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Germany plans to dim lights at night to save insects

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Re: Germany plans to dim lights at night to save insects

#351

Post by rubber_duck »

yummypaint wrote: post #168
rubber_duck wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>has led to the near-extinction of bees in residential areas Why do you want bees in residential areas ? I think that it's illegal to keep bees in some proximity to residential areas around here (my grandparents used to keep bees).

A more accurate framing of the question would be "Should we wantonly destroy massive ecosystems covering vast fractions of available land area for the sake of socially constructed vanity?"

Framing the question indeed...

I'm allergic to bee stings and I'd prefer not to have my neck swell up to the point where I can't breathe because I accidentally sat on or pinched an insect. And I don't want random insects biting me or my children, spreading disieses, etc.

Residential areas are called that because they are built to accommodate humans, I don't see anything particularly problematic about not having bees there.

And I do realise they pollinate a lot of plants - again residential area - I don't have anything against bees on farms or in nature.

Re: Germany plans to dim lights at night to save insects

#352

Post by DocTomoe »

efa wrote: post #228
ashtonkem wrote: post #26

This is good; we've badly underestimated the cost of excess light pollution. Also good is using more LED street lamps that focus the light where we need it, rather than all over the place. Light pollution is bad, and street lights are very power hungry, with the old sodium lights consuming up to 0.25kWh per hour.

North Korea must be swimming in insects. https://i.imgur.com/S1mrMKN.jpg

They also use pesticides pretty liberally.

But there is a somewhat interesting paper on North Korean entomology: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3554493/

Re: Germany plans to dim lights at night to save insects

#354

Post by Scottopherson »

macinjosh wrote: post #300

What is more important? Your nan walking home from the corner store after dark under a street light or a beetle? Germany: beetles!

If we decimate the insect population there won't be any nans or corner stores. If a street light is the only thing keeping your nan safe then maybe your area has bigger safety issues to address.

Regardless, for any issue there is usually middle ground to be found and snark comments like yours do nothing to help find or support it.

Re: Germany plans to dim lights at night to save insects

#355

Post by veddox »

yalsk wrote: post #132
veddox wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Drop according to whom? The people whose jobs depend on the alleged drop? Speaking as an ecologist here, colleagues of mine were authors on one of the recent studies on insect decline in Germany ( https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1684-3 ). Believe me, we'd rather study other things than how fast nature is disappearing. Also, foxes and rats have nothing to do with insect levels.

Foxes and rats have very much to do with the fact that the government is telling us that species are disappearing and need protection while there was literally a fox trying to enter my house via an open door pretty much in the city. This has never happened 20 years ago, so someone is lying. It is a massive credibility problem created by ideologues who will deny the foxes until there are 5 in every apartment.

That is a pretty accusatory tone...

There are probably over 10 million species of plants and animals in the world. Of course some of these are going to be better at coping with humans and their cities than others. As you correctly observe, foxes happen to be some of the best at adapting to city life. If you want more examples, just take a look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_wildlife

However, these exceptions change nothing whatsoever about the fact that in general, species very much are in decline and many are about to, or have already disappeared. Indeed, when we look at cities around the world, only 20% of bird species and 5% of plant species actually live in such an environment (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4027400/). Outside cities, the picture is not much better. Some species, like the crested lark in Europe, have suffered over 95% population drops. Others, like the passenger pigeon, have gone entirely extinct. I‘m citing bird examples here because we tend to have the best data for them (we have numerous birdwatching records reaching back 300 years), but I could cite others. In the last decades, an increasing number of observations suggest that by now, even insects are beginning to decline. And if you want to know what it‘s like when they‘re dead, just ask the Chinese labourers who are already having to pollinate apple blossoms by hand, because all the bees are gone...

