.
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Any shrill alarmism is the result of people going "lalalalala, I can't hear you" when confronted with evidence of warming, because that evidence presents a threat to their current comfy gas-guzzling lifestyle.
Add to that a great deal of misinformation spread by people with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
In disbelief that people can be dumb enough to ignore the facts that are right in front of them, scientists and policymakers turned to hyperbole in hope of shaking people out of their stupor
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This sort of shrill hyperbolic alarmism is counterproductive to getting people to take climate change seriously.
I keep saying that.
If anybody's wondering why folks like me are skeptical, it's because of decades of shrill alarmism.
And now insect populations are rapidly collapsing in many locations over the planet.
Apparently you should have been alarmed after all.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
100 corporations are responsible for 71% of carbon emissions. [fortune.com] Even if every would-be environmentalist dropped dead tomorrow and took themselves off the board, we'd still be in trouble (assuming you want carbon emissions to go down). Meaningful change is only going to come at the the policy level. As an individual the change you can effect isn't even a a drop in the bucket.
It's nice if you try to be "green" as an individual if it makes you feel good, but as a consumer it's not very obvious whether a given
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Re: AGW (Score:3, Insightful)
Yup. Toxic insecticides and other crazy chemicals stayed with abandon onto crops are by far the most likely culprit. Why? Because a) they've done this before, many times. And b) killing insects is what those crazy chemicals were _designed_ to do.
But hey, let's blame it on the sky falling. That way people can spend a lot of time shaking their first and shouting at the sky. Rather than, you know, controlling and restricting the usage of dangerous environmental toxins.
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Yeah I also think this is a lot more likely as an explanation.
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Re:AGW (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:AGW (Score:4, Informative)
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The article makes a decent case for global warming as the culprit
It really doesn't. What insect that thrives at 27 degrees practically disappears at 29 degrees? Or maybe the recent hurricane had more to do with it? [sciencemag.org]
and yet here you are disputing this guy's research
I'm not disputing his research, I'm disputing his conclusion. Although now that you mention it, his research does raise eyebrows. 98% of the insects are gone? This is a study I would double-check before using it for anything important.
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You should probably ask anyone who farms or hunts. In my neck of the woods, everyone can tell you the difference a "cold winter" or "hot summer" will make in insect populations. Particularly the ones that like to eat you or your crops. Many insect eggs are very delicate, either laid in shallow pools that dry up, or at very specific locations where small temperature/humidity variations will make them non-viable. Usually the species are healthy because they lay a LOT of eggs, but eventually, tipping point
Re:AGW (Score:5, Insightful)
tropical insects, having evolved in a very stable climate, would be much more sensitive to climate warming. “If you go a little bit past the thermal optimum for tropical insects, their fitness just plummets,” he said.
The article does say why insects have declined so much, it just doesn't take the next step to say why their fitness plummets. Higher heat can more more humidity in the air, or less rainfall, or different wind patterns... many possibilities. That is, not doubt, an interesting topic. I share your curiosity, but I'm not going to criticize the author for declining to go off on a barely-related tangent.
Let's say the article did answer why their fitness plummets. Let's say it went into great detail about a specific insect which requires enough moisture in specific places in order to procreate, and how the decline of that insect effects some others who rely on the first as a food source. And a third group who rely on the structure-building practices of the second group for shelter. And a fourth group who... and on and on down the cascade effect. What would that accomplish? You can always ask another "why" question, there's no end to that.
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Yeah. I thought the scaremongers had told us that when global warming really took off only the cockroaches would be left. Turns out they are dying. So they did not even get that right.
Perhaps people should study the ecosystems more in depth instead of blaming everything on anthropomorphic global warming. Seriously.
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The article never said Anthropogenic or human-caused. Sorry, but YOU (and many commenters) inserted that. If you really care about such topics, this should alert you to your own biases in interpreting information.
For folk who just headline-skimmed then jumped to the comments: the article offers into good reasons why heat-thresholds are crossed regularly now but not before make the changing climate a likely candidate, and how pesticides and other "usual suspects" are unlikely to be factors in this scenario.
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You mean small cold blooded animals, who had adapted for millions of years for a particular climate have trouble to a rapidly changing climate?
The problem with global Climate change, isn't that the Climate is changing, but the speed of the change. While many of these animals can deal with fluctuations of weathers and seasons. The change in climate means the number of bad seasons for them outweighs the number of good ones, so it just leads to long term pressure on their survival.
While there are other issues
It's a rainforest without rain (Score:2, Interesting)
It's a rainforest, didn't you even read the summary? I mean I get it, it's nice to see you're trying a *deflection* instead of a flat out "no global warming", but you might at least try something closer to Puerto Rico's rainforest. e.g. blame hurricanes or brown people or something.
https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-09/documents/climate-change-pr.pdf
It seems to have faced a 2.5 F degree rise in sea temperature since 1900 with a loss or rainfall and 4 inch rise in sea level sin
Re:It's a rainforest without rain (Score:5, Insightful)
DO you think those things don't migrate? It's impossible to know exactly where the breakdown is without studying intensely for multiple years, they have barely scratched the surface noticing the massive losses. Pay attention.
None of this is obvious, one study may find GW the #1 culprit, another might find it #2. Either way it's a massive change planetwide that is happening, killing the food web. ALL of these factors adversely affect it at once.
Picking one to worry about is not going to cut it. We need to stop polluting, stop poisoning, stop clearcutting, stop dumping unclear water, etc. All at once, or we're going to suffer for it. That's how delicate this is.
Picking one to worry about is why we fail. Pretending the case for only one of them must override our economic paradigm of short term profit, it's all of them, or nothing. The greatest one today may not be tomorrow. All factor in.
More than a rainforest without rain (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:More than a rainforest without rain (Score:5, Informative)
Who the fuck knows.
Don't know about the rainforest, but here in Europe it's pesticides in agriculture and villages (e.g. removing weed from paved paths).
Easy to spot, sudden drop of native insectivorous bird population.
Glyphosate.
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There were practically no crickets or katydids in Kingston in September and October. It was wierd. The zombies living around me scarcely noticed. People are oblivious or in deep denial.
Or they were happy there were less noisy insects.
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Many times the vulnerabilities in insect populations are do not to harsh conditions for adults, but delicacy of their eggs. Small changes in humidity, temperature or host plant species can cause them to be non-viable This country used to be blanketed yearly by 1000 mile long carpet of locusts that blacked out the sun. But then we expanded west and turned the grassland where they buried their eggs into farmland. And then they disappeared, despite there being plenty of food left.
Re:More than a rainforest without rain (Score:4)
Please double check your sources on the eggs, Wikipedia seems to disagree. Wikipedia with references is saying that the Rocky Mountain Locusts, at least, laid eggs at high altitudes and the prairies were just where they sometimes spread to. They went from possibly the most abundant species of animal in the world to extinct in 30 years... around 1902, and nobody has proved exactly why I take it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
" with one famous sighting in 1875 estimated at 198,000 square miles (510,000 km2) in size (greater than the area of California), weighing 27.5 million tons and consisting of some 12.5 trillion insects, the greatest concentration of animals ever speculatively guessed, according to Guinness World Records.[2]"
"The first mention of Melanoplus spretus appears in 1887 in publications by S.H. Scudder.[6][7] Although the name "Rocky Mountain locust" was thought to have been given to this species following recovery of specimens washing off from Rocky Mountains glaciers in recent years, particularly from the Grasshopper Glacier, the name was given to the species, while it was still extant, after it had been established that the true habitat and breeding site of the species is high on the Rocky Mountains. The species is reported to have descended from the Rocky Mountains to the prairie in large numbers only in certain years, particularly in dry seasons, following westward wind currents. Outbreaks usually lasted two consecutive years. Although a great number of eggs were laid on the prairie during outbreak years, individuals hatched from these eggs usually did not thrive, a condition that has been attributed to the lack of adaptation of this species to prairie habitats"
Re:It's a rainforest without rain (Score:5, Funny)
DO you think those things don't migrate?
Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?
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but how could a six ounce sparrow carry an eight ounce coconut?
Re:It's a rainforest without rain (Score:4, Insightful)
There's not much evidence of that.
You've been spending too much time indoors for many years, and not enough outside walking around. It doesn't take a rocket scientist or entomologist to see what's going on right under our noses. Drive a car during summer in the last twenty years? Google "insects on windshield" and read the buzz there. The collapse of the insect population is real, planet-wide, and happened in the last fifteen years.
