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Insect Collapse: 'We Are Destroying Our Life Support Systems' (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientist Brad Lister returned to Puerto Rican rainforest after 35 years to find 98% of ground insects had vanished. His return to the Luquillo rainforest in Puerto Rico after 35 years was to reveal an appalling discovery. The insect population that once provided plentiful food for birds throughout the mountainous national park had collapsed. On the ground, 98% had gone. Up in the leafy canopy, 80% had vanished. The most likely culprit by far is global warming. "It was just astonishing," Lister said. "Before, both the sticky ground plates and canopy plates would be covered with insects. You'd be there for hours picking them off the plates at night. But now the plates would come down after 12 hours in the tropical forest with a couple of lonely insects trapped or none at all."
"We are essentially destroying the very life support systems that allow us to sustain our existence on the planet, along with all the other life on the planet," Lister said. "It is just horrifying to watch us decimate the natural world like this." Lister calls these impacts a "bottom-up trophic cascade", in which the knock-on effects of the insect collapse surge up through the food chain. "I don't think most people have a systems view of the natural world," he said. "But it's all connected and when the invertebrates are declining the entire food web is going to suffer and degrade. It is a system-wide effect." To understand the global scale of an insect collapse that has so far only been glimpsed, Lister says, there is an urgent need for much more research in many more habitats. "More data, that is my mantra," he said.
"We are essentially destroying the very life support systems that allow us to sustain our existence on the planet, along with all the other life on the planet," Lister said. "It is just horrifying to watch us decimate the natural world like this." Lister calls these impacts a "bottom-up trophic cascade", in which the knock-on effects of the insect collapse surge up through the food chain. "I don't think most people have a systems view of the natural world," he said. "But it's all connected and when the invertebrates are declining the entire food web is going to suffer and degrade. It is a system-wide effect." To understand the global scale of an insect collapse that has so far only been glimpsed, Lister says, there is an urgent need for much more research in many more habitats. "More data, that is my mantra," he said.
We had this dance already :
https://it.slashdot.org/story/...
As I said last time :
"Water diverted from the forest ranges from 7 to 17 percent of average flow throughout the year, with up to 54 percent of flow diverted from individual watersheds (table 5). A much higher percentage of average flow is diverted when intakes outside of the forest are considered (table 6)."
https://www.fs.fed.us/global/i...
That forest isn't as pristine as the researchers pretend it to be.
I proved that the paper said :
"Given its long-term protected status (59), significant human perturbations have been virtually nonexistent within the Luquillo forest since the 1930s, and thus are an unlikely source of invertebrate declines. "
I proved that an USDA study said :
"Water diverted from the forest ranges from 7 to 17 percent of average flow throughout the year, with up to 54 percent of flow diverted from individual watersheds (table 5). A much higher percentage of average flow is diverted when intakes outside of the forest are considered (table 6)."
Either way it's a massive change planetwide that is happening, killing the food web.
There's not much evidence of that.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The Soviets had "money". The problem was the whole nation was run by state monopolies. In the USA you have corporate monopolies like P&G. You have a lot of brands, sure, but most of them are part of only a few conglomerates. The more the conglomerates grow, the less real competition there is, prices go up, and salaries go down.
"Little Island are different to big Island, as in small locations with only one climate and large locations with many."
I live on a small Island and there is quite large variation in climate between valleys. For instance, we cannot grow stone fruit yet the next valley can. Also, it got 30mm of rain yesterday while we sat in bright sunshine.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
In the UK nsect abundance has fallen by 75% over the last 27 years. I notice in woods where I used to constantly hear bird noise it is now mostly silent
I'm doubting your credentials for casually opining as if better sourced than collective expertise. We all see you don't study this. We see that you personally kvetch about trivial video game bullshit with more emotion and expertise.
I'm questioning your intelligence for offering your denialist opine in conflict with the world scientific consensus, flawed though it is. I think people like you are why biodiversity on Earth doesn't stand a chance. You're too lazy.
The article never said Anthropogenic or human-caused. Sorry, but YOU (and many commenters) inserted that. If you really care about such topics, this should alert you to your own biases in interpreting information.
For folk who just headline-skimmed then jumped to the comments: the article offers into good reasons why heat-thresholds are crossed regularly now but not before make the changing climate a likely candidate, and how pesticides and other "usual suspects" are unlikely to be factors in this scenario. Remember also that a changing climate can bring much more extreme _local_ variations than just the "world average" increase.
No need to limit yourself: The cause of global warming is directly related to rapid human population growth. Since the bulk of additional CO2 in the air has come from industrialized countries, it's misleading to omit them.
> It is also implausible that nobody has noticed this massive worldwide catastrophe before this lone researcher stumbled onto the evidence of our life support systems "collapsing".
More than merely implausible, you can go and look up the previously found results. :-) Thankfully insect geeks do exist, and guess what...
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/germany-s-insects-are-disappearing ... they found similar declines. What makes this new data-point particularly informing is, aside from the scale, its location and how that was not an area previously expected to be hit so badly.
> So far AGW has warmed the earth by 1.3 C (2 F).
That's a world average, but that same level of warming can bring local extremes more like +/- 4 C
As the article states: “The number of hot spells, temperatures above 29C, have increased tremendously,”
"A warmer climate means MORE RAINFALL which I cannot believe how few people, even now, understand."
