25 ms·

Insect collapse

258 points by crispinb 8y ago

crispinb 8y ago
Our world is dying.
- King-Aaron 8y ago
  The world isn't, but the ecosystem that allows us to be alive appears to be.
  - stouset 8y ago
    To me, that’s the “our” in “our world”.
    - crispinb 8y ago
      Exactly.
    - shusson 8y ago
      If life started on the Earth, then we are just part of a process of a particular rock floating in space. There is no 'our' world and it is not dying.
      - ben_w 8y ago
        Are you objecting to “our” on the grounds that we didn’t build it? Because most people use “our house” to mean the one they occupy, not limiting it to only what they built.
        shusson 8y ago
        > Are you objecting to “our” on the grounds that we didn’t build it I'm objecting that we own the Earth and that somehow we can kill it. > people use “our house” to mean the one they occupy, not limiting it to only what they built The Earth isn't being occupied by us, we are simply part of the Earth. So I don't mind the use of "our", but implying that we are killing the planet is the bit I think people should take a step back from and think about.
        crispinb 8y ago
        'Our' doesn't connote ownership. Our families are not owned by us. If anything the relationship is the other way around: we belong to the world that has formed us. > implying that we are killing the planet That would be a meaningless assertion. We our killing our world, which is a network of evolved complex living systems, not 'the planet'.
      - stouset 8y ago
        This is pointlessly pedantic. You know full well what the GP is trying to say, and you are being willfully obstinate by ignoring the obvious context. We are rendering the world uninhabitable for a frightening number of species—most likely including our own—through environmental collapse. Instead of bothering to discuss that point, you've decided to try and derail the conversation by playing semantics and arguing over the meaning of "destroy" and "our" and "planet". If you're not willing to or capable of engaging in these types of discussions in good faith, maybe Hacker News isn't the site for you.
  - chakalakasp 8y ago
    “Fortunately, the house isn’t in fire, there’s just a 50 mile wide firestorm sweeping this way that will be here in a few minutes”
  - 0xcafecafe 8y ago
    Exactly to quote George Carlin "The planet is not going anywhere, we are"
fastbeef 8y ago
I find these articles terrifying, and yet unreal. Like it's not really happening. I guess this is what denial feels like.
- bamboozled 8y ago
  That's because it's an alarmist piece which aren't too difficult to find in The Guardian. They do sell papers after all. I'm by no means claiming there is no problem and the situation is fabricated; However, using terms like “ecological Armageddon” really makes your amygdala go into overdrive and for what? To shock people into action or something?
  - mikeash 8y ago
    That term is a quote from one of the scientists. It also seems quite appropriate. What would you use to describe this event?
    - lixtra 8y ago
      Anthropocene extinction. I'm sure the ecosystem will finally stabilize with a fraction of current amount of species. It so far always did in the past. EDIT: I did not make up the term. The term Holocene seems to be more current (but also more obscure). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
      - mikeash 8y ago
        That seems highly obfuscatory for describing a catastrophic event to a nonscientific audience. Might as well call it an “unplanned existence deficit” or something.
      - chakalakasp 8y ago
        Right, but having your species single-handedly cause a mass extinction event on a scale not seen in 250 million years and having it happen in the span of a couple centuries (which is like a millisecond in geological time) seems like a pretty big deal to me. Like the biggest of big deals that we’ve ever lived through. This is a “there is a three mile wide asteroid inbound that will hit the earth in 80 years” kind of big deal.
thebradbain 8y ago
And here I was recently musing to myself that if something embedded into our societal imagination, like the giraffe, went nearly extinct due to climate change, that would wake people up before it's too late. Little did I know that's already essentially happened here according to this article, and the powers that be neither seem to be aware nor care. And because I was curious: Giraffes are now on the endangered species list as of about two months ago [1]. Go figure. When do we do something? [1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2018/11/14/giraffes-risk-extinction-animals-listed-critically-endangered/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2018/11/14/giraffes-risk...
- ribasushi 8y ago
  I read a very in-depth write-up on your last question couple weeks ago. Have tried to post it on HN a few times with no luck. Won't spoil the "when" answer for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18753499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18753499
- amelius 8y ago
  We don't do anything because people read too much pop-sci, pretending that we can just store the DNA.
- brazzy 8y ago
  > When do we do something? When it significantly impacts the daily lives of a majority of people, and not a second earlier.
  - lucideer 8y ago
    > When it significantly impacts the daily lives of a majority of relatively economically comfortable people, and not a second earlier.
  - EGreg 8y ago
    Majority of which people? Honduras is being impacted. Our reaction in the USA is to block the refugees fleeing famine and drought from reaching us and “invading”. Similarly with Europe and African refugees.
fsfsdff56sdf 8y ago
Predator Prey Cycle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYq2078_xqc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYq2078_xqc It seems likely there are at least some insects that can adapt to the slightly higher temperatures in the rain forest. If now their predators (birds) have gone down, these insects can multiply, becoming a food source for birds, whose population can then recover. I love insects like the next guy, but we need to stop believing everything besides completely static environments are a catastrophe.
fsloth 8y ago
It's funny we think we are an "advanced" civilization, yet we have no real time diagnostics of the status of our biosphere. It's really creepy how little basic research apparently is going on into "boring" ecological factors. This insect apocalypse is like you suddenly notice you are missing an arm and a leg and have no idea what happened to them. Any professionals in um... ecological metrics here? To an outsider it seems there are like three people on the planet who are concerned about the quantifiable properties of our biosphere and only one of them got part time funding.
- voqv 8y ago
  For some reason we as humanity have been living really well for the last 50 years and, without thought, we imagine it's just going to stay like that.
  - addicted 8y ago
