In
order of magnitude, antivaccination attitudes were highest among those who
(a) were high in conspiratorial
thinking (b) were high in reactance (c) reported high levels of disgust toward blood and needles (d) had strong individualistic/hierarchical worldviews.
In contrast, demographic variables (including
education) accounted for nonsignificant or trivial levels of variance.
I don't know what you can do with that, but that's what's wrong with them: Conspriacy theorists who are bolshie, but not from any particular education level or demographic group.
Since action has been delayed for 40 years, action now has to reduce emissions to where they should be, and also reduce emissions additionally by the amount that has been released since then.
It's much more expensive because of that.
So the truth is that there has been insufficient awareness of how much panic there should be.
No, you're wrong. If you were old enough to read the newspaper back in those days (I am), then you'll recall that the GP is telling the truth. That's not to dispute your claim of what was in scholarly papers, it certainly wasn't reported that way.
The GGP said In the seventies it was common knowledge, and agreed on consensus, that the Earth was experiencing a climatic cooling period..
That is not the truth.
You're correct that there was some reporting to the contrary in the press, but that doesn't make the GGP true.
From the abstract: An enduring popular myth suggests that in the 1970s the climate science community was predicting “global cooling” and an “imminent” ice age, an observation frequently used by those who would undermine what climate scientists say today about the prospect of global warming. A review of the literature suggests that, on the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking as being one of the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales. More importantly than showing the falsehood of the myth, this review describes how scientists of the time built the foundation on which the cohesive enterprise of modern climate science now rests.
This figure from the paper shows that even then, the papers predicting warming dominated.
But in the denialosphere, this is still a much repeated lie.
Stop it.
The problem is, between then and now, climate itself became a political baseball bat.
Nope. The problem is that if fossil fuels are reduced a lot of people who are very rich now will earn less. And they can pay PR groups to stop that happening.
Something that changes meaning with the whim of those who weild it. Used to beat those who disagree into submission.
...okay, I'm going in...
How has the meaning of climate been used to beat people who disagree, and who are some people who've been beated by the meaning of climate becasue they disagree?
Volvo are implementing a "Saftey Vision" that "nobody will be killed or seriously injured in a new Volvo car by 2020."
The automatic braking system can see so far ahead. Roads have a minimum skid resistance. A human body can take a certain acceleration. The two other factors is how the front end crumples and the speed of travel. It's not arbitrary.
The reason that you'd buy something with that limit would be that you value being alive.
If I want to kill myself at 113 MPH, volvo shouldn't stop me.
This isn't Volvo's business model. You want a Kia.
Though I hesitate to trust the actual numbers from an article written by an "Associate Professor of Sustainable Development" on a clearly conservationist website.
The conversation are pro-scientific, in that the author has to be a scientist. The story is edited, and the scientist signs off on the final draft. So you don't get the mis-reporting that is becoming more and more common in these says of cost cutting in journalism.
But "clearly conservationist" is not fair, except to the extent that conservationist is the scholarly default position because that's what happens when you understand the costs and risks.
Yet I didn't see any wind farms when I was traveling across India
Their generation by coal is increasing faster than their wind generation. But the proportion is decreasing.
Beating coal not a particularly high achievement, nor is it all that useful.
It is in India. 66% of their power generation is coal.
"Ice age" in Europe is actually one predicted consequence of climate change due to a potential shutdown of the gulf stream.
The gulf stream may well slow as the melting of the Greenland ice sheet accelerates.
But "Ice age" doesn't usually mean that the Thames freezes in winter. Geologically, it means that there are significant ice sheets in both hemispheres. So you will notice we are in an ice age, and the risk is we might come out of it.
A common meaning of "ice age" in the field of climate rather than geology is what geologists call a glaciation. That is, the advance of glaciers in Milankovitch cycles. This is a much more global phenomenon than a 3C-6C cooling of Europe.
Infectious disease and war happens no matter what the climate is.
Increases in the range of Malaria due to climate change are killing people. And the conflicts in the horn of Africa are related to nomadic cultures being driven out of their traditional lands by climate change.
And as food shortages encroach on the richer countries, the scope of the conflicts will increase.
Being displaced is not lethal to most people.
We haven't displaced most people yet. I don't think it will be a pretty as you hope.
Biodiversity loss isn't either.
How do you know? The cure for any disease or disorder could be amongst the biochemistry of any of the species that have been lost.
