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Monarch butterfly populations in U.S. west are down an order of magnitude

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Re: Monarch butterfly populations in U.S. west are down an order of magnitude

#141

Post by icebraining »

momentmaker wrote: post #127
monktastic1 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that all of these problems -- the insect apocalypse, general biodiversity loss, climate change, all the way to the depression and anxiety epidemics, economic inequity, etc., stem from the same general principle: our alienation from ourselves, each other, and nature. In a sense, healing any one of them will contribute to healing all of them. And trying to merely engineer our way out of any of them (whil…

We're all connected in a sense and we all rely on each other in a way we don't even realize. We are all a part of a whole. Oneness if you will. By destroying one part to satisfy another part, we're still chipping away the whole. In the Gaia's hypothesis, the human race is the brain of Earth. We are the neural network that powers the thriving liveliness of Earth. We're suppose to be the protector, keeper and guardian…

Why would we be all of that? Sounds narcissistic. Earth was here long before we ever came around, it never needed us to do that, it just needs us not to fuck stuff up.

Re: Monarch butterfly populations in U.S. west are down an order of magnitude

#142

Post by eesmith »

vixen99 wrote: post #134
eesmith wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's an extremely complex system about we have shockingly little information in the grand scheme of things (30 years' worth of satellite data!), You should stop making that argument as it's too much like a well-refuted talking point that climate change denialists use. We have many different lines of evidence. “Global Warming in an Independent Record of the Past 130 Years“, for example, shows that the temperature ch…

Trust doesn't come into it. As Eschenbach puts it in his articles "My Other Request: If you believe that e.g. I’m using a method wrong or using the wrong dataset, please educate me and others by demonstrating the proper use of the method or the right dataset. Simply claiming I’m wrong about methods doesn’t advance the discussion unless you can point us to the right way to do it."

That's not how it works.

Climate denialists have a long history of cherry picking data, eg, picking trend lines which appear to indicate a decreasing or stable temperature, but done by picking an anomalously high temperature early on and low temperature later on.

These are the sorts of trickery which require time to figure out. Since I don't have that expertise, nor do have the time to be an expert in all of the topics which affect me, I have to use some sort of trust mechanism. I presume cryptonector does as well.

Why should I trust that Eschenbach isn't one of these sorts of cherry picking climate denalists? What I'm asking the g'parent is, why should I spend any time to research those points - especially since as I demonstrated some of the other points are invalid?

I've dealt enough with Young Earth Creationists who make similar arguments (that is, stating they are open to the evidence, want to be told where they are wrong, etc) but, oddly, no matter what evidence is presented - and the evidence is overwhelming that the world was not created in the last 10,000 years - they still deny it. That's not to say that Eschenbach is in the same category! I bring it up to point out that the description you pointed to can be suspect.

And I've DDG's enough to know that there is a wide spectrum of views about Eschenbach. https://www.skepticalscience.com/eschenbach-and-mcintyres-be... is the most concrete I found in terms of identifying problems in his methods of analysis.

So, what are cryptonector's reasons for trusting Eschenbach enough to bring it up on HN?

Re: Monarch butterfly populations in U.S. west are down an order of magnitude

#143

Post by Aloha »

icebraining wrote: post #141
momentmaker wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're all connected in a sense and we all rely on each other in a way we don't even realize. We are all a part of a whole. Oneness if you will. By destroying one part to satisfy another part, we're still chipping away the whole. In the Gaia's hypothesis, the human race is the brain of Earth. We are the neural network that powers the thriving liveliness of Earth. We're suppose to be the protector, keeper and guardian…

Why would we be all of that? Sounds narcissistic. Earth was here long before we ever came around, it never needed us to do that, it just needs us not to fuck stuff up.

because we, unlike most other creatures can substantively change our environment.

Re: Monarch butterfly populations in U.S. west are down an order of magnitude

#144

Post by mempko »

cryptonector wrote: post #7

This seems like part of the insect apocalypse story, and bee colony collapse disorder. All probably caused by overuse of insecticides. Note that if we don't find a way to correct this, it can be catastrophic on a timescale that makes the most alarmist climate change predictions seem like nothing. There must be some percentage of normal insect population density below which population of frogs and birds and what not w…

Bird populations are also crashing. It's a complex problem, overuse of insecticide is one part, but global warming is another. We have changed the habitats of these creatures in such a short amount of time, they don't have time to adapt.