    But even that is misleading. A small fraction of humanity has been living really well. And it’s increasingly apparent they have been able to do so by essentially pushing the costs of their actions to future generations.
    - vokep 8y ago
      No. Almost everyone is living "really well" compared to 100 years back. The lowest low is higher than it was before.
    - ryanmercer 8y ago
      "living really well" is highly subjective, >5 billion people now have a mobile phone connection, according to GSMA data. Per https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/13/5-billion-people-now-have-a-mobile-phone-connection-according-to-gsma-data/ https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/13/5-billion-people-now-have... That alone should be an indication people are living quite different now than just 10 years ago.
  - crispinb 8y ago
    Even 'living well' isn't quite right. By and large, we have swapped out physical for psychological suffering.
titzer 8y ago
This planet will not support 7 billion humans. Certainly not 7 billion stupid-ass humans who swing massive sledgehammers into the pillars of the biosphere that support them in their hedonistic blunder in search of more "wealth". When I hear the words "economic growth", and then weigh it against the destruction of this magnitude, I often want to vomit. And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in computers somewhere that represent some fiction of our collective imagination, all the while burning more energy and fuel and contributing to the massive side show that distracts us from our self-destruction? Not well.
- amelius 8y ago
  > And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in computers somewhere that represent some fiction of our collective imagination, all the while burning more energy and fuel and contributing to the massive side show that distracts us from our self-destruction? Not well. Well at least the mass consumption of virtual goods (software) seems to produce less waste than the mass consumption of physical goods. Your mission is to write software that's so good that people do not need to upgrade their hardware.
  - xg15 8y ago
    I'm not sure about that. Sure, the software itself won't, but the hardware needed to run the software absolutely has environmental impact: It drives habitat destruction due to mining the raw materials, pollution from waste by the mining and production processes and than more pollution when the hardware is decommissioned and ends up on landfills. Then there is the enormous energy demand of IT systems, which in turn requires more fuel to drive them. The industry itself is not helping either. Not just is writing resource efficient software often not a priority, it's sometimes even seen as an anti-pattern (due to a misunderstanding of "premature optimization"). In the latest iteration, we have technologies like blockchains that make wasting energy into a feature. > Your mission is to write software that's so good that people do not need to upgrade their hardware. Meanwhile, the mission of your superiors is to make sure people upgrade their hardware as often as possible so the revenue keeps coming in. Before there is a large-scale change of that culture, I don't think software development will be innocent in this.
EGreg 8y ago
We are making the world into farms and monocultures. A very brittle arrangement.
ryanmercer 8y ago
Somewhat related... The other day I was annoyed at my allergies, in winter, with snow coming down and reflecting on how I never had allergies until around 30 a few years back. Bees. Bees dying. Bees eat pollen. It seems many of my friends have far worse allergies than previously... What if we are already seeing consequences of insects dying off, like bees for example. I need to find time to try and see if there is good data on allergies, if there has been a general increase, and how it matches up with bee die off and pollen count. Is it possible that bees not being around to use pollen, has caused pollen count to go up on average, which is causing more allergy issues with humans? And what happens if mosquitoes start dying off, we have chocolate because mosquitoes are one of the few pollinators that can pollinate the cacao tree due to the small size. sigh
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  I'm not a biologist, but, if there's less bees, wouldn't that also mean there's less pollination done by them which would reduce the amount of seeds produced which in turn reduces the amount of plants?
  - ryanmercer 8y ago
    Bees aren't the only pollinators by a long shot, they're just the most commercialized/domesticated one. Take corn/maize, you have to rely on a pollinator speices or manual pollination if you grow small amounts in your garden but if you grow acres and acres of it wind alone will sufficiently pollinate it. The plants still produce the pollen though. Pine trees for example produce copious amounts of pollen but it offers a relatively poor protein source so most pollinating insects don't make use of it. Bees consume pollen as one of their food sources though, they just happen to pollinate plants due to accidental transfer while collecting pollen for their own use. You can then harvest some of the wax and honey as a commercial product and it's much easier to load up box after box of honey bees on a truck to transport to the next field than it is moths, butterflies, beetles, mosquitoes etc. Modern farming outright relies on domesticated bees, domesticated bees aren't remotely 'natural' though and nature has plenty of other means of spreading pollen sufficiently for reproduction. A recent figure puts just domesticated honey bees at 80-100 million colonies worldwide. An average-size colony may bring in 100 pounds of pollen in a season so 8-10 billion pounds of pollen annually. If you saw just a 10% die off of those domesticated colonies, you're talking about an insane amount of pollen. 2000 maize pollen grains weigh one milligram, so 907 million grains per pound for maize. So the NAB scale, depending on the type of pollen, 5-89 grains per cubic meter of air is moderate and 20-1499 grains per cubic meter is a high pollen count. Yeah, there's a LOT of air but you can see how even a small reduction in colonies could drastically increase average pollen counts. Add in global warming which can extend the growing season and open up new regions and you also see an amplification of pollen during a given period.
chakalakasp 8y ago
For those who haven’t done so, the Pulitzer winner “The Sixth Extinction” is well worth reading. We are on the cusp of popular culture realizing the world as we know it is coming to a close and we are probably half a century beyond the point where our ingenuity or actions can do anything about it.
sethammons 8y ago
Reminds me of my favorite demotivational poster: Responsibility: no single raindrop feels it is responsible for the flood.
- Simon_says 8y ago
  That's a great quote. Very similar to: "The avalanche has has already started. It's too late for the pebbles to vote." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zJsrjOytG8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zJsrjOytG8
