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Insect collapse

theguardian.com

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191–200 of 266 posts

Re: Insect collapse

#191

Post by aoeusnth1 »

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…

Agreed. Raising vegan/vegetarian children and trying to steer them toward effective-altruistic careers around environmental benefit probably has positive expected outcomes for the environmental and political future.

Re: Insect collapse

#192

Post by rollo »

nopriorarrests wrote: post #134
rollo wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JS is the most popular language. Thus most software is wasting orders of magnitude more energy than it should. The same functionality would require less than a tenth of processing power (and thus energy and physical hardware) if it were implemented properly.

Properly is like what, assembler? So lets spend 100x power on developers notebooks and 100x of their paid time and rewrite eveything in asm so it will work faster? Or what "implemented properly" means?

In a modern compiled language and without using ten layers of abstraction. It is very feasible and does not require significantly more development effort, at least not compared to the energy and material savings.

Re: Insect collapse

#193

Post by crispinb »

voqv wrote: post #20
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…

For some reason we as humanity have been living really well for the last 50 years and, without thought, we imagine it's just going to stay like that.

Even 'living well' isn't quite right. By and large, we have swapped out physical for psychological suffering.

Re: Insect collapse

#194

Post by crispinb »

shusson wrote: post #118
ben_w wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you objecting to “our” on the grounds that we didn’t build it? Because most people use “our house” to mean the one they occupy, not limiting it to only what they built.

> Are you objecting to “our” on the grounds that we didn’t build it I'm objecting that we own the Earth and that somehow we can kill it. > people use “our house” to mean the one they occupy, not limiting it to only what they built The Earth isn't being occupied by us, we are simply part of the Earth. So I don't mind the use of "our", but implying that we are killing the planet is the bit I think people should take a…

'Our' doesn't connote ownership. Our families are not owned by us.

If anything the relationship is the other way around: we belong to the world that has formed us.

> implying that we are killing the planet

That would be a meaningless assertion. We our killing our world, which is a network of evolved complex living systems, not 'the planet'.

Re: Insect collapse

#195

Post by ForHackernews »

toasterlovin wrote: post #184
ForHackernews wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

As I pointed out, children get their nature and their nurture from their parents. And I don't know how you can reconcile the success of the environmental movement in the developed world in the past 5 decades with your position that somehow people caring about the environment doesn't have any real world effects.

CO2 emissions are not just rising but rising faster. We haven't even gotten the second derivative pointed in the necessary direction.

Re: Insect collapse

#196

Post by vokep »

addicted wrote: post #138
voqv wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason we as humanity have been living really well for the last 50 years and, without thought, we imagine it's just going to stay like that.

But even that is misleading. A small fraction of humanity has been living really well. And it’s increasingly apparent they have been able to do so by essentially pushing the costs of their actions to future generations.

No. Almost everyone is living "really well" compared to 100 years back. The lowest low is higher than it was before.

Re: Insect collapse

#197

Post by vokep »

EGreg wrote: post #26
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.

Majority of which people? Honduras is being impacted. Our reaction in the USA is to block the refugees fleeing famine and drought from reaching us and “invading”. Similarly with Europe and African refugees.

A significant portion of those "refugees" are seeking safety from problems that can be solved at home, not famine.

Re: Insect collapse

#198

Post by crispinb »

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…

1. It's not 'this story' - it's a stream of new stories about collapses of insect populations in different ecosystems (a part of the wider stream of stories about ecosystem breakdown) 2. As for motivations for submitting the stories, I can only speak for myself: ecosystem collapse is more important and interesting to me than tech. I live in ecosystems (indeed I have nowhere else to go), whereas I merely make a living from tech.

Re: Insect collapse

#199

Post by vokep »

honkycat wrote: post #145
radiorental wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you vastly over-estimate our power. If the oceans die through acidification and pollution, and all of the insects die we will die as well.

Yes, we'll die, but only 99.99% dead. The remaining surviving will have learned the most costly lesson yet of humanity, and will continue on and rebuild. It sucks, but so did the millions of years of animals murdering each other just so that I could type this and you could read it.

Re: Insect collapse

#200

Post by throwaway5752 »

toasterlovin wrote: post #169
throwaway5752 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you reconcile the future warfare and famine risk to your N existing children caused by the additional carbon of your hypothetical N+1 vs your utility of having an N+1th child, though? Because that is the actual formulation.

You reconcile it by reading some history books and realizing that life has always been tough and that the future probably won't be any tougher than the past.

I mean, you are absolutely, 100% incorrect. It's textbook fallacy. X is tough, Y was tough, we survived Y, and therefore we can survive X.

The planet has never been through warming as rapid as what we are going through in known geological (not human) history. There was a paper hosted and copublished by NASA to that effect in the last month. It's literally unknown how much life can survive the velocity of the change that is in progress.

What "history books" should I read about climate science, too?

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