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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.
5 step plan to fixing this, fast.
1. Remove 2 billion people from the planet.
2. HVDC lines built to all major deserts.
3. All major deserts covered in as much solar power as we can build.
4. LFTR reactor research funded to pre-Jimmy-Carter levels.
5. Ban coal power outright.
Keep in mind that if we want to reverse the damage, we need to build excess power capacity (a lot of it) to pull CO2 out of the air as a feedstock for hydrocarbons or some other sequestration.
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.
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."
Yes, really.
It couldn't be tons of pesticides or hurricanes. It couldn't be invasive species. It couldn't be human tourism trampling the ground.
The temperature went up 1 degree and that is the REAL OBVIOUS cause. You must not question the church of global warming. Back to re-education camp for you!!
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.
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)."
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.
It's a rainforest, didn't you even read the summary?
Pretty amusing coming from someone who did not even read the PDF he posted...
It seems to have faced a 2.5 F degree rise in sea temperature since 1900 with a loss or rainfall
We aren't talking about sea insects, now are we? Your OWN PDF states PR has seen a 1*F* (not even C) increase in land temperatures since mid 20th century... vastly less than seasonal variation.
Furthermore the paper speculated rainfall MIGHT lower, based on... nothing at all.
In reality rainfall has been cyclical but remained fairly steady (click on "MAX" below the chart).
This would be obvious to anyone who understands the effect of heat on large bodies of water, which surround PR.... A warmer climate means MORE RAINFALL which I cannot believe how few people, even now, understand.
Sorry to disturb your manufactured panic with actual real data... carry on.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
After not being bothered to check on the insect count for 35 years, is it a coincidence this count occurred a little more than a year after Hurricane Maria?
I'm guessing a category 4 hurricane doesn't do insect populations any favors.
The article makes a decent case for global warming as the culprit, you have made no case whatsoever. Not even shitty anecdote, you have offered nothing at all and yet here you are disputing this guy's research. You need to do better.
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.
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
> 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,”
It's not just the rainforest. In the Catskills and Hudson Valley of New York, the insect population has been devastated. There were practically no crickets or katydids in Kingston in September and October. It was wierd. The zombies living around me scarcely noticed. People are oblivious or in deep denial. There's been no sudden deforestation, uptick in heavy industry...hell we even cleaned up a few Superfund sites. And except for some drought in the late 90's or early 2000's the climate has not been exceptionally hot, cold or dry. Just damn irregular. Something else is going on -- or we reached a global ticking point. Personally I find it hard to imagine that so many species, especially hardy ones with plenty of food like crickets, katydids and moths, suddenly reached a tipping point due to our local climate change. "Chemtrails" perhaps? Who the fuck knows.
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.
DO you think those things don't migrate?
Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?
Wanna buy a shirt?
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tropical insects, having evolved in a very stable climate, would be much more sensitive to climate warming. “If you go a little bit past the thermal optimum for tropical insects, their fitness just plummets,” he said.
The article does say why insects have declined so much, it just doesn't take the next step to say why their fitness plummets. Higher heat can more more humidity in the air, or less rainfall, or different wind patterns... many possibilities. That is, not doubt, an interesting topic. I share your curiosity, but I'm not going to criticize the author for declining to go off on a barely-related tangent.
Let's say the article did answer why their fitness plummets. Let's say it went into great detail about a specific insect which requires enough moisture in specific places in order to procreate, and how the decline of that insect effects some others who rely on the first as a food source. And a third group who rely on the structure-building practices of the second group for shelter. And a fourth group who... and on and on down the cascade effect. What would that accomplish? You can always ask another "why" question, there's no end to that.
This sort of shrill hyperbolic alarmism is counterproductive to getting people to take climate change seriously.
I keep saying that.
If anybody's wondering why folks like me are skeptical, it's because of decades of shrill alarmism.
If you were trying to make skeptics, you couldn't have done a better job.