Re: Germany plans to dim lights at night to save insects

#356

Post by amelius »

wenc wrote: post #86
thatguy0900 wrote: post #16

I actually was sitting outside a few nights ago and realized that there was no more fireflies, and I couldn't remember the last time I had seen one. I used to go out all the time during summer as a kid to catch them, they would light up whole fields. That was just like 15 years ago. Pretty sobering realization

I'm in Chicago (in a neighborhood close to downtown) and in previous years I'd hardly ever seen any fireflies. This year, they're everywhere -- in parks and even in trees on neighborhood streets. I understand fireflies are sensitive to light pollution. I can't imagine Chicago's any different from other major cities. COVID has people staying home a lot more but that has nothing to do with street lighting. I wonder wha…

How many bugs are on your car's windshield/grille, versus 20 years ago?

Re: Germany plans to dim lights at night to save insects

#357

Post by mattoxic »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #16

I actually was sitting outside a few nights ago and realized that there was no more fireflies, and I couldn't remember the last time I had seen one. I used to go out all the time during summer as a kid to catch them, they would light up whole fields. That was just like 15 years ago. Pretty sobering realization

It hit me a couple of years back, a night time drive through the Australian countryside and your car would be plastered with insects - not anymore. And fireflies, I haven't seen one in years,

Re: Germany plans to dim lights at night to save insects

#358

Post by emptybits »

ashtonkem wrote: post #26

This is good; we've badly underestimated the cost of excess light pollution. Also good is using more LED street lamps that focus the light where we need it, rather than all over the place. Light pollution is bad, and street lights are very power hungry, with the old sodium lights consuming up to 0.25kWh per hour.

> Also good is using more LED street lamps that focus the light where we need it,

Focusing light where needed is good. Using LEDs, as we do now, has downsides though. LED lighting in cities is making astronomy and astrophotography and even animal life worse in some cases.[1]

Traditional sodium vapour lights pollute around a wavelength of 589 nm.[2] That's the yellow/orange sky you used to see in the sky around cities. In theory, if you filtered out that wavelength 10 years ago, you'd be able to eliminate a lot of light pollution. But today, with more LED lighting, the pollution tends toward white/blue. This is "nicer" in some objective and subjective ways. e.g. colour accuracy. But it's a bitch to filter out, without also removing all the white and broad spectrum we want to see in the features of the night sky.

Animals are also sensitive to white and blue light emitted by modern LEDs, and the NatGeo link and others go into why this can be a bad thing, compared to "old fashioned" lighting methods, inefficient as they are.

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/11/light-pollut...

[2] https://www.peterzelinka.com/blog/2019/8/light-pollution-fil...

Re: Germany plans to dim lights at night to save insects

#359

Post by ori_b »

nashalo_nighly wrote: post #107
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We live rural southern Ontario and fireflies are usually just a single weekend or so at the end of June or beginning of July. But this year they went on for almost two months. They only just stopped about a week ago. I'm not sure why it was a good season for them. Like you say, traffic, lighting, pesticide sprays on farms, all really the same despite COVID. Reduced air traffic I don't think would have an affect? Even…

I feel that I hear people say « we’re having a unusually hot dry year » every year...

The last 5 years have been the hottest years on record, so...

Re: Germany plans to dim lights at night to save insects

#360

Post by spaetzleesser »

zdragnar wrote: post #294
adrianN wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germans for example have an expectation of privacy at the workplace. It's not allowed to monitor a German employee's web browsing on a work computer. In the US the employer can monitor them all they want.

Property rights are more "first class" than privacy rights; in the US, the idea that a company is not allowed to monitor the use of company equipment by employees is absurd- to the extent that many institutions are regulated to require it (i.e. monitoring for data exfiltration, etc). Of course, most companies' monitoring is pretty shallow and reasonable, but there are exceptions, and I certainly wouldn't choose to wo…

That makes sense. Property ownership seems to be one of the most important values in the US. Which leads to property owners having the freedom to restrict the freedoms of other people. You can see that in companies where employees are assumed to basically have no rights while working. Same in the west here where property owners fence off large areas of land and nobody can pass through. In Germany there usually is some kind of path where people can pass through. This can make hiking in CA quite difficult because you often run into a fence.
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