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This is really frightening - I've been riding motorcycles in Germany all year for 20 years, naturally taking the more scenic routes.
In summer I used to clean my helmet from insects at most tankstops because of visibility. That was kind of a ceremony - tank, take a paper, soak it, put it on the helmet, go pay, come back.
This year I cleaned it at home every few weeks.
Something changed, for whatever reason and the sheer number or weight of biomass that seems to have disappeared is frightning.
Might want to re-read your PDF (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a rainforest, didn't you even read the summary?
Pretty amusing coming from someone who did not even read the PDF he posted...
It seems to have faced a 2.5 F degree rise in sea temperature since 1900 with a loss or rainfall
We aren't talking about sea insects, now are we? Your OWN PDF states PR has seen a 1*F* (not even C) increase in land temperatures since mid 20th century... vastly less than seasonal variation.
Furthermore the paper speculated rainfall MIGHT lower, based on... nothing at all.
In reality rainfall has been cyclical but remained fairly steady [tradingeconomics.com] (click on "MAX" below the chart).
This would be obvious to anyone who understands the effect of heat on large bodies of water, which surround PR.... A warmer climate means MORE RAINFALL which I cannot believe how few people, even now, understand.
Sorry to disturb your manufactured panic with actual real data... carry on.
Re:Might want to re-read your PDF (Score:5, Informative)
"A warmer climate means MORE RAINFALL which I cannot believe how few people, even now, understand."
Hold your horses, this is most definitely not a universal truth. There are plenty of examples across the globe where this clearly isn't the case, geography also plays a major part.
The Middle East is as hot as it gets, but it's also as dry as it gets. Similarly if you look across island chains such as the Caribbean or Canary Islands you'll see completely different levels of precipitation on even neighbouring islands depending on the geography of those islands. In the Canaries for example Lanzarote is a dry barren landscape resembling Mars in many places, whilst near islands in the Canaries such as Tenerife have trees left and right. In the Caribbean you have islands like Bonaire that are reminiscent of Arizona within visible distance of Venezuela's lushest regions. The reason for this is because those islands don't have peaks that are sufficiently high to cause clouds to gather over the island and drop rain. An island like, say St Lucia, would be a desert island and not a lush tropical rainforest covered island were it not for the two peaks there, the Pitons. In the case of the Middle East, the Sahara etc. rainfall is blocked by weather patterns of hot air caused by the position of the sun around the Earth.
As such there are vast regions of the globe where increasing temperatures would most certainly cause less rainfall; if you look on a map you'll notice two major bands of desert for example; one south of the equator covering the Atacama in Chile and Argentina, across South Africa, and New Zealand, and one north of the equator spanning Mexico/Southern USA, North Africa including the Sahara, the Middle East, Kazakhstan, Mongolia etc. It doesn't matter how much hotter things get, not only will these regions not become wetter, the area of dryness they cover will actually expand.
With that in mind it's worth looking at where Puerto Rico is on the map, it's at the Southern end of the northern band. Whilst I agree there's no clear impact yet, it's not impossible that rising temperatures will dry Puerto Rico out somewhat more. It's also worth noting that the effects can be incredibly localised; it's equally possible that Puerto Rico's position as an island with decent sized mountains will increase rainfall around those mountains, whilst, say, drying out it's lower lying areas for example. This is something you see in Peru which is often thought of as a lush rainforest covered wilderness due to images of Machu Pichu and such, but it's coast line is dry as a bone. It can even be seasonal, again depending on the unique geography of a place; more rainfall overall doesn't necessary mean that a place doesn't see dryer summers (or winters) which could cause animal or plants to die out still due to not being able to survive worsened dry seasons, even if more rain falls in the wet seasons.
So before kicking off and implying people are dumb for not understanding warmer climate means more rainfall, please consider that that's a rather simplistic view, and is most definitely not a universal truth. There will be substantial areas of the Earth's land mass that will see much less rainfall (and typically more and more problematic wildfires as a result; Australia is already seeing this for example). Things aren't even remotely as simple as you're implying.
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Maybe if reading is hard for you, Slashdot is not the correct community for you to participate in.
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We aren't talking about sea insects, now are we? Your OWN PDF states PR has seen a 1*F* (not even C) increase in land temperatures since mid 20th century... vastly less than seasonal variation.