gerbilly 8y ago
Wendell Berry once wrote that we are at war with nature, and I think the metaphor is quite appropriate. This war, like most wars, has turned out to be a trickier business than we expected. We must now face two shocking surprises. The first surprise is that if we say and believe that we are at war with nature, then we are in the fullest sense at war: that is, we are both opposing and being opposed, and the costs to both sides are extremely high. The second surprise is that we are not winning. [...] Even in our most grievous offenses against her, as in the present epidemic of habitat destruction and species extinction we are being defeated, for in the long run we can less afford the losses than nature can.
- crispinb 8y ago
  Though I sometimes enjoy Berry, he's wrong. We can't be 'at war' with nature. We are nature. Human destruction of ecosystems is a natural process - it's not fundamentally different from introduced flora & fauna overrunning island ecologies. It's just happening on a planetary scale. The only 'unnatural' aspect of the picture is the common notion that humans (primates designed for small-scale tribal interactions) could somehow magically adapt to managing planetary-scale populations (let alone the vast network of ecologies hosting them). The story of human 'progress' or 'destiny' is a religious myth. Amusingly, it is held with particular vehemence by many technologically-inclined atheists without a shred of irony.
  - gerbilly 8y ago
    I read it more allegorically than that. Being at war with nature is a good metaphor for our behaviour, because we seem determined to completely vanquish it and bend it to our will. Of course it's a bitter irony that if we are at war with nature, we are at war with ourselves (because as you say we come from nature). I think that's implied by the passage. The way we interact with nature is different in kind from other species, not just in scope. For humans, it's not enough to take , say, just the fish that we need. Because of money we take _all_ the fish we can get and then sell them. What doesn't sell is thrown out.
    - 8y ago
coldcode 8y ago
Evolution will ultimately prevail; it just may not include us. In all eras of mass species die off, eventually new niches created new opportunity. Even with idiot humans messing up stuff, in a long enough timeframe, evolution will eventually route around us.
cs702 8y ago
The growing body of anecdotal evidence, including the disappearance of insects at the bottom of the food pyramid in more than one area, suggests that it is now too late to reverse these dramatic changes to the earth's biosphere and humankind's ability to extract food from it. Let us hope that as these dramatic changes start affecting more and more people in concrete ways, we, human beings, will search for and develop technological solutions that will allow us to survive and thrive in a changing environment.
- rootusrootus 8y ago
  It's an interesting position we've put ourselves into, at least in the US. Half the population in denial that anything is wrong, the other half convinced the only solution is conservation. Eventually we're going to have to engineer our way out of it, or die trying. But I expect it will get pretty dire before enough people across the spectrum get on board.
  - cs702 8y ago
    > Eventually we're going to have to engineer our way out of it, or die trying. Exactly. That's a much better way of putting it.
graeme 8y ago
The guardian links to a study of a nature reserve in australia. The abstract is terrifying. ------ Aim We characterized changes in reporting rates and abundances of bird species over a period of severe rainfall deficiency and increasing average temperatures. We also measured flowering in eucalypts, which support large numbers of nectarivores characteristic of the region. Location A 30,000‐km2 region of northern Victoria, Australia, consisting of limited amounts of remnant native woodlands embedded in largely agricultural landscapes. Methods There were three sets of monitoring studies, pitched at regional (survey programmes in 1995–97, 2004–05 and 2006–08), landscape (2002–03 and 2006–07) and site (1997–2008 continuously) scales. Bird survey techniques used a standard 2‐ha, 20‐min count method. We used Bayesian analyses of reporting rates to document statistically changes in the avifauna through time at each spatial scale. Results Bird populations in the largest remnants of native vegetation (up to 40,000 ha), some of which have been declared as national parks in the past decade, experienced similar declines to those in heavily cleared landscapes. All categories of birds (guilds based on foraging substrate, diet, nest site; relative mobility; geographical distributions) were affected similarly. We detected virtually no bird breeding in the latest survey periods. Eucalypt flowering has declined significantly over the past 12 years of drought. Main conclusions Declines in the largest woodland remnants commensurate with those in cleared landscapes suggest that reserve systems may not be relied upon to sustain species under climate change. We attribute population declines to low breeding success due to reduced food. Resilience of bird populations in this woodland system might be increased by active management to enhance habitat quality in existing vegetation and restoration of woodland in the more fertile parts of landscapes. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1472-4642.2009.00578.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1472-4642...
peacetreefrog 8y ago
It's interesting to me how often this story shows up on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=insect&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=insect&sort=byPopularity&prefi... Edit: a lot of down votes, I'm not saying it's bad that it's frequently posted or isn't a very serious or alarming problem, or that it's showing up here so often due to some conspiracy or something. It's just interesting, given the non-technical nature of the topic. I wonder if environmental Armageddon is of particular interest to engineers/hackers, or whether it's just an alarming story to humans generally, or what.
- pohl 8y ago
  Non-technical? Do you think maybe the cause of insect collapse is related to something other than a tradeoff that came along with the use of pesticide technology? What's your hypothesis?
  - peacetreefrog 8y ago
    I meant non-tech like non-programming, start ups, Rust etc, the stuff you usually see on HN.
    - pohl 8y ago
      HN has never been that narrow, in my experience. I don't recall ever seeing a day on HN without something of mere general science interest (although I've only been here since '09.) Come to think of it, there are HN guidelines that explicitly state that HN isn't that narrow: On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- crispinb 8y ago
