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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.
Really? The most likely culprit?
Of course not. The most likely culprit is experimental error, and the 2nd most likely is outright fraud.
So far AGW has warmed the earth by 1.3 C (2 F). That is a serious trend, and a big concern for the future but is unlikely to wipe out 98% of insects today. 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".
This sort of shrill hyperbolic alarmism is counterproductive to getting people to take climate change seriously. This is so over-the-top that I suspect this guy is on Exxon-Mobil's payroll as a false flag operation to make scientists look incompetent.
Anyway, we will soon find out. If he is right, we will all be dead by this time next year.
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.