That 1 degree shift is an average. Along with a "small" increase in the macro average are much more frequent and more wild swings in local weather patterns and temperature due to there just being a lot more energy in the system. It only takes one extreme weather event at the right time to disrupt a population. As these extreme events become more frequent with a warming climate, you get larger and more frequent population disruptions leading to species becoming extirpated from an area and eventually extin
Re:It's a rainforest without rain (Score:4, Interesting)
This is the new narrative among those pushing the most catastrophist view of global warming.
As usual with such views, they ignore all of the obvious elephants in the room, such as massive escalation of war on malaria which is purposefully designed to destroy as much insect habitat as possible to save tens to hundreds of millions of human lives, or significant increase in agricultural efficiency due to insecticide usage having spread to developing counties and spreading of farmlands into rainforest areas. None of these things that are literally targeting insect populations are relevant, nope. It's the global warming.
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It's obviously not a single cause. Which is my problem with this story, which tries to sell it as such. Global warming is likely very, VERY low on the totem pole of things that are affecting insects right now, especially because insects are among the most adaptable creatures on the planet due to their very rapid reproductive cycle. That's why pesticides have to be constantly worked on in terms of R&D. Such life forms are the least affected by a slow change like global warming, as they will adapt to it w
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GMO baked-in toxins,
That's a very efficient way to emergency-jettison any scientific credibility you might've had.
Total agreement (Score:4, Interesting)
5 step plan to fixing this, fast.
1. Remove 2 billion people from the planet.
2. HVDC lines built to all major deserts.
3. All major deserts covered in as much solar power as we can build.
4. LFTR reactor research funded to pre-Jimmy-Carter levels.
5. Ban coal power outright.
Keep in mind that if we want to reverse the damage, we need to build excess power capacity (a lot of it) to pull CO2 out of the air as a feedstock for hydrocarbons or some other sequestration.
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6. Escalating taxes on fossil fools for transportation use. The aim should be to phase them out for ground transport within 20 years, worldwide.
7. Ban all unnecessary use of pesticides and herbicides. Agriculture is a valid use if used in moderation; so is disease control. Having a perfect, green lawn in your boring shithole of a suburb is NOT a valid use.
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All good points, except that there is no need to kill off the 2 billion people. If we implement the other steps, we can leave genocide to the Greens.
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Re: Total agreement (Score:2, Insightful)
In regards to truck traffic. As long as you can get a 500 to 600 mile range in the truck you are fine. The driver can take her or his mandatory rest while it charges. You can only drive 10 hours straight. And you are expected to cover only 50 to 60 miles on average per hour.
So, this is not only a last mile solution. That said, a better multi-modal train and truck solution would be a good idea. You need trains that have regular schedules, and quick build/break times.
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Ban reproduction by anyone with an inheritable disease. (Source: Larry Niven's _A World out of Time_)
Make abortion legal and available on demand, worldwide.
Equality now, everywhere, so women have control of their bodies.
The population will fall to a more manageable level after these are in effect.
Re: Total agreement (Score:2, Insightful)
Remove 2 billion people? And put them where exactly?
Are you going to line up first to be removed?
Or is that only for other people from some other place you dont know anyone?
Thought so. I stopped reading there. Nothing else you could possibly have said would have made sense or even been funny.
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Remove 2 billion people? And put them where exactly?
In the nether, or maybe a river. At least, that's where I unload my excess cobblestone.
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Remove 2 billion people from the planet.
There is really no need for that. We have basically got population growth under control, with the fertility rate being around static (2.2) in most places. Yes, even third world countries.
The population is still growing because people are living longer. But it's levelling off, and at a level which is sustainable with modern farming methods and renewable energy.
In the longer term, past 2100, the population will probably fall as the fertility rate continues to decline
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Remove 2 billion people from the planet.
There is really no need for that. We have basically got population growth under control, with the fertility rate being around static (2.2) in most places. Yes, even third world countries.
The population is still growing because people are living longer. But it's levelling off, and at a level which is sustainable with modern farming methods and renewable energy.
In the longer term, past 2100, the population will probably fall as the fertility rate continues to decline
Modern farming techniques aren't sustainable. Modern farming relies on tapping fossil water (aquifers), mining phosphorus, and petro chemicals. All of these are exhaustible resources. And beyond that fertilizer runoff in waterways, excessive antibiotics used to raise livestock, and pesticides are all ecological disasters in their own right.
