Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Insect collapse

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 266 posts

Re: Insect collapse

#171

Post by toasterlovin »

dmichulke wrote: post #110
drankula3 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Fighting climate change involves lowering CO2 rates Exactly, and not having kids doesn't lower CO2 rates per capita, it just reduces absolute CO2 emissions. Hence the equivalence that the article's statistics implicitly suggest killing humans reduces CO2 emissions and my claim that this type of info doesn't help at all.

It reduces absolute CO2 emissions if everyone has less children. Biology tells us that life does not stop reproducing short of extinction level events, however.

Re: Insect collapse

#172

Post by refurb »

jelliclesfarm wrote: post #154

Speaking as a farmer..We should return half the earths landmass to nature. We must change how we grow food. We must even reconsider our ‘food for survival and fuel’. We can all do without pork and HFCS and kale to live. We can’t live without this planet and it’s natural systems sustaining us. We should waste less. Use less fossil fuel. Every time I hear another VC flog their investment with the tired old line ‘we mus…

But 1/2 of the world is already wilderness.[1]

I think people underestimate just how big Russia and Canada are and the fact that for most the part, they are completely undeveloped.

[1]https://www.conservation.org/NewsRoom/pressreleases/Pages/12...

Re: Insect collapse

#173

Post by skh »

toasterlovin wrote: post #166
skh wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is true. For me the way that I deal with the reality of a planet becoming a shitty place to live is to not have children. It is the best way for me to cope with the situation. People can choose to do otherwise.

Have you considered letting your children decide whether they want to be alive on whatever the future has in store for this planet? Life is optional; they can opt out at any time. But my hunch is that they'll appreciate being alive and decide to make a go of it, however tough it is. After all, there is no alternative; the only life they can have is the one you give them.

I have not considered letting things that don't yet exist decide if they want to exist.

Re: Insect collapse

#174

Post by jelliclesfarm »

radiorental wrote: post #68
Regardsyjc wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to feel this way and I found that it wasn't productive. What can you do? If you can do something, do it. If you think you can't change the future possible destruction of our ecosystem or millions of people, then you also need to make peace with it. I think you can either do or not do things without the negativity. I found that the negativity made me think emotionally and not rationally or productively, and als…

I view our success as a product of evolution. It is the driving factor that got us down out of the trees, cultivating our food and to where we are today. Would we be putting a little less pressure on the environment without people like Edward Bernays, possibly. However, I think our collective consciousness can put itself a little at ease. As we enter the 6 mass extinction event, it's a natural cycle and if it wasn't…

Thank you. St.Carlin always keeps me grounded.

Re: Insect collapse

#175

Post by peacetreefrog »

pohl wrote: post #146
peacetreefrog wrote: post #115

It's interesting to me how often this story shows up on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=insect&sort=byPopularity&prefi... Edit: a lot of down votes, I'm not saying it's bad that it's frequently posted or isn't a very serious or alarming problem, or that it's showing up here so often due to some conspiracy or something. It's just interesting, given the non-technical nature of the topic. I wonder if environmental Arm…

Non-technical? Do you think maybe the cause of insect collapse is related to something other than a tradeoff that came along with the use of pesticide technology? What's your hypothesis?

I meant non-tech like non-programming, start ups, Rust etc, the stuff you usually see on HN.

Re: Insect collapse

#176

Post by jelliclesfarm »

astazangasta wrote: post #135
otikik wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but your comment doesn't help me. I can not "transition my society to a carbon neutral economy". I don't know how I can "create political will". Can you be more concrete?

You posited an individual act that could only have a result if realized collectively. I posit the same. Make carbon neutral choices as much as possible, in your personal and professional life; conservation works. As for political will, it is the same: composed of individual wills. Bill McKibben points out that a major impediment to a carbon-neutral future is that fossil fuel reserves are capital; the powerful people…

We could always transcend from carbon based life forms to a hybrid silicon-carbon based lifeform by becoming part AI.

Re: Insect collapse

#177

Post by ForHackernews »

toasterlovin wrote: post #164
skh wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me the only thing we can really do is not have children. There are too many people on the planet.

It may seem counterintuitive, but if you care about the environment, you should have children. I wrote a whole blog post on this, but the gist is that people are going to have children whatever you decide to do. If people like you, who are thoughtful and conscientious about the future of our species, decide not to have children, then the world will just be filled with the offspring of people who don't really care abo…

This only makes sense if you assume "caring about the environment" is highly heritable and that individuals "caring about the environment" in the abstract somehow translates into large-scale public policy that's better for the environment (I would suggest available evidence shows that it does not).

Re: Insect collapse

#178

Post by jelliclesfarm »

jellicle wrote: post #124
lotsofpulp wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course it is. You can immediately and permanently eliminate all of your CO2 production going forward. That's a big help to the world, not very useful for yourself though. Obviously if we eliminate humanity we also eliminate humanity's impact on the world. You can also get rid of all bugs in your code by deleting the code. That is the exact definition of throwing the baby out with the bathwater though. We're lookin…

In 1600s, the population of the world was a little more than half a billion.[1] We predict 10 billion by 2050.

We certainly can work towards reducing our population. Starting with 1/2 surviving child per person. It is important that it can’t be bought or sold in order to maintain diversity of human genetic code.

We could also likely become part AI or part synthetic instead of organic to deal with a different planet. But I am treading sci fi here.

[1]http://www.ecology.com/population-estimates-year-2050/

P.S. nice handle!!

Re: Insect collapse

#179

Post by sethammons »

jelliclesfarm wrote: post #161
Regardsyjc wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to feel this way and I found that it wasn't productive. What can you do? If you can do something, do it. If you think you can't change the future possible destruction of our ecosystem or millions of people, then you also need to make peace with it. I think you can either do or not do things without the negativity. I found that the negativity made me think emotionally and not rationally or productively, and als…

Reaching out and talking to people will help. 1. If everyone has 1/2 surviving child then in 150 years, our population will become stable. 2. It’s not transferable because we still need species diversity 3. People will be incentivized with ubi and all their needs taken care of if they agree to #1. 4.stop animal based foods. 5. Return half planet back to nature to reforest and rewind. 6.reverse acidification of oceans…

Human populations grow slower the more advanced they are. Most of the first world, including the US, is below replacement fertility rate of 2.1. Without immigration and the like, the US would start contracting. Bringing the third world up to first world is what is needed. That and the other things you said.

[EDIT] Links help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility

Re: Insect collapse

#180

Post by jelliclesfarm »

EGreg wrote: post #25
thebradbain wrote: post #6

And here I was recently musing to myself that if something embedded into our societal imagination, like the giraffe, went nearly extinct due to climate change, that would wake people up before it's too late. Little did I know that's already essentially happened here according to this article, and the powers that be neither seem to be aware nor care. And because I was curious: Giraffes are now on the endangered specie…

Tigers are nearly extinct. People don’t care.

Apparently there are more pet tigers in Texas than in the wild. (Source unknown to me)

Tigers disappeared because of humans. Not the natural ebb and flow of the planets rhythms. Less humans = less impact.

Post reply on HN