Food shortage and famine are two sides of the same thing, and would be an actual concern if it manifested itself.
Malnutrition due to the anthropogenic part of climate change killed 77,000 people in 2000, but the estimate in the Patz et al. paper, linked above.
Most people would call that a manifestation at some level.
However in first world countries, we produce so much more than what we eat that most of it goes to waste.
And that will last for a while. The drop in agricultural productivity will be in the lower latitudes. Canada and Russia look forward to increased arable land.
It's still killing people though.
... and due to dryness, such as the Middle east and the Sahara. Once those places thaw and receive rain, we will have even more arable land than we do today.
I've got bad news for you about what climate change will do to deserts under Hadley cells, which are the circulation in the lowest latitudes. As warming increases, the temperature differential increases, putting more energy into the Hadley circulation. The consequences are increased rainfall (and flooding) in the tropics, longer and dryer dry spells in the adjacent deserts, and a movement polewards of the edge of those deserts.
The general rule of thumb is that the dry bits of the world get dryer and the wet bits get wetter.
So the only negative there is that scientific progress might be slower?
There are many negatives to speices loss.
One is the the biotechnology and medical science that we will never have access to.
Another is the capacity of the world to carry life, including ours
Another is the risk of losing a species or group that collapses an important system for human survival.
We can find out which species are pollinators....
Well, we'd have to put a lot of money into species identification if we're going to identify all the pollinators. And a lot of time.
But being a pollinator isn't the only mechanism by which a species is important to an ecosystem. There are fungi and bacteria that are critial for soil fertility and for nutrient supply.
... and ensure they are unaffected.
We are not yet able to ensure a species does not go extinct.
What does that even mean?
It means that we're depleting natural resources.
Overfishing. Overhunting. Fossil fuel use for fertilzer production and spreading. Forest clearing.
You can't have both. All climate change solutions I've seen so far are only affordable to people living a middle class lifestyle in a first world country.
In the poor parts of the world, according to this estimate for the year 2000, 160,000 people died because of the anthropogenic part of climate change.
Wind is cheaper than coal now, and that's without the health impacts of pollution.
Fossil fules are not affordable for the third world.
What problems specifically? Bad weather? Fires? Ice age? Desertification? Sea level rise?
Well, except "ice age", yes. Food shortage. Biodiversity loss. Disease. People Displacement. Famine. War.
Yeah those all suck, but none of those are extinction-level threats to humans.
The 30% population drop in Europe around the black death had impact on civilization, as skills were lost, and communities, child care and cultural norms broke down.
So there are things that are not extinction-level threats, that would never-the-less be good to avoid.
About 50 years.
In the case of eucalypts, that about 25% of species outside their range. Which means they have to migrate or go extinct. Other plants are probably similar.
The truth is if humanity wanted to solve our claimed warming problem we have the technology right now to do it.
Agreed. The problem appears to be that humanity is manipulable by marketing, and fossil fuel interests are paying for marketing.
We could quite easily build out double our current global power generation capacity with nuclear and use the surplus to remove the carbon from the atmosphere.
We'll need about seven times if we want our current transportation to go electric as well, assuming my arithmetic is about right.
Why don't we do it? Because we aren't being impacted enough from any warming effects to justify the effort and expense..
Oh yes we are. We aren't doing it because of marketing on one hand, and the difficulty in deciding who should contribute to the power generation on the other. On the third hand, moving the power generation away from fossil fuels dramatically disadvantages some nations compared to others.
I think you can rest easy knowing that if the oceans start to rise so much that all the banker's and politician's ocean front homes become endangered, solutions will be enacted before you can say "too big to fail"
There's a lot of inertia in the system. If we stop building new fossil fuel power plants tonight we wont stop burning fossil fuels for 30 to 50 years. If we stop emissions tonight the warming will continue for 50 to 100 years. If the warming stops tonight, the ice sheet mass loss will continue for thousands of years.
Suppose the CO2 wasn't absorbing the candle heat but occluding it by meerly scattering the light like a bunch of tiny mirrored particles.
Then the heat radiated by the earth would still be slowed reaching space by CO2, which will reflect it around the atmosphere like a pinball instead of making it directly to space.
In fact there's not a lot of difference between the two, as a warm gas will radiate heat itself.
CO2 doesn't warm the atmosphere in the same way insulation doesn't warm your house.
Sunlight comes through the CO2 in the atmosphere, because CO2 is transparent to visible light, which is where sunlight's greatest energy spectral density is. CO2 then blocks its escape because CO2 is opaque in large sections on the IR spectrum, where earth's radiation has greatest energy spectral density.
Insulation in your house doesn't come with an energy imbalance.
There are many very intelligent folks on both sides of the Climate Change argument.
There really aren't.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Increasing the concentration of greenhouse gasses increases the greenhouse effect. There's aproximately zero controversy on cause of the current warming amongst very intelligent folks.
Extinction Is a bad thing because it denies humanity access to the living thing and its ecosystem as a scientific resource.
It is also a bad thing because we are a long way from understanding the interconnectedness of the global ecosystem, so we don't know which extinction will be followed by the extinction of a very important pollinator or competitor or predator of a pathogen that will lead to the impacts for us or important domestic or agricultural species.
Extinction aside, drops in biomass of things like 98% are indicative of a collapse of productivity of the land. Humans already use about 30% more resources per year than the world produces. We already need to develop technologies that improve that number or face a nasty crash. Having parts of the world dropping to more or less zero productivity makes that equation worse, and is indicative of a problem that may be affecting other ecosystems.
How many people will die as a result?
It's very difficult to guess.
The few insect species that we do rely on are nowhere near extinction
These populations drops are coupled with related drops in insectivores. Insects are just the bottom of the food chain. The collapse will flow upwards.
while intensive farming techniques and cheap energy are bringing billions of people out of poverty
Great for them, but not relevant to the impact on humanity of the loss of some of the world's ecosystems.
After every mass extinction, a large number of ecological niches become available for new species to occupy, leading to an explosion of biodiversity.
Right. But that won't help humanity. The problems we face will hit crunch point in the next thousand years. Probably early in that time.
You can even say that the evolution of complex life on Earth is driven by mass extinction events.
Arthropod Samples.
Lister (22) sampled arthropods within the Luquillo forest during July 1976 and January 1977. Following the same procedures and using the same study area, arthropod abundances were again estimated during July 2011 and January 2012 using both sticky-traps and sweep netting. Our 10 traps were the same size (34 × 24 cm) as Lister’s (22), and also utilized Tanglefoot as the sticky substance. Traps were laid out on the ground in the same-sized grid (30 × 24 m), and also left uncovered for 12 h between dawn and dusk before all captured insects were removed and stored in alcohol. Hoop sizes of our sweep nets (30-cm diameter) matched those used by Lister (22). Body lengths of all captured arthropods were measured to the nearest 0.5 mm using a dissecting scope and ocular micrometer. Regression equations were used to estimate individual dry weights from body lengths (142, 143).
Anolis Abundance.
To compare Anolis densities with Lister’s (22) estimates from July 1976 and January 1977, we sampled anoles within the same 15 × 15-m quadrat during July 2011 and January 2012. Following Lister (22), we used the Schnabel multiple recapture method (27) to estimate densities. However, instead of marking captured lizards by toe clipping, we used Testor’s enamel paint to create small (2 mm) spots with different color combinations directly above the dorsal base of the tail.
Climate Data.
We analyzed climate data taken at two locations in the Luquillo forest: the United States Forest Service El Verde Field Station and the Bisley Lower meteorological tower, which is part of the Luquillo Critical Zone Observatory. The El Verde station lies 5 km southwest of our study area (18.3211 N, 65.8200 W), at an elevation of 350 m. The upper Bisley Tower is located 3.2 km southeast of our study area (18.3164 N, 65.7453 W) at 352 m in elevation. Temperature data for the El Verde station span 37 y, from 1978 to 2015 (Fig. 1A), and for the Bisley station 21 y from 1993 to 2014 (Fig. 1B). Given that the highest ambient temperatures for a given area should have the greatest impact on fitness, especially for ectotherms (144), daily maximum temperatures were utilized in our analyses. Climate data for the Estacion de Biologia Chamela were obtained from www.ibiologia.unam.mx/ebchamela/www/clima.html.
Luquillo Long-Term Ecological Research Data.
Data sets from the Luquillo long-term ecological research (LTER) online Data Center were downloaded and analyzed for trends in population abundances over time. Detailed methods employed in the various studies can be found at the LTER Data Center website (https://luq.lter.network/luquillo-information-management-system-luq-ims).