I'm not saying that we should just stop all those things now and let a bunch of people starve, but we need to realize we are drawing down resources in decades that were
Re:Total agreement (Score:4, Insightful)
Modern farming is unsustainable only when profit is the main motive. If sustainability is the main motive it's fine. We can fix the economic system simply by legislating that sustainability must be the priority and imposing penalties for not doing it.
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Modern farming is unsustainable only when profit is the main motive. If sustainability is the main motive it's fine. We can fix the economic system simply by legislating that sustainability must be the priority and imposing penalties for not doing it.
The bread basket of the US is only that because of tapping aquifers and putting nutrients back into the soil that we are pulling out and shipping all over the country/world. If we moved to sustainable techniques like rotating in non-food crops, leaving fields fallow for long enough for the aquifer to recover from a year's worth of growing, and recovering nutrients from sewage all over the country to ship back to fields as fertilizer, then food prices would skyrocket as supply plummets. Even if there was en
Total western entitlement (Score:2)
It's not the human population, it's the human resource consumption. As the average American uses 30 times the amount of resources [nytimes.com] as people in developing countries, removing the USA would be equivalent to "removing" the poor from around the world many times over.
Sure.
Cost and time make nuclear power unjustifiable. Taking 20 years and $20 billion to build a new nuclear power plant is alre
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There should be a law that says that anyone that proposes removing (killing) people as a solution to climate change then the first ones in line to be removed should be their family and friends.
Deja Vu (Score:5, Informative)
We had this dance already :
https://it.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]
As I said last time :
"Water diverted from the forest ranges from 7 to 17 percent of average flow throughout the year, with up to 54 percent of flow diverted from individual watersheds (table 5). A much higher percentage of average flow is diverted when intakes outside of the forest are considered (table 6)."
https://www.fs.fed.us/global/i... [fs.fed.us]
That forest isn't as pristine as the researchers pretend it to be.
Re:Deja Propaganda narrative, yours. (Score:5, Informative)
I proved that the paper said :
"Given its long-term protected status (59), significant human perturbations have been virtually nonexistent within the Luquillo forest since the 1930s, and thus are an unlikely source of invertebrate declines. "
I proved that an USDA study said :
"Water diverted from the forest ranges from 7 to 17 percent of average flow throughout the year, with up to 54 percent of flow diverted from individual watersheds (table 5). A much higher percentage of average flow is diverted when intakes outside of the forest are considered (table 6)."
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I think lots of changes are necessary, I just don't see any way to become dictator of the world to accomplish them.
So until then I nitpick obvious flaws in the assumptions of global warming theologians.
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It doesn't have to be deliberate, it could just be bad science. It wasn't my intention to define the cause. I just has a sneaking suspicion his basic assumptions were unsupported and hey presto, they were. Not my fault, his fault.
Why get so offended by me showing a clear contradiction between his assertions and earlier research which he completely failed to cite? Is it blasphemy?
Global warming? (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's not that hard to have a nice green lush lawn without chemicals. Good soil with the right mixture of sand and compost, don't mow the grass short so it shades out the weed seeds and live somewhere with lots of rainfall.
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Wouldn't be the first time that a scientist blames global warming for some unexplained phenomenon. And no, we don't need more data, we need more study into this.
Re:Global warming? (Score:4, Insightful)
What about pesticides and other toxins as well? We're dumping this shit into our environment and some of it is persistent. Agriculture is one thing, but whenever I see a house with a perfect, green lawn, I want to smack the owners in the face.
The EU issued a blanket ban all neonicotinoids last year. This is the stuff that is largely responsible a 75%-85% collapse of the insect population in the EU zone. I don't know how much those are used in Puerto Rico but neonicotinoids are certainly capable of causing a 70% plus reduction in insect populations so I won't be crying any rivers if this stuff gets banned elsewhere too. It's just one of many toxic substances that I don't want in my food.
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The best and easiest way to get a green lawn is to not plant grass there are any number of weeds that look like grass that also help with erosion and are more persistent than average grasses people usually plant. Let the lawn grow to about 6 - 7 inches before your first mow of the year, keep the lawn mowed to 3.5 - 4 inches if you mow to low in the hotter months it will turn brown. No pesticides required that being said I use pesticide on the back tree line in particular to kill flea and ticks and it helps
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Re: Global warming? (Score:2)
Some farmer (Score:2)
Every year they spray and use more.