  1. It's not 'this story' - it's a stream of new stories about collapses of insect populations in different ecosystems (a part of the wider stream of stories about ecosystem breakdown) 2. As for motivations for submitting the stories, I can only speak for myself: ecosystem collapse is more important and interesting to me than tech. I live in ecosystems (indeed I have nowhere else to go), whereas I merely make a living from tech.
gzu 8y ago
The Puerto Rico rainforest? You mean the same island that got hit by a massive hurricane last year?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jelliclesfarm 8y ago
Speaking as a farmer..We should return half the earths landmass to nature. We must change how we grow food. We must even reconsider our ‘food for survival and fuel’. We can all do without pork and HFCS and kale to live. We can’t live without this planet and it’s natural systems sustaining us. We should waste less. Use less fossil fuel. Every time I hear another VC flog their investment with the tired old line ‘we must feed 10 billion by 2050’, a chill runs through my spine. And another species inches closer to extinction. We have a population problem. Not an environmental problem. All this ‘innovation’ is enabling our addiction to procreation. .. all our traditional and modern methods of Ag and producing food + having breached the carrying capacity of the planet so long ago , we are losing this battle of species survival ...with willful ignorance. It’s all very disheartening.
- refurb 8y ago
  But 1/2 of the world is already wilderness.[1] I think people underestimate just how big Russia and Canada are and the fact that for most the part, they are completely undeveloped. [1]https://www.conservation.org/NewsRoom/pressreleases/Pages/120402_global-analysis-finds-nearly-half-earth-still-wilderness.aspx https://www.conservation.org/NewsRoom/pressreleases/Pages/12...
  - ryanmercer 8y ago
    I think they meant more along the lines of "We should take half of the 17,235,800 square kilometers of cultivated land in the world and return it to nature" Or even "We should take half of the 1,549,600 square kilometers of permanent cropland"
StanislavPetrov 8y ago
Unfortunately pointing out the obvious - that the destruction of our ecosystem is a direct result of the massive overpopulation of humans - almost always results in denials and rationalizations. Those who prefer to keep their heads in the sand about massive overpopulation wave their hands and attempt to rebut the problem with two absurd arguments. First, deniers say that people who have been warning about overpopulation for centuries have always proven wrong. This flies in the face of all the evidence, such as the article being replied to. The verdict is in, there's no disputing the damage that has been done. The insects, the birds, the fish, virtually all large mammals (and most of the smaller ones). The Second response deniers go with is that "we can solve the problem of overpopulation with new technologies". The damage is done! What's left of the environment is being destroyed right now. Talking about solving the problem of overpopulation by developing new technologies is like talking about inventing new ways to fight fires as you watch a building burn down in front of your eyes. This is obviously not to say that we should be killing people off or forcibly sterilizing people or any of the feverish rhetoric used by those who don't want to face reality. It means that if we as a society want to continue to live on the planet earth we need to start having a conversation about what sort of population the earth can sustainably support and what sort of policies we should enact to reach that massively reduced number at some time in the future (which hopefully isn't too late).
ackfoo 8y ago
The data underlying this study were taken most recently in January 2013. I wonder why it took almost six years to publish the results? Given the catastrophic nature of the findings, six years seems a long time to wait before publication. It's hard to replicate this kind of data six or seven years out. If someone repeats the survey this year and gets different numbers, it can be discounted as an anomaly. It would have been better if the study could have been repeated right away: in the same year, or in the following year. Also, the authors are overwhelmingly biased in favour of climate change as the cause. This is mainly a bug count. How hard is it to count the bugs and present the data and the analysis, leaving speculation about the cause to the discussion? I have to be very suspicious of a study that starts off implicating climate change instead of following the evidence. Especially when the conclusion is "we need more money to study this". It does not make much sense to try so hard to fit climate change to the curve of this data. If it turns out that something else is operative, such as pesticide use, or the unusual solar minimum, or the unexpectedly rapidly diminishing magnetic field, then we have missed an early indication of something huge. There is overwhelming evidence that humans are screwing up this planet, but no matter how politically correct and funding-expedient it may be to nail everything with the climate change hammer, it's not really how science is supposed to work. It's hard to lay an insect apocalypse at the door of a 2C change in temperature. Measuring the temperature of a whole planet is hard. Pons & Fleischmann had trouble measuring the temperature change in a beaker and look at the stupidity that occasioned. Lister & Garcia mostly rely upon increased variability in the weather to make the connection, but the fundamental mechanism is never explored. It's pretty hard to swallow that all the insects in a tropical rain forest died because they were a little too warm a few days out of the year. Climate change has become a religion, and, like a religion, it makes a lot of money for its practitioners. If 98% of the bugs in Luquillo are dead, then we are likely in dire trouble. If true, this finding is way too important to screw up with curve-fitting.
charliebrownau 8y ago
If the Globe is warming via ARTIFICIAL or NATURE then what can we really do as INDIVIDUALS ? Even if everyone in West (USA + UK + CA + NZ + AU ) swapped from * Grid power to solar * Rain tank water from grid water * Countries swapped from Coal to Nuclear power * Countries swapped from Petrol to 100% ethanol Would this really impact the pollution from India + China ?
rubarax 8y ago
Someday, we will realize that it's too late. There only will be regrets. Meanwhile, we just have to ignore it and complain about stupid stuff. That's humankind.
syncmaster913n 8y ago
How do we know that global warming won't ultimately lead to a better future, all things considered? Why is all the focus on what can go wrong? Serious questions, not trying to be cute.
eecc 8y ago
Watched this the other night: https://www.vpro.nl/programmas/tegenlicht/kijk/afleveringen/2018-2019/de-aarde-draait-door.html https://www.vpro.nl/programmas/tegenlicht/kijk/afleveringen/... It's from a Dutch broadcaster, but most of the program is in english. Very pertinent, disturbing and the questions it lays on the table unsettling.
TagAsDelusion 8y ago
pesticide manufacturers