Canopy arthropods.
Data were collected by Schowalter (23) near the El Verde field station between February 1991 and June 2009. Several articles have analyzed these samples with respect to invertebrate diversity, functional groups, arthropod composition in gap and intact forest, and recovery from disturbance (145), but none have looked for trends in overall abundance. Here we summed all arthropods sampled each year across taxa, forest type, and tree genera.
Walking sticks.
We analyzed data from a census of walking sticks (Lamponius portoricensis) carried out by Willig et al. (24) between 1991 and 2014 in the 16-ha Luquillo Forest Dynamics Plot (LFDP) near the El Verde Field Station. Sampling was conducted during the wet and dry seasons and captured individuals were classified as adults or juveniles. To analyze walking stick abundance through time, we summed all juveniles and adults across seasons and land classes.
E. coqui abundance.
We analyze census data for the Puerto Rican frog E. coqui taken by Woolbright (29, 30) between 1987 and 1997 at study areas n
Slashdot Mirror
Some Aussies looked into the reasons last year.
In order of magnitude, antivaccination attitudes were highest among those who
(a) were high in conspiratorial thinking
(b) were high in reactance
(c) reported high levels of disgust toward blood and needles
(d) had strong individualistic/hierarchical worldviews.
In contrast, demographic variables (including education) accounted for nonsignificant or trivial levels of variance.
The Psychological Roots of Anti-Vaccination Attitudes: A 24-Nation Investigation, Hornsey, M. J., Harris, E. A., & Fielding, K. S. Health Psychology (2018)
I don't know what you can do with that, but that's what's wrong with them: Conspriacy theorists who are bolshie, but not from any particular education level or demographic group.
Or perhaps the increasing CO2 levels will result in an increasing plant bio mass which will convert the CO2 into O2
It has a little bit, but the terrestrial biosphere sequestration overall is probably negative. (That is a positive feedback).
Reality is not quite as simple as you describe.
Yes it is.
Minor processes are interesting but not significant.
Rotational motion isn't relative.
Since action has been delayed for 40 years, action now has to reduce emissions to where they should be, and also reduce emissions additionally by the amount that has been released since then.
It's much more expensive because of that.
So the truth is that there has been insufficient awareness of how much panic there should be.
No, you're wrong. If you were old enough to read the newspaper back in those days (I am), then you'll recall that the GP is telling the truth. That's not to dispute your claim of what was in scholarly papers, it certainly wasn't reported that way.
The GGP said In the seventies it was common knowledge, and agreed on consensus, that the Earth was experiencing a climatic cooling period..
That is not the truth.
You're correct that there was some reporting to the contrary in the press, but that doesn't make the GGP true.
For some evidence of global warming. It's been decades now, and everything they've shown us as evidence has turned out not to be the case.
The increasing global mean surface temperature.
The rising sea level
It was well known and *PROVEN* at one time, though these scientific methods and the observable information at hand that:
The Earth was flat
When was that considered proven?
What was the proof?
Man has sinned through industrialization, and the price to be paid is the destruction of our civilization.
I must have missed that price mentioned in the IPCC reports. Do you have a link?
In the seventies it was common knowledge, and agreed on consensus, that the Earth was experiencing a climatic cooling period.
Here we have an example of complete bullshit.
In 2008, Petersen et al. published a comprehensive literature review of scholarly papers on that had an opinion on the subject: THE MYTH OF THE 1970s GLOBAL COOLING SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS
From the abstract:
An enduring popular myth suggests that in the 1970s the climate science community was predicting “global cooling” and an “imminent” ice age, an observation frequently used by those who would undermine what climate scientists say today about the prospect of global warming. A review of the literature suggests that, on the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking as being one of the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales. More importantly than showing the falsehood of the myth, this review describes how scientists of the time built the foundation on which the cohesive enterprise of modern climate science now rests.
This figure from the paper shows that even then, the papers predicting warming dominated.
But in the denialosphere, this is still a much repeated lie.
Stop it.
The problem is, between then and now, climate itself became a political baseball bat.
Nope. The problem is that if fossil fuels are reduced a lot of people who are very rich now will earn less. And they can pay PR groups to stop that happening.
Something that changes meaning with the whim of those who weild it. Used to beat those who disagree into submission.
...okay, I'm going in ...
How has the meaning of climate been used to beat people who disagree, and who are some people who've been beated by the meaning of climate becasue they disagree?
