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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.
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.
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'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.
"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.