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This study confirms empirical observation all around. Insects are disappearing. Birds are disappearing (populations are down 50 to 60% for many species). Large

by wazoox 9y ago

This study confirms empirical observation all around. Insects are disappearing. Birds are disappearing (populations are down 50 to 60% for many species). Large animals are disappearing. Soils are disappearing. Fish are disappearing. The situation is quite obviously of imminent global catastrophe, but you can harp until the end about "alarmist predictions".

gbog 9y ago
Here on HN we need to back such affirmations with data. The bolder the affirmations, the more solid the data-backed proof need to be. If we were to exchange "philosophical" considerations here, I'd tell you that sunday fishermen have complained weekly that there was much more fish in the river before since the dawn of humanity. I'd also tell you that my own home in downtown Beijing has seen a slug invasion this year, and that these animals are not disappearing at all (at least in my courtyard).
- JoeAltmaier 9y ago
  That's a symptom of ecological upset too. One species flourishing when another dies off, and the resulting wild cycles. Not a good sign.
  - gerbilly 9y ago
    Here's a good article on that topic: Planet of weeds Tallying the losses of Earth’s animals and plants By David Quammen/Harpers Magazine http://courses.botany.wisc.edu/botany_422/readings/Quammen1998.pdf http://courses.botany.wisc.edu/botany_422/readings/Quammen19...
- soundwave106 9y ago
  Googling, a lot of the articles on species decline seem to point to the World Wildlife Foundation and The Living Planet, a survey published as a joint collaboration between the WWF and the Institute of Zoology. Obviously, there is probably some bias due to this being in part from a conservation advocacy group. However, the methodology does appear to be documented in a peer-reviewed paper [2]. So I'd personally give it a fair more weight than mere anecdote. [1] https://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/living-planet-report-2016 https://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/living-planet-report-201... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1569448/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1569448/
golergka 9y ago
> empirical observation > quite obviously I don't know about you, but for me such words are huge red flags - especially without hard data.
- wazoox 9y ago
  OK, so you want to play this game. Now please provide those reports about life thriving everywhere. Birds populations face steep decline https://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/january12/birds-011205.html https://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/january12/birds-011205.h... Common Birds in Steep Decline List https://www.allaboutbirds.org/state-of-the-birds-2014-common-birds-in-steep-decline-list/ https://www.allaboutbirds.org/state-of-the-birds-2014-common... Global collapse in huge songbird population https://www.uni-muenster.de/news/view.php?cmdid=7720 https://www.uni-muenster.de/news/view.php?cmdid=7720 Dramatic decline of bird population in Germany https://www.nabu.de/news/2017/10/23284.html https://www.nabu.de/news/2017/10/23284.html Sharp decline of birds in UK https://ww2.rspb.org.uk/our-work/conservation/centre-for-conservation-science/state-of-the-uks-birds https://ww2.rspb.org.uk/our-work/conservation/centre-for-con... Towards understanding large mammal population declines in Africa’s protected areas https://tropicalconservationscience.mongabay.com/content/v4/11-03-28_1-11_Scholte.pdf https://tropicalconservationscience.mongabay.com/content/v4/... Global decline in aggregated migrations of large terrestrial mammals http://www.int-res.com/articles/esr2009/7/n007p055.pdf http://www.int-res.com/articles/esr2009/7/n007p055.pdf Marine Fish Population Collapses https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/54/4/297/284117 https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/54/4/297/284117 Has Half of World's Wildlife Been Lost in Past 40 Years? https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/09/1409030-animals-wildlife-wwf-decline-science-world/ https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/09/1409030-ani... Marine population halved since 1970 http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34265672 http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34265672 Half of Great Barrier Reef Lost in Past 3 Decades https://www.livescience.com/23612-great-barrier-reef-steep-decline.html https://www.livescience.com/23612-great-barrier-reef-steep-d...
  - golergka 9y ago
    > OK, so you want to play this game. Since when asking for sources is "playing a game"?
autokad 9y ago
open up google maps and search for Philadelphia. Click satellite at the bottom left. pan to the left. you should see ~40% of the area is green. you are still mostly within the city. pan left again. your in the suburbs (only an hour out) and its mostly houses and trees. a few more pans and you have nothing but forest. if you keep panning, you'll find yourself looking at mostly forest and farmland with the former prevailing. you may find an occasional city, but the vast of what you will find is nature for the next 1700 miles. by then you reached the rocky moutains and things start to get a bit drier. Nature is ok. nature is not dead. and as per comments bellow, you do not take two data points and extrapolate a linear prediction and expect anything meaningful. let alone from one small area in Germany, using a methodology that has not been widely tested. its certainly cause for additional research.
- GVIrish 9y ago
  That is a realllyy simplistic way of looking at things that doesn't at all speak to the issue at hand. Is there still lots of plant cover? Sure. But when you get into what types of environments are intact and healthy enough to support the normal fauna, we start to see problems. So there may be forest, but there may now be a tremendous drop in the amount of wildlife in the forest because the food chain has been badly damaged. Insects form the foundation of many ecosystems and massive drops in insect biomass would be devastating to all of the animals up that food chain. And there are a number of reasons insects can be disappearing from pesticides, to loss of specific species of plants, to air pollution. Even if we continue on our path of anthropomorphic mass extinctions, life on Earth will adapt and move on, that's not in question. But Earth may not be very hospitable for human kind if we don't change course.
- fallingfrog 9y ago
  I think what that misses though is that human growth has been exponential for some time now, and if it remains exponential then even if we've only tapped 12.5% of the earths productivity, we've only got 3 doublings left before we hit the proverbial wall. I think that it could be true that there is more nature left than we think, but also be true that there is less time left than we think.

by wazoox 9y ago

gbog 9y ago

Here on HN we need to back such affirmations with data. The bolder the affirmations, the more solid the data-backed proof need to be. If we were to exchange "philosophical" considerations here, I'd tell you that sunday fishermen have complained weekly that there was much more fish in the river before since the dawn of humanity. I'd also tell you that my own home in downtown Beijing has seen a slug invasion this year, and that these animals are not disappearing at all (at least in my courtyard).