Feck global alarmist and their facist ways.
It's just science, mate.
Consensus is not science. Science is never settled.
On the other hand, it's pretty well accepted that the Earth goes around the Sun now.
And it's unlikely to need revisiting.
Similarly, we know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and so that increasing the concentration of it will increase the greenhouse effect.
It's not rocket science. The problem is only that the fossil fuel industry has put a lot of PR money into establishing misinformation about this.
I thought this story would bring out the science denial crackpots.
/. was a little bit intelligent?
Do you remember when
And the design is done where those bloody owners employ the design teams.
The automatic braking system can see so far ahead. Roads have a minimum skid resistance. A human body can take a certain acceleration. The two other factors is how the front end crumples and the speed of travel. It's not arbitrary.
The reason that you'd buy something with that limit would be that you value being alive.
If I want to kill myself at 113 MPH, volvo shouldn't stop me.
This isn't Volvo's business model. You want a Kia.
That's the ownership.
But the design is still done in Sweeden.
There needs to be a whole information system for informing the cars when the posted speed limit changes.
Though I hesitate to trust the actual numbers from an article written by an "Associate Professor of Sustainable Development" on a clearly conservationist website.
The conversation are pro-scientific, in that the author has to be a scientist. The story is edited, and the scientist signs off on the final draft. So you don't get the mis-reporting that is becoming more and more common in these says of cost cutting in journalism.
But "clearly conservationist" is not fair, except to the extent that conservationist is the scholarly default position because that's what happens when you understand the costs and risks.
Yet I didn't see any wind farms when I was traveling across India
Their generation by coal is increasing faster than their wind generation. But the proportion is decreasing.
Beating coal not a particularly high achievement, nor is it all that useful.
It is in India. 66% of their power generation is coal.
"Ice age" in Europe is actually one predicted consequence of climate change due to a potential shutdown of the gulf stream.
The gulf stream may well slow as the melting of the Greenland ice sheet accelerates.
But "Ice age" doesn't usually mean that the Thames freezes in winter. Geologically, it means that there are significant ice sheets in both hemispheres. So you will notice we are in an ice age, and the risk is we might come out of it.
A common meaning of "ice age" in the field of climate rather than geology is what geologists call a glaciation. That is, the advance of glaciers in Milankovitch cycles. This is a much more global phenomenon than a 3C-6C cooling of Europe.
Infectious disease and war happens no matter what the climate is.
Increases in the range of Malaria due to climate change are killing people. And the conflicts in the horn of Africa are related to nomadic cultures being driven out of their traditional lands by climate change.
And as food shortages encroach on the richer countries, the scope of the conflicts will increase.
Being displaced is not lethal to most people.
We haven't displaced most people yet. I don't think it will be a pretty as you hope.
Biodiversity loss isn't either.
How do you know? The cure for any disease or disorder could be amongst the biochemistry of any of the species that have been lost.
Food shortage and famine are two sides of the same thing, and would be an actual concern if it manifested itself.
Malnutrition due to the anthropogenic part of climate change killed 77,000 people in 2000, but the estimate in the Patz et al. paper, linked above.
Most people would call that a manifestation at some level.
However in first world countries, we produce so much more than what we eat that most of it goes to waste.
And that will last for a while. The drop in agricultural productivity will be in the lower latitudes. Canada and Russia look forward to increased arable land.
It's still killing people though.
I've got bad news for you about what climate change will do to deserts under Hadley cells, which are the circulation in the lowest latitudes. As warming increases, the temperature differential increases, putting more energy into the Hadley circulation. The consequences are increased rainfall (and flooding) in the tropics, longer and dryer dry spells in the adjacent deserts, and a movement polewards of the edge of those deserts.
The general rule of thumb is that the dry bits of the world get dryer and the wet bits get wetter.
So the only negative there is that scientific progress might be slower?
There are many negatives to speices loss.
One is the the biotechnology and medical science that we will never have access to.
Another is the capacity of the world to carry life, including ours
Another is the risk of losing a species or group that collapses an important system for human survival.
We can find out which species are pollinators ....
Well, we'd have to put a lot of money into species identification if we're going to identify all the pollinators. And a lot of time.
But being a pollinator isn't the only mechanism by which a species is important to an ecosystem. There are fungi and bacteria that are critial for soil fertility and for nutrient supply.