Hold your horses, this is most definitely not a universal truth. There are plenty of examples across the globe where this clearly isn't the case, geography also plays a major part.
The Middle East is as hot as it gets, but it's also as dry as it gets. Similarly if you look across island chains such as the Caribbean or Canary Islands you'll see completely different levels of precipitation on even neighbouring islands depending on the geography of those islands. In the Canaries for example Lanzarote is a dry barren landscape resembling Mars in many places, whilst near islands in the Canaries such as Tenerife have trees left and right. In the Caribbean you have islands like Bonaire that are reminiscent of Arizona within visible distance of Venezuela's lushest regions. The reason for this is because those islands don't have peaks that are sufficiently high to cause clouds to gather over the island and drop rain. An island like, say St Lucia, would be a desert island and not a lush tropical rainforest covered island were it not for the two peaks there, the Pitons. In the case of the Middle East, the Sahara etc. rainfall is blocked by weather patterns of hot air caused by the position of the sun around the Earth.
As such there are vast regions of the globe where increasing temperatures would most certainly cause less rainfall; if you look on a map you'll notice two major bands of desert for example; one south of the equator covering the Atacama in Chile and Argentina, across South Africa, and New Zealand, and one north of the equator spanning Mexico/Southern USA, North Africa including the Sahara, the Middle East, Kazakhstan, Mongolia etc. It doesn't matter how much hotter things get, not only will these regions not become wetter, the area of dryness they cover will actually expand.
With that in mind it's worth looking at where Puerto Rico is on the map, it's at the Southern end of the northern band. Whilst I agree there's no clear impact yet, it's not impossible that rising temperatures will dry Puerto Rico out somewhat more. It's also worth noting that the effects can be incredibly localised; it's equally possible that Puerto Rico's position as an island with decent sized mountains will increase rainfall around those mountains, whilst, say, drying out it's lower lying areas for example. This is something you see in Peru which is often thought of as a lush rainforest covered wilderness due to images of Machu Pichu and such, but it's coast line is dry as a bone. It can even be seasonal, again depending on the unique geography of a place; more rainfall overall doesn't necessary mean that a place doesn't see dryer summers (or winters) which could cause animal or plants to die out still due to not being able to survive worsened dry seasons, even if more rain falls in the wet seasons.
So before kicking off and implying people are dumb for not understanding warmer climate means more rainfall, please consider that that's a rather simplistic view, and is most definitely not a universal truth. There will be substantial areas of the Earth's land mass that will see much less rainfall (and typically more and more problematic wildfires as a result; Australia is already seeing this for example). Things aren't even remotely as simple as you're implying.
I have noticed that extremely few global warming alarmists have ever made any meaningful sacrifices of their own.
Although more than half of most western countries could all band together and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to miniscule levels, which would make a staggering impact to global emissions.
Just refrain from activity that is GHG intensive.
- Stop using electricity. Even the manufacture of wind turbines and other renewable sources uses greenhouse gasses, and what's more even if it was completely neutral, your demand for it drives up the price and so makes more polluting energy sources more competitive, and therefore also contributes. Best just to avoid electricity completely.
- Stop using electronics, computers, phones. These should go without saying. Ridiculous expensive polluting frivolities.
- Definitely stop driving an automobile, taking public transport, or flying any airplanes anywhere. A bicycle is probably acceptable.
- Heating and airconditioning are right out. Unless you live somewhere the heat is geothermal or scavenged for free, can't use it.
- Living in a house or apartment? No way. There is no reason why anybody should be so greedy and hateful that a tent is not good enough. Hot water may be used but only if you heat it using non polluting methods.
- Buying goods manufactured in polluting factories and then shipped across the globe in horribly polluting ships can't be done. Buy local made clothes and shoes, or make them yourself.
- Meat is right out. But even vegetable food production using modern agricultural methods is surprisingly GHG intensive.
Voila, you guys have just done vastly more for climate change than any impotent agreement like Paris, for example. I know this is a slight inconvenience but surely one you will be quite willing to do for the greater good to tackle the greatest problem in your life and the biggest problem facing humanity. Quickly now, it turns out you don't actually have to wait for any of these hateful deniers to change their mind, you can start making a difference right now.
Who the fuck knows.
Don't know about the rainforest, but here in Europe it's pesticides in agriculture and villages (e.g. removing weed from paved paths).
Easy to spot, sudden drop of native insectivorous bird population.
Glyphosate.
100 corporations are responsible for 71% of carbon emissions. Even if every would-be environmentalist dropped dead tomorrow and took themselves off the board, we'd still be in trouble (assuming you want carbon emissions to go down). Meaningful change is only going to come at the the policy level. As an individual the change you can effect isn't even a a drop in the bucket.
It's nice if you try to be "green" as an individual if it makes you feel good, but as a consumer it's not very obvious whether a given admittedly ineffective decision will actually be a net benefit, and it's unreasonable to expect every consumer to read an environmental impact report every time they buy a can of beans.
Massive escalation of the war on malaria? Right. That's only very recent, even if "massive." The lack of bugs on winshields has been noticed (by me and many others) since the 1990s, and that's true for the long term insect counts in Europe, as well. In any case, as with most systems it's likely many causes, not a single one.