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Insect collapse

theguardian.com

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Re: Insect collapse

#81

Post by LukeB42 »

titzer wrote: post #14

This planet will not support 7 billion humans. Certainly not 7 billion stupid-ass humans who swing massive sledgehammers into the pillars of the biosphere that support them in their hedonistic blunder in search of more "wealth". When I hear the words "economic growth", and then weigh it against the destruction of this magnitude, I often want to vomit. And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in compu…

When? Yesterday?

Enough energy enters Earth's atmosphere on days like this one to sustain 7 billion people plus the six-legged majority with room for human technological innovation. We're just not capturing each day's energy with even greater than 50% efficiency yet.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/43619013?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...

Re: Insect collapse

#82

Post by fsloth »

growlist wrote: post #61
fsloth wrote: post #11

It's funny we think we are an "advanced" civilization, yet we have no real time diagnostics of the status of our biosphere. It's really creepy how little basic research apparently is going on into "boring" ecological factors. This insect apocalypse is like you suddenly notice you are missing an arm and a leg and have no idea what happened to them. Any professionals in um... ecological metrics here? To an outsider it…

Makes me think of Buckminster Fuller's World Game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Game I guess the problem is that similar to indicators of climate change there would likely be massive methodological argument, some of it legitimate, some of it mendacious, bogging the thing down so much as to destroy its usefulness.

I'm talking just raw numbers like you get in a weather forecast. The fact that politics would happen is not really an explanation of anything. Politics happen in everything people do - at some level.

Re: Insect collapse

#83

Post by vzq »

petilon wrote: post #58
brazzy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When do we do something? When it significantly impacts the daily lives of a majority of people, and not a second earlier.

When it significantly impacts the daily lives of uneducated Americans . Educated people around the world already want to do something. Uneducated people outside America already want to do something (because their governments are on board.) It is uneducated Americans -- and their president -- that is going to do us all in. This means the survival of the planet depends on our ability to communicate with and convince un…

You live in a fantasy world if you think uneducated people outside America give two fucks about global warming.

Most uneducated people outside America live worse lives than uneducated people in America, so they have much more important and immediate things to care about than global warming.

Re: Insect collapse

#84

Post by gerbilly »

latch wrote: post #45
xupybd wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way we’re going to get better at managing our environmental impact is going to be through technological improvement. As you say we are too many now. The only way that technology will improve is under good economic conditions. We have to weigh economic growth against its impact else we will only speed up the destruction. When people become poor environmental concerns come second place to the basics of life.

This is silly. The economy has been booming for a while now and technology is more advanced that it's ever been. The situation is accelerating the wrong way. More of the same won't help. Plant trees and revive massive amount of land loss that most countries have caused due to poor stewardship (overgrazing). Better capture negative externalities. Or at the very least, stop subsidizing them. (aka, tax beef production,…

> Plant trees and revive massive amount of land loss that most countries have caused due to poor stewardship

In some places you can't even plant the trees back. For example if you clearcut trees on a karst landscape, the rain washes away the thin soil completely, leaving only bare rock.

>The lesson goes back to the ancient Romans, who harvested the great pine trees on the Dalmatian karst on the southern tip of Croatia. “As soon as new trees got started, the sheep or the goats ate them,” Ford says. “The word karst means stony ground—stony because they wrecked it.” In the Middle East, the mythic Cedars of Lebanon—believed by some Christians to be the place where the resurrected Jesus revealed himself—grew on pure limestone karst very much like that of Vancouver Island. They were mowed down to build the temples of ancient Egypt and Jerusalem. The soil disappeared and never came back. Around one percent of the original cedars remain, in scattered, protected groves. Slovenia banned clearcutting on karst in 1949—but by then it was too late. There are photos, circa 1900, of babushka-wrapped Austro-Hungarian peasants hauling topsoil back onto the bald karst after it was clearcut.

(https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/the-cavernous-world-u...)

Re: Insect collapse

#85

Post by Tushon »

mrob wrote: post #76
vixen99 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No problem at all! So put tigers at the top of your list and work slowly but surely down the the list of 'nasty' animals and plants. Doubtless we can eliminate the whole damn lot if we really try. You'll be a hero! Or maybe not.

I'd put malaria carrying mosquitoes at the top of the list, not tigers. The concept of a tiger is an important part of human culture, and it would be a pity if nobody could see a real one, but they breed in captivity, so people can see them in zoos. It's easy to romanticize the idea of "wild tigers" when they live far from you, and you're at no risk of one eating you or your livestock. Humans killed most wild tigers…

Would you say the same thing about wolves, re the wolves returning to Yellowstone? https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/wolf-reintroduc...