... and ensure they are unaffected.
We are not yet able to ensure a species does not go extinct.
What does that even mean?
It means that we're depleting natural resources.
Overfishing. Overhunting. Fossil fuel use for fertilzer production and spreading. Forest clearing.
Can you provide a citation?
Here's a non-technical write up.
You can't have both. All climate change solutions I've seen so far are only affordable to people living a middle class lifestyle in a first world country.
In the poor parts of the world, according to this estimate for the year 2000, 160,000 people died because of the anthropogenic part of climate change.
Wind is cheaper than coal now, and that's without the health impacts of pollution.
Fossil fules are not affordable for the third world.
What problems specifically? Bad weather? Fires? Ice age? Desertification? Sea level rise?
Well, except "ice age", yes. Food shortage. Biodiversity loss. Disease. People Displacement. Famine. War.
Yeah those all suck, but none of those are extinction-level threats to humans.
The 30% population drop in Europe around the black death had impact on civilization, as skills were lost, and communities, child care and cultural norms broke down.
So there are things that are not extinction-level threats, that would never-the-less be good to avoid.
1 degree increase in 140 years?
About 50 years.
In the case of eucalypts, that about 25% of species outside their range. Which means they have to migrate or go extinct. Other plants are probably similar.
The truth is if humanity wanted to solve our claimed warming problem we have the technology right now to do it.
Agreed. The problem appears to be that humanity is manipulable by marketing, and fossil fuel interests are paying for marketing.
We could quite easily build out double our current global power generation capacity with nuclear and use the surplus to remove the carbon from the atmosphere.
We'll need about seven times if we want our current transportation to go electric as well, assuming my arithmetic is about right.
Why don't we do it? Because we aren't being impacted enough from any warming effects to justify the effort and expense..
Oh yes we are. We aren't doing it because of marketing on one hand, and the difficulty in deciding who should contribute to the power generation on the other. On the third hand, moving the power generation away from fossil fuels dramatically disadvantages some nations compared to others.
I think you can rest easy knowing that if the oceans start to rise so much that all the banker's and politician's ocean front homes become endangered, solutions will be enacted before you can say "too big to fail"
There's a lot of inertia in the system. If we stop building new fossil fuel power plants tonight we wont stop burning fossil fuels for 30 to 50 years. If we stop emissions tonight the warming will continue for 50 to 100 years. If the warming stops tonight, the ice sheet mass loss will continue for thousands of years.
This can't be turned around in a few years.
Suppose the CO2 wasn't absorbing the candle heat but occluding it by meerly scattering the light like a bunch of tiny mirrored particles.
Then the heat radiated by the earth would still be slowed reaching space by CO2, which will reflect it around the atmosphere like a pinball instead of making it directly to space.
In fact there's not a lot of difference between the two, as a warm gas will radiate heat itself.
Good point.
Probably there are no informed people on one side of the climate debate is a more robust claim than intelligent people.
Even clever people can culture a deep ignorance if motivated to do so.
CO2 doesn't warm the atmosphere in the same way insulation doesn't warm your house.
Sunlight comes through the CO2 in the atmosphere, because CO2 is transparent to visible light, which is where sunlight's greatest energy spectral density is. CO2 then blocks its escape because CO2 is opaque in large sections on the IR spectrum, where earth's radiation has greatest energy spectral density.
Insulation in your house doesn't come with an energy imbalance.
Unless you live in a glasshouse, I suppose.
There are many very intelligent folks on both sides of the Climate Change argument.
There really aren't.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Increasing the concentration of greenhouse gasses increases the greenhouse effect. There's aproximately zero controversy on cause of the current warming amongst very intelligent folks.
When you do something 7 times and get different answers each time, you a probably doing it wrong.
This is one answer, about 1/7 th of the current best estimate.
Seven times is the reduction, not the number of changes.
So what?
Extinction Is a bad thing because it denies humanity access to the living thing and its ecosystem as a scientific resource.
It is also a bad thing because we are a long way from understanding the interconnectedness of the global ecosystem, so we don't know which extinction will be followed by the extinction of a very important pollinator or competitor or predator of a pathogen that will lead to the impacts for us or important domestic or agricultural species.
Extinction aside, drops in biomass of things like 98% are indicative of a collapse of productivity of the land. Humans already use about 30% more resources per year than the world produces. We already need to develop technologies that improve that number or face a nasty crash. Having parts of the world dropping to more or less zero productivity makes that equation worse, and is indicative of a problem that may be affecting other ecosystems.