Humanity should ask itself, can we adapt to a world without bugs, birds, and eventually every other vertebrate? Or is our habitat changing too fast to cope too?

Re: Monarch butterfly populations in U.S. west are down an order of magnitude

#145

Post by mempko »

lurquer wrote: post #52
a_bonobo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The general trend that goes upward in your graph isn't the number of butterflies, but the number of 'sites monitored', i.e., places where they searched for butterflies. In the time that monitored sites went from ~400,000 to ~1,400,000 the number of reported butterflies stayed roughly the same (~200,000), which should be grave cause for concern. The number of butterflies should be a linear correlation with the number…

>The general trend that goes upward in your graph isn't the number of butterflies, but the number of 'sites monitored', i.e., places where they searched for butterflies. With all due respect, I can read a graph. I was referring to the total amount of butterflies. There is no data on the site to permit one to draw any correlation between the number of monitoring sites and the number of butterflies. We could add 10,000…

> In short, the organization's data is useless

No, you think the data you used in your comment is useless. Doesn't mean the data the organization has and their conclusions is useless.

Also, kind of funny you linked data you think is useless, but then drawn a conclusion from that data. Given the graph, the uncertainty is high. They added sites but the numbers stayed the same. What's more likely, the sites added were in antartica? or were in places that are expected to have butterlies? In other words, it could be worse than what the graph shows.

Re: Monarch butterfly populations in U.S. west are down an order of magnitude

#146

Post by Lkjhmnbv »

eesmith wrote: post #142
vixen99 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trust doesn't come into it. As Eschenbach puts it in his articles "My Other Request: If you believe that e.g. I’m using a method wrong or using the wrong dataset, please educate me and others by demonstrating the proper use of the method or the right dataset. Simply claiming I’m wrong about methods doesn’t advance the discussion unless you can point us to the right way to do it."

That's not how it works. Climate denialists have a long history of cherry picking data, eg, picking trend lines which appear to indicate a decreasing or stable temperature, but done by picking an anomalously high temperature early on and low temperature later on. These are the sorts of trickery which require time to figure out. Since I don't have that expertise, nor do have the time to be an expert in all of the topi…

You should read a source before you go looking for other people tearing it down. It ultimately makes you incapable of forming conclusions yourself.

Also expecting others to prove to you why you should trust them but offering no reason for anyone to trust you is bizarre.

Re: Monarch butterfly populations in U.S. west are down an order of magnitude

#147

Post by wgj »

cryptonector wrote: post #7

This seems like part of the insect apocalypse story, and bee colony collapse disorder. All probably caused by overuse of insecticides. Note that if we don't find a way to correct this, it can be catastrophic on a timescale that makes the most alarmist climate change predictions seem like nothing. There must be some percentage of normal insect population density below which population of frogs and birds and what not w…

> climate change gets all the attention

It's in the article.

"The biggest reasons are habitat loss and pesticides across the butterflies’ breeding and migratory range. This year’s steep drop is probably due to extreme weather, at least partly resulting from climate change. Late rainstorms in March, as well as an intense, extended wildfire season across California, have battered the species. The state’s forests have yet to recover from the record-breaking drought stretching from 2011 to 2017."

Climate change is claimed to be a significant factor, and deserves the attention it gets.

Re: Monarch butterfly populations in U.S. west are down an order of magnitude

#148

Post by eesmith »

Lkjhmnbv wrote: post #146
eesmith wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how it works. Climate denialists have a long history of cherry picking data, eg, picking trend lines which appear to indicate a decreasing or stable temperature, but done by picking an anomalously high temperature early on and low temperature later on. These are the sorts of trickery which require time to figure out. Since I don't have that expertise, nor do have the time to be an expert in all of the topi…

You should read a source before you go looking for other people tearing it down. It ultimately makes you incapable of forming conclusions yourself. Also expecting others to prove to you why you should trust them but offering no reason for anyone to trust you is bizarre.

I disagree with your first point. I pointed out that the evidence is overwhelming that Young Earth Creationism is scientifically baseless. In that case, I have no problems with pointing to a "tear it down" commentary rather than try to read the primary source, depending on the specifics of the commentary.