JoeAltmaier 9y ago
That's a symptom of ecological upset too. One species flourishing when another dies off, and the resulting wild cycles. Not a good sign.
- gerbilly 9y ago
  Here's a good article on that topic: Planet of weeds Tallying the losses of Earth’s animals and plants By David Quammen/Harpers Magazine http://courses.botany.wisc.edu/botany_422/readings/Quammen1998.pdf http://courses.botany.wisc.edu/botany_422/readings/Quammen19...
soundwave106 9y ago
Googling, a lot of the articles on species decline seem to point to the World Wildlife Foundation and The Living Planet, a survey published as a joint collaboration between the WWF and the Institute of Zoology. Obviously, there is probably some bias due to this being in part from a conservation advocacy group. However, the methodology does appear to be documented in a peer-reviewed paper [2]. So I'd personally give it a fair more weight than mere anecdote. [1] https://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/living-planet-report-2016 https://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/living-planet-report-201... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1569448/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1569448/

golergka 9y ago

> empirical observation > quite obviously I don't know about you, but for me such words are huge red flags - especially without hard data.

wazoox 9y ago
OK, so you want to play this game. Now please provide those reports about life thriving everywhere. Birds populations face steep decline https://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/january12/birds-011205.html https://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/january12/birds-011205.h... Common Birds in Steep Decline List https://www.allaboutbirds.org/state-of-the-birds-2014-common-birds-in-steep-decline-list/ https://www.allaboutbirds.org/state-of-the-birds-2014-common... Global collapse in huge songbird population https://www.uni-muenster.de/news/view.php?cmdid=7720 https://www.uni-muenster.de/news/view.php?cmdid=7720 Dramatic decline of bird population in Germany https://www.nabu.de/news/2017/10/23284.html https://www.nabu.de/news/2017/10/23284.html Sharp decline of birds in UK https://ww2.rspb.org.uk/our-work/conservation/centre-for-conservation-science/state-of-the-uks-birds https://ww2.rspb.org.uk/our-work/conservation/centre-for-con... Towards understanding large mammal population declines in Africa’s protected areas https://tropicalconservationscience.mongabay.com/content/v4/11-03-28_1-11_Scholte.pdf https://tropicalconservationscience.mongabay.com/content/v4/... Global decline in aggregated migrations of large terrestrial mammals http://www.int-res.com/articles/esr2009/7/n007p055.pdf http://www.int-res.com/articles/esr2009/7/n007p055.pdf Marine Fish Population Collapses https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/54/4/297/284117 https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/54/4/297/284117 Has Half of World's Wildlife Been Lost in Past 40 Years? https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/09/1409030-animals-wildlife-wwf-decline-science-world/ https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/09/1409030-ani... Marine population halved since 1970 http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34265672 http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34265672 Half of Great Barrier Reef Lost in Past 3 Decades https://www.livescience.com/23612-great-barrier-reef-steep-decline.html https://www.livescience.com/23612-great-barrier-reef-steep-d...
- golergka 9y ago
  > OK, so you want to play this game. Since when asking for sources is "playing a game"?

autokad 9y ago

open up google maps and search for Philadelphia. Click satellite at the bottom left. pan to the left. you should see ~40% of the area is green. you are still mostly within the city. pan left again. your in the suburbs (only an hour out) and its mostly houses and trees. a few more pans and you have nothing but forest. if you keep panning, you'll find yourself looking at mostly forest and farmland with the former prevailing. you may find an occasional city, but the vast of what you will find is nature for the next 1700 miles. by then you reached the rocky moutains and things start to get a bit drier. Nature is ok. nature is not dead. and as per comments bellow, you do not take two data points and extrapolate a linear prediction and expect anything meaningful. let alone from one small area in Germany, using a methodology that has not been widely tested. its certainly cause for additional research.

GVIrish 9y ago
That is a realllyy simplistic way of looking at things that doesn't at all speak to the issue at hand. Is there still lots of plant cover? Sure. But when you get into what types of environments are intact and healthy enough to support the normal fauna, we start to see problems. So there may be forest, but there may now be a tremendous drop in the amount of wildlife in the forest because the food chain has been badly damaged. Insects form the foundation of many ecosystems and massive drops in insect biomass would be devastating to all of the animals up that food chain. And there are a number of reasons insects can be disappearing from pesticides, to loss of specific species of plants, to air pollution. Even if we continue on our path of anthropomorphic mass extinctions, life on Earth will adapt and move on, that's not in question. But Earth may not be very hospitable for human kind if we don't change course.
fallingfrog 9y ago
I think what that misses though is that human growth has been exponential for some time now, and if it remains exponential then even if we've only tapped 12.5% of the earths productivity, we've only got 3 doublings left before we hit the proverbial wall. I think that it could be true that there is more nature left than we think, but also be true that there is less time left than we think.