It probably helps that millions of people are helping insect and bird populations by planting stacks of wildflowers, doing No Mow May, and being a bit nicer to local wildlife which all adds up.
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Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?
161–170 of 184 posts
Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
If fracking was related, we'd see a dramatically higher die-off around the permian basin and more or less no die-off whatsoever in the north-west and north-east. This isn't quite what we see: https://fractracker.org and https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-map-highlights... Now, as for fracking and air pollution, I am not an expert, but I did have a very interesting set of discussions with a fracking enginee…
Thanks for the information. What about water table pollution? Those videos of people's tap water lighting on fire certainly stuck with me [1] [1] https://youtu.be/1zagvo75RJo
The water is the least of your problems with fracking. It costs a lot but you can import your water. You cannot however import your air.
https://news.wsu.edu/press-release/2022/03/08/natural-gas-fl...
Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
If mass recycling doesn't work well except for two materials, then it's not unreasonable to disparage recycling in general. Especially when you're talking about recycling as an alternative to landfills. > Nor is cheaper ways of reducing CO2 a sensible argument. Every method of reducing CO2, except for one, has cheaper options. We should do all the ones that are a net positive, and so save us money, not only the very…
Yes, the article tried to give the vague impression that recycling is expensive, and then admits that metal recycling would increase the social good and should be subsidized. So it's not 'expensive', it's expensive not to do it, no matter how much that total subsidy comes to. In fact the higher the total subsidy the more we save. (Not coincidentally the same applies to CO2, carbon fees are the economists solution to…
> In fact the higher the total subsidy the more we save.
What.
If someone offers a way to spend a hundred thousand dollars per ton of CO2 saved, you should not give them a single penny. It does not increase social good to fund such a program.
Unless that sentence was just about the efficient types of recycling. In which case yes, fully fund those programs.
> which he dubiously claims is the original, false reason given to recycle
The argument the article makes is "90s environmentalism said we'd run out of landfill space and trash would pile up everywhere. This was wrong."
Not that it was the only reason to recycle, but that it was a massive part of the messaging, and completely wrong.
You're so laser-focused on that single sentence that you're making a strawman out of the article. The section is not geared at the overall practice of recycling. One single sentence is going too far by being too glib.
Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?
#164Bumblebee populations are down in the US N.E.
From October 6, 2021
The American Bumblebee Has Nearly Vanished From Eight States https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/american-bumblebee...
Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
(Not my knowledge, just repeating sources): almonds, some apples, melons, alfafa, plums, avocado, blueberry, cherry, pear, cucumber, sunflower, cranberry, kiwi, etc. Source: PDF page 4: https://www.beyondpesticides.org/assets/media/documents/poll... Background, in order from "most readable" to "scholarly": https://www.museumoftheearth.org/bees/agriculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_crop_plants_pollinated..…
Blueberries, sunflowers, and cranberries are all native to North America. The things Europeans sometimes call "blueberries" (bilberries) are an entirely different species.
Yes, the old world bees sometimes do pollinate the native crops too, and vice versa. It's not a completely separate Venn diagram. The studies discuss and analyze the degrees of crossover.
Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?
#166Um, "bee"? What's that?
Seriously, I used to see MANY more bees than I have in the past two years, so any conclusion that the bees (or other insects) are OK, is anecdotally wrong.
Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?
#167I appreciate that she draws the link between monoculture crops, land use, and the health of ecosystems upon which agriculture depends. Organics are important not because GMOs are the enemy but rather because the land use change is inherently bad for all life in that area. GMOs don't have to lead to monoculture crops that span acres or rampant neonicotinoid insecticides, but they often do, and it's precisely at that p…
While I heartily agree with most of your comment, I must strongly disagree with the third paragraph (this is exactly what I'm doing my PhD on): > many scientists won't go to bat against this kind of land use change. A self-respecting scientist won't say that converting croplands to monocultures ready for insecticide use lead to biodiversity die-off because it's hard to actually track the fluctuations between species…
Apparently (and probably unsurprisingly) weed/grass killers like Roundup can also affect bees:
https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/2021/04/roundup-s...
Roundup also seems to be bad for humans, which is probably why it has been the subject of various lawsuits and settlements and is also banned or restricted in a number of US cities, though not yet in the US as a whole.
Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
High fructose corn syrup and sucrose (table sugar, which is a combination of fructose and glucose) have roughly the same amount of fructose- 50%. Also, what Lustig says is nonsense and isn't backed by any plausible mechanism or observational evidence. Alcohol and fructose aren't metabolized very similarly at all. He points out that if liver glycogen is constantly full, the liver has to convert extra fructose to fat (…
Agreed, fructose combined with overeating will lead likely to problems, fructose alone often not. But what do you make of this passage in the abstract of the linked paper? > Thus, fructose can exert detrimental health effects beyond its calories and in ways that mimic those of ethanol, its metabolic cousin. Indeed, the only distinction is that because fructose is not metabolized in the central nervous system, it does…
> As to your knowledge these claims about fructose and ethanol being "metabolic cousins" are false? Do you have any references for this?
Ethanol is metabolized ethanol->acetaldehyde->acetate->acetyl CoA whereas fructose is metabolized through the fructolysis pathway, which eventually enters glycolysis the same as other carbohydrates. All energy nutrients eventually end up at acetyl CoA and enter the citric acid cycle, but there is nothing uniquely similar about fructose and alcohol besides being metabolized only in the liver, which is also done for a lot of other nutrients from food. This is all in any basic undergrad biochemistry textbook. Short chain fats from fermented vegetable fiber in the gut for example are widely regarded as super healthy, and are also metabolized in the liver, and nobody says "vegetables are basically just alcohol without the buzz."
Lustig is just confused in my opinion, and he has a particular type of personality where conflicting evidence entrenches rather than weakens his confused opinion. I had some initial interest in learning more about his ideas before I actually met him at a conference (I am a PI researcher in this field) and found him to be arrogantly dismissive of any and all technical questions and criticisms, without trying to understand what people are saying.
Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would I do that? Closely related species compete for the same resources. 9 out of 10, one species "dwindling" just means another is gaining.
In this cas it does not. The insects as a whole are in decline.
I've not heard insects like ants, beetles or flies being in decline. I've heard of bee colony collapse and declines in grasshoppers and monarch butterflies. But there are tons of other insects, some of which seem to do quite well around humans, whether we like it or not.
Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?
#170What happened is that the apocalypse did happen, is still happening, and will continue to happen until such time as people quit using tons of pesticides. Worse is that warmer air usually means more oxygen is available which should make insect and arachnid populations explode, and should result in physically larger insects and arachnids. That we do not see this speaks to the health of these populations.
So an apocalypse can happen for an indefinite period of time? I'm calling BS on the use of that term. A decline in some insect populations is not an "apocalypse". An apocalypse would be a massive extinction level event on a global scale, like when a giant rock slams into the Earth, or there's continuous volcanic activity for a million years.