Which source am I supposed to be evaluating? cryptonector only pointed to https://wattsupwiththat.com/ . Am I supposed to read everything there? Is the phrase "Just a very small change in cloud cover along the equator can cool down an overheating Earth, or warm a cooling Earth" connected to the “Sense and Sensitivity” posting at wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/28/sense-and-sensitivity/ ? Note that it was from 2010, seemingly never otherwise published, and it was criticized by https://www.skepticalscience.com/SensitivitySensibility1.htm... .

Or is it some later source that I'm supposed to read?

What is bizarre about the trust claims of my original post? I stated reasons why I disagreed with cryptonector's interpretation of climate information and gave links to supporting citations from the scientific literature.

Specifically, claim #1: "we have shockingly little information in the grand scheme of things (30 years' worth of satellite data!)". Response: I referenced a 2013 paper describing 173 different lines of evidence for warming across the last 130 years. (BTW, we have 40 years of microwave sounding units and 51 years of sea surface IR data, both from satellites.)

claim #2: "recent climate change is minute even by standards of the past two millennia". Response: I cited a 2005 paper with quite different conclusions. I asked for the source of the claim. I also questioned how cryptonector could be certain of this claim if we have such "shockingly little information".

I can follow up with additional supporting evidence if there are statements I made which you do not agree with. That's usually how this trust relationship works, yes?

Re: Monarch butterfly populations in U.S. west are down an order of magnitude

#149

Post by nkurz »

eesmith wrote: post #148
Lkjhmnbv wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should read a source before you go looking for other people tearing it down. It ultimately makes you incapable of forming conclusions yourself. Also expecting others to prove to you why you should trust them but offering no reason for anyone to trust you is bizarre.

I disagree with your first point. I pointed out that the evidence is overwhelming that Young Earth Creationism is scientifically baseless. In that case, I have no problems with pointing to a "tear it down" commentary rather than try to read the primary source, depending on the specifics of the commentary. Which source am I supposed to be evaluating? cryptonector only pointed to https://wattsupwiththat.com/ . Am I sup…

You ask good questions, and raise good points. Since one can't read all the primary sources, how can you decide who to trust? In this case, I don't think there is a simple and logically defensible answer. Normally, your best bet would be to trust that the recognized experts in the field probably have it right. But I think Climate Science is so politicized at this point that unless you can sit down and have a beer at a backyard BBQ with those experts, anything you read is more likely to be well-calculated propaganda than the experts' true beliefs. The data presented in the papers is largely true, but the ancillary spin is so strong that it's hard to know what to conclude without a close reading of the entire paper. And even then, the choice of which papers are published in which journals makes it hard to know how much weight to put on what.

So you ask why to trust Willis Eschenbach. For me, I trust him because I've been reading his comments on ClimateAudit.org for well over a decade, and I've never seen him attempt to mislead. He's occasionally wrong, and but readily owns up to his errors. My impression from reading him over many years is that he's a smart guy who believes what he's saying, knows a lot about the field, has no obvious conflicts of interest, and does his best to be accurate.

I don't feel like the SkepticalScience.com post you linked to treats him fairly. Since that post considers him together with McIntyre, the best answer I can provide is that you should read McIntyre's latest post (https://climateaudit.org/2018/10/24/pages2k-north-american-t...) and see if you think their criticisms actually apply. I realize this isn't anything approaching rock-solid logic, but personal testimonial is the best I can offer. As a fervent environmentalist who has been closely reading McIntyre since soon after MBH98 came out, I'm still firmly under his sway, and think his criticisms have still not been adequately addressed.

Re: Monarch butterfly populations in U.S. west are down an order of magnitude

#150

Post by balt_s »

monktastic1 wrote: post #115
cryptonector wrote: post #7

This seems like part of the insect apocalypse story, and bee colony collapse disorder. All probably caused by overuse of insecticides. Note that if we don't find a way to correct this, it can be catastrophic on a timescale that makes the most alarmist climate change predictions seem like nothing. There must be some percentage of normal insect population density below which population of frogs and birds and what not w…

It seems to me that all of these problems -- the insect apocalypse, general biodiversity loss, climate change, all the way to the depression and anxiety epidemics, economic inequity, etc., stem from the same general principle: our alienation from ourselves, each other, and nature. In a sense, healing any one of them will contribute to healing all of them. And trying to merely engineer our way out of any of them (whil…

> If you're a fan of this line of reasoning, I recommend the author Charles Eisenstein.

Check out John Michael Greer for another very clear and cogent writer on this topic.

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