How many people will die as a result?
It's very difficult to guess.
The few insect species that we do rely on are nowhere near extinction
These populations drops are coupled with related drops in insectivores. Insects are just the bottom of the food chain. The collapse will flow upwards.
while intensive farming techniques and cheap energy are bringing billions of people out of poverty
Great for them, but not relevant to the impact on humanity of the loss of some of the world's ecosystems.
After every mass extinction, a large number of ecological niches become available for new species to occupy, leading to an explosion of biodiversity.
Right. But that won't help humanity. The problems we face will hit crunch point in the next thousand years. Probably early in that time.
You can even say that the evolution of complex life on Earth is driven by mass extinction events.
So what? How many people will live as a result?
A hint: None.
You read the materials and methods section?
An you found they used 6 data points?
I'll copy the relevant part of the section here:
Arthropod Samples.
Lister (22) sampled arthropods within the Luquillo forest during July 1976 and January 1977. Following the same procedures and using the same study area, arthropod abundances were again estimated during July 2011 and January 2012 using both sticky-traps and sweep netting. Our 10 traps were the same size (34 × 24 cm) as Lister’s (22), and also utilized Tanglefoot as the sticky substance. Traps were laid out on the ground in the same-sized grid (30 × 24 m), and also left uncovered for 12 h between dawn and dusk before all captured insects were removed and stored in alcohol. Hoop sizes of our sweep nets (30-cm diameter) matched those used by Lister (22). Body lengths of all captured arthropods were measured to the nearest 0.5 mm using a dissecting scope and ocular micrometer. Regression equations were used to estimate individual dry weights from body lengths (142, 143).
Anolis Abundance.
To compare Anolis densities with Lister’s (22) estimates from July 1976 and January 1977, we sampled anoles within the same 15 × 15-m quadrat during July 2011 and January 2012. Following Lister (22), we used the Schnabel multiple recapture method (27) to estimate densities. However, instead of marking captured lizards by toe clipping, we used Testor’s enamel paint to create small (2 mm) spots with different color combinations directly above the dorsal base of the tail.
Climate Data.
We analyzed climate data taken at two locations in the Luquillo forest: the United States Forest Service El Verde Field Station and the Bisley Lower meteorological tower, which is part of the Luquillo Critical Zone Observatory. The El Verde station lies 5 km southwest of our study area (18.3211 N, 65.8200 W), at an elevation of 350 m. The upper Bisley Tower is located 3.2 km southeast of our study area (18.3164 N, 65.7453 W) at 352 m in elevation. Temperature data for the El Verde station span 37 y, from 1978 to 2015 (Fig. 1A), and for the Bisley station 21 y from 1993 to 2014 (Fig. 1B). Given that the highest ambient temperatures for a given area should have the greatest impact on fitness, especially for ectotherms (144), daily maximum temperatures were utilized in our analyses. Climate data for the Estacion de Biologia Chamela were obtained from www.ibiologia.unam.mx/ebchamela/www/clima.html.
Luquillo Long-Term Ecological Research Data.
Data sets from the Luquillo long-term ecological research (LTER) online Data Center were downloaded and analyzed for trends in population abundances over time. Detailed methods employed in the various studies can be found at the LTER Data Center website (https://luq.lter.network/luquillo-information-management-system-luq-ims).
Canopy arthropods.
Data were collected by Schowalter (23) near the El Verde field station between February 1991 and June 2009. Several articles have analyzed these samples with respect to invertebrate diversity, functional groups, arthropod composition in gap and intact forest, and recovery from disturbance (145), but none have looked for trends in overall abundance. Here we summed all arthropods sampled each year across taxa, forest type, and tree genera.
Walking sticks.
We analyzed data from a census of walking sticks (Lamponius portoricensis) carried out by Willig et al. (24) between 1991 and 2014 in the 16-ha Luquillo Forest Dynamics Plot (LFDP) near the El Verde Field Station. Sampling was conducted during the wet and dry seasons and captured individuals were classified as adults or juveniles. To analyze walking stick abundance through time, we summed all juveniles and adults across seasons and land classes.
E. coqui abundance.
We analyze census data for the Puerto Rican frog E. coqui taken by Woolbright (29, 30) between 1987 and 1997 at study areas n