Insect collapse

258 points by crispinb 8y ago

crispinb 8y ago

Our world is dying.

King-Aaron 8y ago
The world isn't, but the ecosystem that allows us to be alive appears to be.
- stouset 8y ago
  To me, that’s the “our” in “our world”.
  - crispinb 8y ago
    Exactly.
  - shusson 8y ago
    If life started on the Earth, then we are just part of a process of a particular rock floating in space. There is no 'our' world and it is not dying.
    - ben_w 8y ago
      Are you objecting to “our” on the grounds that we didn’t build it? Because most people use “our house” to mean the one they occupy, not limiting it to only what they built.
      - shusson 8y ago
        > Are you objecting to “our” on the grounds that we didn’t build it I'm objecting that we own the Earth and that somehow we can kill it. > people use “our house” to mean the one they occupy, not limiting it to only what they built The Earth isn't being occupied by us, we are simply part of the Earth. So I don't mind the use of "our", but implying that we are killing the planet is the bit I think people should take a step back from and think about.
        crispinb 8y ago
        'Our' doesn't connote ownership. Our families are not owned by us. If anything the relationship is the other way around: we belong to the world that has formed us. > implying that we are killing the planet That would be a meaningless assertion. We our killing our world, which is a network of evolved complex living systems, not 'the planet'.
    - stouset 8y ago
      This is pointlessly pedantic. You know full well what the GP is trying to say, and you are being willfully obstinate by ignoring the obvious context. We are rendering the world uninhabitable for a frightening number of species—most likely including our own—through environmental collapse. Instead of bothering to discuss that point, you've decided to try and derail the conversation by playing semantics and arguing over the meaning of "destroy" and "our" and "planet". If you're not willing to or capable of engaging in these types of discussions in good faith, maybe Hacker News isn't the site for you.
- chakalakasp 8y ago
  “Fortunately, the house isn’t in fire, there’s just a 50 mile wide firestorm sweeping this way that will be here in a few minutes”
- 0xcafecafe 8y ago
  Exactly to quote George Carlin "The planet is not going anywhere, we are"

fastbeef 8y ago

I find these articles terrifying, and yet unreal. Like it's not really happening. I guess this is what denial feels like.

bamboozled 8y ago
That's because it's an alarmist piece which aren't too difficult to find in The Guardian. They do sell papers after all. I'm by no means claiming there is no problem and the situation is fabricated; However, using terms like “ecological Armageddon” really makes your amygdala go into overdrive and for what? To shock people into action or something?
- mikeash 8y ago
  That term is a quote from one of the scientists. It also seems quite appropriate. What would you use to describe this event?
  - lixtra 8y ago
    Anthropocene extinction. I'm sure the ecosystem will finally stabilize with a fraction of current amount of species. It so far always did in the past. EDIT: I did not make up the term. The term Holocene seems to be more current (but also more obscure). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
    - mikeash 8y ago
      That seems highly obfuscatory for describing a catastrophic event to a nonscientific audience. Might as well call it an “unplanned existence deficit” or something.
    - chakalakasp 8y ago
      Right, but having your species single-handedly cause a mass extinction event on a scale not seen in 250 million years and having it happen in the span of a couple centuries (which is like a millisecond in geological time) seems like a pretty big deal to me. Like the biggest of big deals that we’ve ever lived through. This is a “there is a three mile wide asteroid inbound that will hit the earth in 80 years” kind of big deal.

thebradbain 8y ago

And here I was recently musing to myself that if something embedded into our societal imagination, like the giraffe, went nearly extinct due to climate change, that would wake people up before it's too late. Little did I know that's already essentially happened here according to this article, and the powers that be neither seem to be aware nor care. And because I was curious: Giraffes are now on the endangered species list as of about two months ago [1]. Go figure. When do we do something? [1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2018/11/14/giraffes-risk-extinction-animals-listed-critically-endangered/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2018/11/14/giraffes-risk...

ribasushi 8y ago
I read a very in-depth write-up on your last question couple weeks ago. Have tried to post it on HN a few times with no luck. Won't spoil the "when" answer for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18753499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18753499
amelius 8y ago
We don't do anything because people read too much pop-sci, pretending that we can just store the DNA.
brazzy 8y ago
> When do we do something? When it significantly impacts the daily lives of a majority of people, and not a second earlier.
- lucideer 8y ago
  > When it significantly impacts the daily lives of a majority of relatively economically comfortable people, and not a second earlier.
- EGreg 8y ago
  Majority of which people? Honduras is being impacted. Our reaction in the USA is to block the refugees fleeing famine and drought from reaching us and “invading”. Similarly with Europe and African refugees.

fsfsdff56sdf 8y ago

Predator Prey Cycle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYq2078_xqc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYq2078_xqc It seems likely there are at least some insects that can adapt to the slightly higher temperatures in the rain forest. If now their predators (birds) have gone down, these insects can multiply, becoming a food source for birds, whose population can then recover. I love insects like the next guy, but we need to stop believing everything besides completely static environments are a catastrophe.

fsloth 8y ago

It's funny we think we are an "advanced" civilization, yet we have no real time diagnostics of the status of our biosphere. It's really creepy how little basic research apparently is going on into "boring" ecological factors. This insect apocalypse is like you suddenly notice you are missing an arm and a leg and have no idea what happened to them. Any professionals in um... ecological metrics here? To an outsider it seems there are like three people on the planet who are concerned about the quantifiable properties of our biosphere and only one of them got part time funding.

voqv 8y ago
For some reason we as humanity have been living really well for the last 50 years and, without thought, we imagine it's just going to stay like that.
- addicted 8y ago
  But even that is misleading. A small fraction of humanity has been living really well. And it’s increasingly apparent they have been able to do so by essentially pushing the costs of their actions to future generations.
  - vokep 8y ago
    No. Almost everyone is living "really well" compared to 100 years back. The lowest low is higher than it was before.
  - ryanmercer 8y ago
    "living really well" is highly subjective, >5 billion people now have a mobile phone connection, according to GSMA data. Per https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/13/5-billion-people-now-have-a-mobile-phone-connection-according-to-gsma-data/ https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/13/5-billion-people-now-have... That alone should be an indication people are living quite different now than just 10 years ago.
- crispinb 8y ago
  Even 'living well' isn't quite right. By and large, we have swapped out physical for psychological suffering.

titzer 8y ago

This planet will not support 7 billion humans. Certainly not 7 billion stupid-ass humans who swing massive sledgehammers into the pillars of the biosphere that support them in their hedonistic blunder in search of more "wealth". When I hear the words "economic growth", and then weigh it against the destruction of this magnitude, I often want to vomit. And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in computers somewhere that represent some fiction of our collective imagination, all the while burning more energy and fuel and contributing to the massive side show that distracts us from our self-destruction? Not well.

amelius 8y ago
> And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in computers somewhere that represent some fiction of our collective imagination, all the while burning more energy and fuel and contributing to the massive side show that distracts us from our self-destruction? Not well. Well at least the mass consumption of virtual goods (software) seems to produce less waste than the mass consumption of physical goods. Your mission is to write software that's so good that people do not need to upgrade their hardware.
- xg15 8y ago
  I'm not sure about that. Sure, the software itself won't, but the hardware needed to run the software absolutely has environmental impact: It drives habitat destruction due to mining the raw materials, pollution from waste by the mining and production processes and than more pollution when the hardware is decommissioned and ends up on landfills. Then there is the enormous energy demand of IT systems, which in turn requires more fuel to drive them. The industry itself is not helping either. Not just is writing resource efficient software often not a priority, it's sometimes even seen as an anti-pattern (due to a misunderstanding of "premature optimization"). In the latest iteration, we have technologies like blockchains that make wasting energy into a feature. > Your mission is to write software that's so good that people do not need to upgrade their hardware. Meanwhile, the mission of your superiors is to make sure people upgrade their hardware as often as possible so the revenue keeps coming in. Before there is a large-scale change of that culture, I don't think software development will be innocent in this.

EGreg 8y ago

We are making the world into farms and monocultures. A very brittle arrangement.

ryanmercer 8y ago

Somewhat related... The other day I was annoyed at my allergies, in winter, with snow coming down and reflecting on how I never had allergies until around 30 a few years back. Bees. Bees dying. Bees eat pollen. It seems many of my friends have far worse allergies than previously... What if we are already seeing consequences of insects dying off, like bees for example. I need to find time to try and see if there is good data on allergies, if there has been a general increase, and how it matches up with bee die off and pollen count. Is it possible that bees not being around to use pollen, has caused pollen count to go up on average, which is causing more allergy issues with humans? And what happens if mosquitoes start dying off, we have chocolate because mosquitoes are one of the few pollinators that can pollinate the cacao tree due to the small size. sigh

Cthulhu_ 8y ago
I'm not a biologist, but, if there's less bees, wouldn't that also mean there's less pollination done by them which would reduce the amount of seeds produced which in turn reduces the amount of plants?
- ryanmercer 8y ago
  Bees aren't the only pollinators by a long shot, they're just the most commercialized/domesticated one. Take corn/maize, you have to rely on a pollinator speices or manual pollination if you grow small amounts in your garden but if you grow acres and acres of it wind alone will sufficiently pollinate it. The plants still produce the pollen though. Pine trees for example produce copious amounts of pollen but it offers a relatively poor protein source so most pollinating insects don't make use of it. Bees consume pollen as one of their food sources though, they just happen to pollinate plants due to accidental transfer while collecting pollen for their own use. You can then harvest some of the wax and honey as a commercial product and it's much easier to load up box after box of honey bees on a truck to transport to the next field than it is moths, butterflies, beetles, mosquitoes etc. Modern farming outright relies on domesticated bees, domesticated bees aren't remotely 'natural' though and nature has plenty of other means of spreading pollen sufficiently for reproduction. A recent figure puts just domesticated honey bees at 80-100 million colonies worldwide. An average-size colony may bring in 100 pounds of pollen in a season so 8-10 billion pounds of pollen annually. If you saw just a 10% die off of those domesticated colonies, you're talking about an insane amount of pollen. 2000 maize pollen grains weigh one milligram, so 907 million grains per pound for maize. So the NAB scale, depending on the type of pollen, 5-89 grains per cubic meter of air is moderate and 20-1499 grains per cubic meter is a high pollen count. Yeah, there's a LOT of air but you can see how even a small reduction in colonies could drastically increase average pollen counts. Add in global warming which can extend the growing season and open up new regions and you also see an amplification of pollen during a given period.

chakalakasp 8y ago

For those who haven’t done so, the Pulitzer winner “The Sixth Extinction” is well worth reading. We are on the cusp of popular culture realizing the world as we know it is coming to a close and we are probably half a century beyond the point where our ingenuity or actions can do anything about it.

sethammons 8y ago

Reminds me of my favorite demotivational poster: Responsibility: no single raindrop feels it is responsible for the flood.

Simon_says 8y ago
That's a great quote. Very similar to: "The avalanche has has already started. It's too late for the pebbles to vote." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zJsrjOytG8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zJsrjOytG8

gerbilly 8y ago

Wendell Berry once wrote that we are at war with nature, and I think the metaphor is quite appropriate. This war, like most wars, has turned out to be a trickier business than we expected. We must now face two shocking surprises. The first surprise is that if we say and believe that we are at war with nature, then we are in the fullest sense at war: that is, we are both opposing and being opposed, and the costs to both sides are extremely high. The second surprise is that we are not winning. [...] Even in our most grievous offenses against her, as in the present epidemic of habitat destruction and species extinction we are being defeated, for in the long run we can less afford the losses than nature can.

crispinb 8y ago
Though I sometimes enjoy Berry, he's wrong. We can't be 'at war' with nature. We are nature. Human destruction of ecosystems is a natural process - it's not fundamentally different from introduced flora & fauna overrunning island ecologies. It's just happening on a planetary scale. The only 'unnatural' aspect of the picture is the common notion that humans (primates designed for small-scale tribal interactions) could somehow magically adapt to managing planetary-scale populations (let alone the vast network of ecologies hosting them). The story of human 'progress' or 'destiny' is a religious myth. Amusingly, it is held with particular vehemence by many technologically-inclined atheists without a shred of irony.
- gerbilly 8y ago
  I read it more allegorically than that. Being at war with nature is a good metaphor for our behaviour, because we seem determined to completely vanquish it and bend it to our will. Of course it's a bitter irony that if we are at war with nature, we are at war with ourselves (because as you say we come from nature). I think that's implied by the passage. The way we interact with nature is different in kind from other species, not just in scope. For humans, it's not enough to take , say, just the fish that we need. Because of money we take _all_ the fish we can get and then sell them. What doesn't sell is thrown out.
  - 8y ago

coldcode 8y ago

Evolution will ultimately prevail; it just may not include us. In all eras of mass species die off, eventually new niches created new opportunity. Even with idiot humans messing up stuff, in a long enough timeframe, evolution will eventually route around us.

cs702 8y ago

The growing body of anecdotal evidence, including the disappearance of insects at the bottom of the food pyramid in more than one area, suggests that it is now too late to reverse these dramatic changes to the earth's biosphere and humankind's ability to extract food from it. Let us hope that as these dramatic changes start affecting more and more people in concrete ways, we, human beings, will search for and develop technological solutions that will allow us to survive and thrive in a changing environment.

rootusrootus 8y ago
It's an interesting position we've put ourselves into, at least in the US. Half the population in denial that anything is wrong, the other half convinced the only solution is conservation. Eventually we're going to have to engineer our way out of it, or die trying. But I expect it will get pretty dire before enough people across the spectrum get on board.
- cs702 8y ago
  > Eventually we're going to have to engineer our way out of it, or die trying. Exactly. That's a much better way of putting it.

graeme 8y ago

The guardian links to a study of a nature reserve in australia. The abstract is terrifying. ------ Aim We characterized changes in reporting rates and abundances of bird species over a period of severe rainfall deficiency and increasing average temperatures. We also measured flowering in eucalypts, which support large numbers of nectarivores characteristic of the region. Location A 30,000‐km2 region of northern Victoria, Australia, consisting of limited amounts of remnant native woodlands embedded in largely agricultural landscapes. Methods There were three sets of monitoring studies, pitched at regional (survey programmes in 1995–97, 2004–05 and 2006–08), landscape (2002–03 and 2006–07) and site (1997–2008 continuously) scales. Bird survey techniques used a standard 2‐ha, 20‐min count method. We used Bayesian analyses of reporting rates to document statistically changes in the avifauna through time at each spatial scale. Results Bird populations in the largest remnants of native vegetation (up to 40,000 ha), some of which have been declared as national parks in the past decade, experienced similar declines to those in heavily cleared landscapes. All categories of birds (guilds based on foraging substrate, diet, nest site; relative mobility; geographical distributions) were affected similarly. We detected virtually no bird breeding in the latest survey periods. Eucalypt flowering has declined significantly over the past 12 years of drought. Main conclusions Declines in the largest woodland remnants commensurate with those in cleared landscapes suggest that reserve systems may not be relied upon to sustain species under climate change. We attribute population declines to low breeding success due to reduced food. Resilience of bird populations in this woodland system might be increased by active management to enhance habitat quality in existing vegetation and restoration of woodland in the more fertile parts of landscapes. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1472-4642.2009.00578.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1472-4642...

peacetreefrog 8y ago

It's interesting to me how often this story shows up on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=insect&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=insect&sort=byPopularity&prefi... Edit: a lot of down votes, I'm not saying it's bad that it's frequently posted or isn't a very serious or alarming problem, or that it's showing up here so often due to some conspiracy or something. It's just interesting, given the non-technical nature of the topic. I wonder if environmental Armageddon is of particular interest to engineers/hackers, or whether it's just an alarming story to humans generally, or what.

pohl 8y ago
Non-technical? Do you think maybe the cause of insect collapse is related to something other than a tradeoff that came along with the use of pesticide technology? What's your hypothesis?
- peacetreefrog 8y ago
  I meant non-tech like non-programming, start ups, Rust etc, the stuff you usually see on HN.
  - pohl 8y ago
    HN has never been that narrow, in my experience. I don't recall ever seeing a day on HN without something of mere general science interest (although I've only been here since '09.) Come to think of it, there are HN guidelines that explicitly state that HN isn't that narrow: On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
crispinb 8y ago
1. It's not 'this story' - it's a stream of new stories about collapses of insect populations in different ecosystems (a part of the wider stream of stories about ecosystem breakdown) 2. As for motivations for submitting the stories, I can only speak for myself: ecosystem collapse is more important and interesting to me than tech. I live in ecosystems (indeed I have nowhere else to go), whereas I merely make a living from tech.

gzu 8y ago

The Puerto Rico rainforest? You mean the same island that got hit by a massive hurricane last year?

deleted 8y ago

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jelliclesfarm 8y ago

Speaking as a farmer..We should return half the earths landmass to nature. We must change how we grow food. We must even reconsider our ‘food for survival and fuel’. We can all do without pork and HFCS and kale to live. We can’t live without this planet and it’s natural systems sustaining us. We should waste less. Use less fossil fuel. Every time I hear another VC flog their investment with the tired old line ‘we must feed 10 billion by 2050’, a chill runs through my spine. And another species inches closer to extinction. We have a population problem. Not an environmental problem. All this ‘innovation’ is enabling our addiction to procreation. .. all our traditional and modern methods of Ag and producing food + having breached the carrying capacity of the planet so long ago , we are losing this battle of species survival ...with willful ignorance. It’s all very disheartening.

refurb 8y ago
But 1/2 of the world is already wilderness.[1] I think people underestimate just how big Russia and Canada are and the fact that for most the part, they are completely undeveloped. [1]https://www.conservation.org/NewsRoom/pressreleases/Pages/120402_global-analysis-finds-nearly-half-earth-still-wilderness.aspx https://www.conservation.org/NewsRoom/pressreleases/Pages/12...
- ryanmercer 8y ago
  I think they meant more along the lines of "We should take half of the 17,235,800 square kilometers of cultivated land in the world and return it to nature" Or even "We should take half of the 1,549,600 square kilometers of permanent cropland"

StanislavPetrov 8y ago

Unfortunately pointing out the obvious - that the destruction of our ecosystem is a direct result of the massive overpopulation of humans - almost always results in denials and rationalizations. Those who prefer to keep their heads in the sand about massive overpopulation wave their hands and attempt to rebut the problem with two absurd arguments. First, deniers say that people who have been warning about overpopulation for centuries have always proven wrong. This flies in the face of all the evidence, such as the article being replied to. The verdict is in, there's no disputing the damage that has been done. The insects, the birds, the fish, virtually all large mammals (and most of the smaller ones). The Second response deniers go with is that "we can solve the problem of overpopulation with new technologies". The damage is done! What's left of the environment is being destroyed right now. Talking about solving the problem of overpopulation by developing new technologies is like talking about inventing new ways to fight fires as you watch a building burn down in front of your eyes. This is obviously not to say that we should be killing people off or forcibly sterilizing people or any of the feverish rhetoric used by those who don't want to face reality. It means that if we as a society want to continue to live on the planet earth we need to start having a conversation about what sort of population the earth can sustainably support and what sort of policies we should enact to reach that massively reduced number at some time in the future (which hopefully isn't too late).

ackfoo 8y ago

The data underlying this study were taken most recently in January 2013. I wonder why it took almost six years to publish the results? Given the catastrophic nature of the findings, six years seems a long time to wait before publication. It's hard to replicate this kind of data six or seven years out. If someone repeats the survey this year and gets different numbers, it can be discounted as an anomaly. It would have been better if the study could have been repeated right away: in the same year, or in the following year. Also, the authors are overwhelmingly biased in favour of climate change as the cause. This is mainly a bug count. How hard is it to count the bugs and present the data and the analysis, leaving speculation about the cause to the discussion? I have to be very suspicious of a study that starts off implicating climate change instead of following the evidence. Especially when the conclusion is "we need more money to study this". It does not make much sense to try so hard to fit climate change to the curve of this data. If it turns out that something else is operative, such as pesticide use, or the unusual solar minimum, or the unexpectedly rapidly diminishing magnetic field, then we have missed an early indication of something huge. There is overwhelming evidence that humans are screwing up this planet, but no matter how politically correct and funding-expedient it may be to nail everything with the climate change hammer, it's not really how science is supposed to work. It's hard to lay an insect apocalypse at the door of a 2C change in temperature. Measuring the temperature of a whole planet is hard. Pons & Fleischmann had trouble measuring the temperature change in a beaker and look at the stupidity that occasioned. Lister & Garcia mostly rely upon increased variability in the weather to make the connection, but the fundamental mechanism is never explored. It's pretty hard to swallow that all the insects in a tropical rain forest died because they were a little too warm a few days out of the year. Climate change has become a religion, and, like a religion, it makes a lot of money for its practitioners. If 98% of the bugs in Luquillo are dead, then we are likely in dire trouble. If true, this finding is way too important to screw up with curve-fitting.

charliebrownau 8y ago

If the Globe is warming via ARTIFICIAL or NATURE then what can we really do as INDIVIDUALS ? Even if everyone in West (USA + UK + CA + NZ + AU ) swapped from * Grid power to solar * Rain tank water from grid water * Countries swapped from Coal to Nuclear power * Countries swapped from Petrol to 100% ethanol Would this really impact the pollution from India + China ?

rubarax 8y ago

Someday, we will realize that it's too late. There only will be regrets. Meanwhile, we just have to ignore it and complain about stupid stuff. That's humankind.

syncmaster913n 8y ago

How do we know that global warming won't ultimately lead to a better future, all things considered? Why is all the focus on what can go wrong? Serious questions, not trying to be cute.

eecc 8y ago

Watched this the other night: https://www.vpro.nl/programmas/tegenlicht/kijk/afleveringen/2018-2019/de-aarde-draait-door.html https://www.vpro.nl/programmas/tegenlicht/kijk/afleveringen/... It's from a Dutch broadcaster, but most of the program is in english. Very pertinent, disturbing and the questions it lays on the table unsettling.

TagAsDelusion 8y ago

pesticide manufacturers