Re: Insect collapse

#86

Post by graeme »

The guardian links to a study of a nature reserve in australia. The abstract is terrifying.

------

Aim We characterized changes in reporting rates and abundances of bird species over a period of severe rainfall deficiency and increasing average temperatures. We also measured flowering in eucalypts, which support large numbers of nectarivores characteristic of the region.

Location A 30,000‐km2 region of northern Victoria, Australia, consisting of limited amounts of remnant native woodlands embedded in largely agricultural landscapes.

Methods There were three sets of monitoring studies, pitched at regional (survey programmes in 1995–97, 2004–05 and 2006–08), landscape (2002–03 and 2006–07) and site (1997–2008 continuously) scales. Bird survey techniques used a standard 2‐ha, 20‐min count method. We used Bayesian analyses of reporting rates to document statistically changes in the avifauna through time at each spatial scale.

Results Bird populations in the largest remnants of native vegetation (up to 40,000 ha), some of which have been declared as national parks in the past decade, experienced similar declines to those in heavily cleared landscapes. All categories of birds (guilds based on foraging substrate, diet, nest site; relative mobility; geographical distributions) were affected similarly. We detected virtually no bird breeding in the latest survey periods. Eucalypt flowering has declined significantly over the past 12 years of drought.

Main conclusions Declines in the largest woodland remnants commensurate with those in cleared landscapes suggest that reserve systems may not be relied upon to sustain species under climate change. We attribute population declines to low breeding success due to reduced food. Resilience of bird populations in this woodland system might be increased by active management to enhance habitat quality in existing vegetation and restoration of woodland in the more fertile parts of landscapes.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1472-4642...

Re: Insect collapse

#87

Post by drankula3 »

dmichulke wrote: post #77
drankula3 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Limiting further population increase is in no way equivalent to saying kill yourself. This is a gross exaggeration.

I'm just saying it logically follows that killing yourself is likely even better than not having children. I consider it a failure of the study if it says "don't have kids" if (and only if) its original aim was to show how that can be done without drastic measures (such as "kill all humans", "don't have kids", ...). It's like suggesting to not have kids in order to fight cancer. Yes, absolute cancer occurrences will…

Fighting cancer involves lowering cancer rates in each individual person. Individual likelihood of cancer is unaffected by the global population. Fighting climate change involves lowering CO2 rates for the globe, and is heavily influenced by the global population and the population of rich countries.

Re: Insect collapse

#88

Post by chimprich »

pfisch wrote: post #27
11235813213455 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, but I believe we can act about it. My environmental fingerprint is probably At a single person level, these actions looks insignificant, but if everyone does it, it won't be since the major source of pollution is residential pollution, i.e. people, and the other sources of pollution (industry, large-scale transports...) are also driven by consumption. So if people stop over-consuming, this saves dramatically…

[flagged]

It seems to be quite well established that not dealing with climate change is going to be significantly more expensive than taking preventative action. So your arguments about economic hardship and the associated problems are (if valid) really arguments for taking more drastic action against the problem.

Re: Insect collapse

#89

Post by tomp »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #75
dmichulke wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's recursive reasoning because a child also eats, travels by car and by airplane. It's also equivalent to saying: Kill yourself because you cause 58.6t CO2 (unless children cause more CO2 than adults which would be absurd because children don't take a lot of emission-relevant decisions)

It's not equivalent since you're already alive. Not producing a child isn't the same as killing one's self in any way.

In your value system.

It's easy to construct a value system where my own life and my future child's life are both worth more than 58 t CO2.

Re: Insect collapse

#90

Post by dharma1 »

titzer wrote: post #14

This planet will not support 7 billion humans. Certainly not 7 billion stupid-ass humans who swing massive sledgehammers into the pillars of the biosphere that support them in their hedonistic blunder in search of more "wealth". When I hear the words "economic growth", and then weigh it against the destruction of this magnitude, I often want to vomit. And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in compu…

It feels like humans lack the capacity to optimise for success beyond reproduction and acquiring power, especially at large scales and timelines. Maybe there is a non-technological solution to this - new ways of organising that enforces better choices for the planet and our long term survival - but it's hard to see that.

Perhaps the bit flipping will be the way out of this mess - using machine intelligence to understand and help us optimise for things that we can't. I think that will take a while though - we need more legislation around polluting and overuse of resources as the immediate step.

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