More people are trying to use the same land every year.
So human population need to expand into forests more every generation.
How to fix this:
Consider what and who is using so much strange spray on their crops.
Set the forests aside like the US does as a huge new national park. No more human activity is allowed.
See if the insects and critter populations recover when the import a
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Every generation of animals and insects then has to face huge changes to its own health and what the illegal and powerful pesticides and herbicides do.
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Two experiments in one.
Forest recovery and UBI.
Have the UN remove all the humans near the forests and from inside the forests.
See how well the humans do on a UBI in a city setting, in shanty towns.
Protect the forests from all returning humans. Ban all pesticides and herbicides use in the surrounding areas.
See if the insects, critters and forests recover.
Find another nation and let it use all the pesticides and herbicides it can import. No regulations.
Let humans move d
monocropping annuls & ecosystem destruction (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:monocropping annuls & ecosystem destruction (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: monocropping annuls & ecosystem destructio (Score:5, Informative)
The Soviets had "money". The problem was the whole nation was run by state monopolies. In the USA you have corporate monopolies like P&G. You have a lot of brands, sure, but most of them are part of only a few conglomerates. The more the conglomerates grow, the less real competition there is, prices go up, and salaries go down.
Re: monocropping annuls & ecosystem destructi (Score:2)
Re: monocropping annuls & ecosystem destruc (Score:2)
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You say that like it was a bad thing. Soviets had universal health care, education, housing, and no stock market bubbles that would periodically pop, that would make the poor poorer and the rich richer, as capitalists would swoop in and buy up assets at discount prices.
6th mass extinction event (Score:4, Interesting)
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I think the bigger problem is that we are ruining this planet for technological civilization until plate tectonics recycle the access to minerals. Nature can adapt faster than that.
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The problem with that is that the first people to die will have little to nothing to have caused the problem in the first place. The United States and Europe have produced huge amounts of CO2 pollution for their populations, but it's people in other parts of the world (ie Africa and Asia) that will die by the billions first, if catastrophic climate change comes to pass.
Arthropod Farm (Score:2)
Six legs good, eight legs bad.
Re: (Score:2)
So Nils Hellstrom was exaggerating?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hellstrom_Chronicle
Most likely cause? (Score:5, Interesting)
After not being bothered to check on the insect count for 35 years, is it a coincidence this count occurred a little more than a year after Hurricane Maria?
I'm guessing a category 4 hurricane doesn't do insect populations any favors.
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Not just the rain forest (Score:5, Informative)
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Yes. I "hear" that silence here in France too. That silence is frightening me. Nobody under 20 would understand and the others mostly don't care or don't notice
Another german study on insect collapse https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-04774-7
Re:Not just the rain forest (Score:5, Funny)
easy (Score:2)
Here's the thing:
What is destroying the planet are a) humans, lots and lots of humans and b) progress, industrialisation, travel
Or, in other words: Our life, and the things that make it cute.
I don't see volunteers for giving up either of that. Oh, plenty of people who want others to give it up. But almost all the "back to nature" freaks are doing so from a position of 1st world luxury and comfort, not from a position of hard field work and subsistance farming and starvation winters.
The solution is at the sa
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Industrialized nations have been dropping to sub-replacement levels
Yes, but barely. And yes, the mostly see this as a problem, not because of any real reasons, but because too many systems (pension systems, healthcare systems and economic systems dependent on growth) are built with the assumption of growing population.
The problem is that existing levels of human population are already at around 200% of what the planet can sustain without serious consequences.
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Political correctness is the godless religious offshoot of the godless religion of communism. By supporting the lie of political correctness, the left makes it about who the biggest liar is. Since the right is a bigger liar, it wins and we numbly drift into calamity.
Political correctness exists on both flanks of the political spectrum, there is such a thing as right-wing political correctness.
Surprising.... (Score:2)
Wasn't expecting it... but this really bugs me.
Evolution has many turns (Score:2)
Probable Cause (Score:2)
All those scientists and their sticky plates wiped out the insects.
And yet, ppl fight nuclear energy (Score:2)