Slashdot Mirror
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.
The most likely culprit by far is global warming.
Really? The most likely culprit?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
What about pesticides and other toxins as well? We're dumping this shit into our environment and some of it is persistent. Agriculture is one thing, but whenever I see a house with a perfect, green lawn, I want to smack the owners in the face.
Brings to mind this quote, possibly by Alanis Obomsawin... "When the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten and the last stream poisoned, you will realize that you cannot eat money."
As opposed to nicontinoid bee killers, glyphosate, GMO baked-in toxins, AND climate change making their current habitat niche obsolete? I mean did you think none of these things affected eachother also? You have no data.
Remove 2 billion people? And put them where exactly?
Are you going to line up first to be removed?
Or is that only for other people from some other place you dont know anyone?
Thought so. I stopped reading there. Nothing else you could possibly have said would have made sense or even been funny.
DO you think those things don't migrate? It's impossible to know exactly where the breakdown is without studying intensely for multiple years, they have barely scratched the surface noticing the massive losses. Pay attention.
None of this is obvious, one study may find GW the #1 culprit, another might find it #2. Either way it's a massive change planetwide that is happening, killing the food web. ALL of these factors adversely affect it at once.
Picking one to worry about is not going to cut it. We need to stop polluting, stop poisoning, stop clearcutting, stop dumping unclear water, etc. All at once, or we're going to suffer for it. That's how delicate this is.
Picking one to worry about is why we fail. Pretending the case for only one of them must override our economic paradigm of short term profit, it's all of them, or nothing. The greatest one today may not be tomorrow. All factor in.
once it's too late you can expect all the deniers to go to the ovens and gas chamber
Fine, so what do we get to do to all the alarmists that attempted to kill millions with extreme proposals to address climate change once we determine there was never any reason to panic some 10-20 years hence?
I also find it pretty amusing that even by your own logic sending the deniers to the gas chambers (which, P.S. you do realize puts you right up there directly with Hitler as one of a select group of people to use that.. solution....) would give them the most merciful death compared to the rest of you that slowly die as the Earth turns into Venus.
If you truly believe climate change to be beyond hope at some point, would not the ideal solution be to get rid of yourselves and let all of the "deniers" live to suffer through what you see as the inevitable and horrible end? Why would you seek to give comfort to your mortal enemy? :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There's not much evidence of that.
You've been spending too much time indoors for many years, and not enough outside walking around. It doesn't take a rocket scientist or entomologist to see what's going on right under our noses. Drive a car during summer in the last twenty years? Google "insects on windshield" and read the buzz there. The collapse of the insect population is real, planet-wide, and happened in the last fifteen years.
In regards to truck traffic. As long as you can get a 500 to 600 mile range in the truck you are fine. The driver can take her or his mandatory rest while it charges. You can only drive 10 hours straight. And you are expected to cover only 50 to 60 miles on average per hour.
So, this is not only a last mile solution. That said, a better multi-modal train and truck solution would be a good idea. You need trains that have regular schedules, and quick build/break times.
Modern farming is unsustainable only when profit is the main motive. If sustainability is the main motive it's fine. We can fix the economic system simply by legislating that sustainability must be the priority and imposing penalties for not doing it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC