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> He pointed to the rapid disappearance of insect species around the world, including those that pollinate 75% of the world's crops, as a result of climate chan

> He pointed to the rapid disappearance of insect species around the world, including those that pollinate 75% of the world's crops, as a result of climate change and other pressures. We're barely starting to understand bee colony collapse, and that's probably one of the more pressing and therefore better explored issues to date. I think it's a little unscientific to see literally every change in ecological and weather patterns blamed automatically on climate change. It's really turning into a social and institutional catch all. Insects in particular - I find it far easier to believe that the consistent global drop in insect populations has far more to do with deforestation and chemical disbursement rather than fractions of degrees of warming that we've seen so far. Weather patterns are constantly changing even in the absence of climate forcing. Defaulting to unusual event->climate change is statistically invalid in the same way as cold snap->no climate change. More evidence that the academic institution is increasingly broken and driven by dogma.

NikolaNovak 7y ago
I agree that "Climate Change" != "Environment Concern", i.e. there are many, many other environmental impacts that we make in addition, over and above specific subset of climate change. I notice that some articles summarize the study as "Climate threads now dominate", others as "Environmental risks now dominate", and in my mind the two are not at all the same (to me, Climate Change is a proper subset of Environmental Risks). The original link seems to talk about "Environmental Threats" as a summation of individual concerns such as Climate Action Failure, Biodiversity Loss, Water Crises, etc. I'm OK with that summation myself.
- baddox 7y ago
  I also agree that it's clearly possible to misattribute an environmental concern to climate change, but at the same time, it's probably reasonable to seriously investigate climate change as a cause in any significant environmental concern that does not otherwise have a clear and sufficient explanation. It feels a bit like nutrition and health. Of course there are plenty of health problems have little or nothing to do with nutrition, but if you know that you have poor nutrition it's a reasonable cause to investigate whenever you have a non-obvious health problem.
take_a_breath 7y ago
==I find it far easier to believe that the consistent global drop in insect populations has far more to do with deforestation and chemical disbursement rather than fractions of degrees of warming that we've seen so far.== They did add "large-scale biodiversity losses" as part of the climate change threat. Either way, what are your personal qualifications on the subject? It shouldn't be about what's "easiest to believe", but what the data shows us. Here's some data that just came out [1]: 2019 was the second-hottest year on record, continuing a global warming trend, researchers say. "Six of the warmest years on record occurred during the past decade" [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/15/2019-was-the-second-hottest-year-on-record.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/15/2019-was-the-second-hottest-...
- IanDrake 7y ago
  What are your personal qualifications on the subject?
  - IanDrake 7y ago
    I parrot the parent post's question and nobody likes it. If you think GW is a man made disaster, then you need no qualifications. If you don't, there aren't enough qualifications on earth for your opinion to matter.
    - take_a_breath 7y ago
      The people quoted in the article are named and have their titles presented. We are able to research their history and expertise if we desire. An anonymous poster on the internet has neither name or qualifications. When the anonymous poster posts "they find it far easier to believe" a theory counter to an article, knowing their qualifications helps level the playing field. If you had to choose between investing advice from a named financial expert or from me, an anonymous internet poster, you would be wise to either go with the named expert (who you could research their qualifications) or ask me for information on my expertise.
      - 7y ago
watertom 7y ago
Phytoplankton populations are collapsing due to increased ocean acidity and warming. Phytoplankton is the basis for the entire marine food chain.
- chadcmulligan 7y ago
  and a lot of the air we breathe
- bashinator 7y ago
  Not to mention a potentially significant amount of the free oxygen on Earth
  - agumonkey 7y ago
    And here I thought Total Recall was my favorite movie.
- ageofwant 7y ago
  > Phytoplankton populations are collapsing due to increased ocean acidity and warming. Do you have a citation for this ?
  - hootbootscoot 7y ago
    it's old news by now, matey... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/phytoplankton-population/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/phytoplankton-pop... https://edition.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/08/14/satellite.plankton/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/08/14/satellite.plan... https://news.mit.edu/2015/ocean-acidification-phytoplankton-0720 https://news.mit.edu/2015/ocean-acidification-phytoplankton-... https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/What+is+Ocean+Acidification%3F https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/What+is+Ocean+Acidificat... https://www.sciencebuzz.com/the-effects-of-ph-on-the-abundance-of-phytoplankton-for-mariculture/ https://www.sciencebuzz.com/the-effects-of-ph-on-the-abundan... Why would the onus be on a commentator to provide citations for a fact one could readily <branded search engine verb> for in less time than our roundtrip efforts combined? (me not being the commentator either, to boot!) it almost sounds like you can't believe peanut butter is sticky... I mean, I suppose "calfiferous plankton" is kinda a giveaway that ocean acidification would affect it...
3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
Confirmation bias muddies the discussion around what the changing weather patterns are actually doing immensely.
- ggggtez 7y ago
  The reason science is an improvement over previous types of thought is that it is both explanative and predictive. Denying that climate change exists at all is what muddies the conversation. All serious scientists in this field believe in climate change, and only debate about which models are most predictive and accurate.
  - fhbdukfrh 7y ago
    Isn't the real debate about the cause of climate change, and hence the best addressed aspects? I would hope all true scientists can agree on what they see but still debate there underlying phenomena and this the predictive models
    - avip 7y ago
      The scientific "debate" about the cause of climate change (not to be confused with insects population drop, which is a much more involved issue) at this point is similar in spirit to the "debate" about natural selection or the health impact of smoking. In other words, there is no debate at all. We (the human race) have known about the GHG mechanism for over 50 years. We've had the instruments to validate our understanding for well over 20 years now. There is some disagreement between projections, the models definitely don't converge to the same point in 20-100 years, but they just don't agree on the breadth and depth of the catastrophe or the timeframe we have left to take action. There is also disagreement wrt proposed solutions. Some things (like mass afforestation) are really too complex for us to predict the impact.
      - dlp211 7y ago
        We've known about GHG effect for over a century now. https://www.livescience.com/63334-coal-affecting-climate-century-ago.html https://www.livescience.com/63334-coal-affecting-climate-cen...
perfunctory 7y ago
>> He pointed to the rapid disappearance of insect species around the world > ... > More evidence that the academic institution is increasingly broken and driven by dogma. To be fair, "he" in your quote is Peter Giger, chief risk officer for the Zurich Insurance Group, not a scientist. Second, he did say "climate change and other pressures".
- colecut 7y ago
  My guess is that very few "global leaders" are scientists, so based on the headline alone I'm not sure why this survey matters.
  - avip 7y ago
    It matters if said "global leaders" happen to manage loads of cash. When Blackrock's CEO states his firm will divest away from fossil fuels in 2020, this has (sadly imo) roughly the impact of e^9 climate scientists ringing alarm bells for a decade.
    - xiphias2 7y ago
      Saying that Blackrock's getting out of coal, or that it will take a position of $1T in sustainable energy is just saying that they will invest profitably. At this point it's cheaper to build new sustainable energy plants (and sadly natural gas) than to maintain running coal plants.
      - hodder 7y ago
        “...is just saying they will invest profitably”... Couldn’t be more false. Existing coal companies can easily make money for investors when they trade at earnings yields of 25%. no new coal plants need to be built. Coal can even be phased out. If you get 6-7 more years of earnings at a flattish 25% earnings yield you can do very well. This is why deep value investing works on average.
        7y ago
samename 7y ago
> the consistent global drop in insect populations has far more to do with deforestation and chemical disbursement That is climate change as a result of human behavior, is it not?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- susijdjdjxa 7y ago
  Sure you could choose to define the terms that way, but I think it would cause confusion given the wide understanding that climate change refers specifically to the phenomenon formerly known as global warming.
- djsumdog 7y ago
  Pesticides and climate change? Not really. Not shipping bees across the country to pollinate crops and reducing the use of round-up are things that can be done to deal with that right now. Colony collapse is a big problem, but I don't think you can blame it on climate change. Insects are super adaptable, and it's much more likely an overuse in pesticides and other pollutants. If you stop using them and stop trucking bees across the nation, you reduce CO2 incidentally, but that shouldn't be the main focus at all. I feel like climate change turns into "When all you have is a hammer, all you see are nails." There is a shit ton of plastic particulates in the ocean. That's not due to climate change. There are lakes of sludge in factory cities all over China. That's not due to climate change. Both of those are due to pure consumption; shipping and waste. If you reduce other real forms of pollution, by consuming less, you incidentally reduce CO2. You focus on CO2 and the world is still going to rip itself apart as we replace CO2 for other pollution.
  - samename 7y ago
    That’s fair; I concede climate change is more about whether patterns. I was trying to extend the concept to all environment-related concerns caused by human activity.
    - 7y ago
7952 7y ago
Look at the recent fires in Australia. Can you directly attribute the cause to climate change? Probably not. Should the government be held morally reprehensible based on their support for coal power? Yes, absolutely. They do not deserve the benefit of the doubt. Politics has a lower threshold of proof than science.
- nl 7y ago
  Can you directly attribute the cause to climate change? Probably not. This is actually a much easier argument to make than the political argument. Even the Prime Minister "has always made the connection between climate change and extreme weather conditions"[1] Obviously they haven't always made that connection, but it is indicative that the PM's argument is now "yes it's climate change but we shouldn't do anything about it". The argument is easier because in Australia it's pretty obvious that the last few summers have been hotter and dryer than usual (except in Queensland), and the record is clear that pattern has been happening for some years. Hotter and drier weather leads to bush that is drier and more flammable, and no one has even attempted to argue otherwise. The politics are harder in Australia because of the combination of the powerful coal lobby and a large part of the press trying to portray climate change as "a leftist conspiracy". This combination has led to the election loss of the Labor party in 2013, and Malcolm Turnbull losing the Prime Ministership in 2018. [1] https://twitter.com/albericie/status/1213624003992141825 https://twitter.com/albericie/status/1213624003992141825
  - nl 7y ago
    Are the downvotes because people don't think the PM has acknowledged it or because they think the "it's happening" argument is still going on?
zahma 7y ago
> I find it far easier to believe that the consistent global drop in insect populations has far more to do with deforestation and chemical disbursement rather than fractions of degrees of warming that we've seen so far. It’s not that easy. The intersection of climate and other environmental issues creates a kind of feedback loop.
yongjik 7y ago
> Defaulting to unusual event->climate change is statistically invalid in the same way as cold snap->no climate change. That's technically true, but irrelevant. We already have mountains of evidence for man-made climate change, we don't really need more. Of course, whether a particular event is linked to climate change is a different question, but even when it's invalid, it's not invalid in the same way as "cold snap->no climate change". The latter is already disproved by mountains of evidence; the former isn't.
- est31 7y ago
  > > Defaulting to unusual event->climate change is statistically invalid in the same way as cold snap->no climate change. > That's technically true, but irrelevant. I think it's very relevant. If you keep blaming all catastrophies on climate change by default, then as other causes are found one by one, you are discrediting the good name of climate change. This may lead normal non scientist people to become more sceptical of the concept of climate change. Furthermore, it causes scientists to be scared to point out those alternative reasons. In the worst case, this puts people who fight against climate change into the situation that they have to defend things they know are wrong in order to not tarnish their name. Climate change is a major problem and the more we fight it at this early point, the lower the toll it takes. Just don't blame everything on it. Otherwise in the long term, you are playing into the hands of the deniers.
  - anigbrowl 7y ago
    I wish people put as much energy into shutting down eco-deniers as they do policing other eco-advocates.
    - est31 7y ago
      > I wish people put as much energy into shutting down eco-deniers as they do policing other eco-advocates. Everyone is an eco advocate today. If you check out the bp home page you find pictures of solar deployments on green meadows. If you check out shell's website you see a statement by the CEO how climate activists "give me hope". Should bp and shell be policed? Absolutely. As for the "traditional" eco advocates, many of them are often the first to protest when you want to build a dam or a wind turbine, explaining how precious the nature is that you are destroying. This is actively harmful to the goal of stopping climate change. The more protests, the more requirements that the activists push through, the larger the cost of the project, and the longer it takes. Increased prices of the renewable energy you are providing ultimately slows down the expansion of renewable energy generation due to market effects as well as population. The risk of climate change is far greater than the risks of fairly small ecosystem disruption to fight it. Many eco advocates don't want to realize this and believe that everyone should live like a monk and go vegan or something. They are completely removed from reality. In itself, it's good for the climate to have more vegan people, but when those advocates protest construction projects to provide green energy for the people who do not want to live like monks, they should step aside instead of standing in the way.
ajross 7y ago
> Defaulting to unusual event->climate change [is] evidence that the academic institution is increasingly broken and driven by dogma. That quote was from "Peter Giger, chief risk officer for the Zurich Insurance Group", not part of the "academic institution" in any way I can see. It's also pretty cherry picked, as there is a ton of other evidence presented in that short article that you're choosing to ignore while you pick on bees. So... tell me, what is your threshold for action? If bees, wild fires, worsening storms/floods/droughts, CO2 charts, temperature measurements, sea ice levels, etc.. don't meet your criteria for proof because they aren't certain enough, what possibly could be? Broadly: how certain are you that your opinions are really well considered and not driven by "dogma"?
gravelc 7y ago
> I find it far easier to believe that the consistent global drop in insect populations has far more to do with deforestation and chemical disbursement rather than fractions of degrees of warming that we've seen so far. You might find it easier to believe, but that doesn't make it so. Ecosystems are interconnected. A degree of warming might not do much to a loan insect in a cage, but a degree can contribute a lot to the spread and range of bacterial and fungal pathogens of insects. It can change how plants behave (they can't get up and move, so have to respond physiologically to survive in the same location), and that change impacts insects. Competitors for the same resources may respond better to temperature rise or other climate related changes. Climate change also changes farmers' behaviour - more pests due to warmer conditions can mean more sprays, which have unintended consequences.
- ouid 7y ago
  we've seen about 1.5 degrees fahrenheit of warming so far.
  - tunesmith 7y ago
    Is that true? I thought we were still below a degree, but had just reached the point where 1.5 was inevitable later due to delayed effects. That was depressing when I figured out that even if the world became carbon-neutral tomorrow we'd still be getting warmer for a while.
    - cstejerean 7y ago
      We are below 1 degree Celsius. 1.5F is about 0.9C.
  - jdnenej 7y ago
    It seems that people seriously struggle to understand how significant a single degree change in average temperature is.
    - FooHentai 7y ago
soperj 7y ago
I think this is a major thing that people don't realize is a massive danger. People here point to disappearing fish stocks and massive forest fires, and say it's climate change when Fish farms and over fishing, and forest management have been massive contributors to the issues. You take a solve-able by a local government and make it an issue that really isn't.
- XorNot 7y ago
  Australia's bushfires are definitely climate change related, the only argument anyone can have is whether it's human-caused. But the climatic trend for the last 2 decades has consistently topping daytime temperature records, and it's been drier and hotter earlier in the bushfire season year over year (a fact which our rural fire service was warning our federal government about in July right when they were both ignored and had their funding cut). We are having problems because of a climate trend, and the reaction of skeptics in power has been to cut funding to the groups who can do forest management to deal with the year over year reality we now face.
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    It would be evidence of climate change if Australia was no longer getting hit with droughts that induce wildfire conditions. We've got records of those going back to colonial times and fossil evidence going back thousands of years. Minor increases in temperature do not cause wildfire conditions. Drought, wind, fuel, and a catalyst (like an arsonist or clumsy person or lightning) are all you need for fires. Until we start controlling the rain and playing God in the sky, I doubt we're going to be able to prevent Australia from developing dry conditions from time to time.
  - soperj 7y ago
    Definitely. Definitely. And what about the other bushfires they've had that were over twice as large as the ones they are currently having? Like the 74-75 bushfires that were 6 times as big as the current ones? Or the ones in 69-70 that were twice as big? or 68-69 (also twice as big)? You're talking about one of the most fire prone places in the world that has had massive bushfires documented since 1851. edit: @mrpopo, can't reply to you. But it looks like the largest set of bush fires ever recorded in Australia (290 million hectares) occured in a year where the temperature was below average for pretty well the entire country. Far below in some parts of the country.
agumonkey 7y ago
I believe we're entering a nasty turbulence zone where too many indicators and reference points are off and now everybody will start shouting whatever conclusion they believe in. Either you're too confident and won't listen or too anxious and overreact. Well the point is, truth lies in somewhere in the middle as usual.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  The doomers will get all the attention though. It’ll skew because the media makes money on gloom and doom, not the truth.
vincent-toups 7y ago
Its great rhetoric, though. And it will take rhetoric to solve the climate change problem.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  > it will take rhetoric to solve the climate change problem. Can’t that backfire? Shouldn’t the cause be built on truth and science not narrative ends over means?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
mempko 7y ago
How would you explain the insect collapse found in the Puertorican rain forest which is protected and doesn't have deforestation or or other human activity. That research concluded it must be climate since the number of extremely hot days grew a lot there.
joe_the_user 7y ago
I think it's a little unscientific to see literally every change in ecological and weather patterns blamed automatically on climate change. Climate change itself is well-established scientifically. It is indeed hard to determine exactly which changes in the earth's ecology are a direct product of climate change. But it is important avoid a jump from this to "well, not such an emergency after all". This is because a wide of ecological and local climate conditions are driven by temperature.
- Brakenshire 7y ago
  Indeed, the first part of his post was reasonable, it is true that other factors are extremely important or perhaps dominant in some of these cases, loss of habitat and insecticide use for the loss of insects, and for wildfires, suburban settlement into forests leading to suppression of regular burning and a consequent build-up on the fuel load. But then he takes a totally unjustified leap into using a quote from an insurance executive to draw sweeping conclusions about academic institutions and climate science in general. Very strange.
- CalRobert 7y ago
  I mean, not _every_ one of Barry Bonds' home runs were due to steroids, either. Doesn't mean steroids didn't matter.
bamboozled 7y ago
It's as easy as working on solutions to the climate crisis and removing it as a factor of concern then. Yes there may be other causes to environmental issues and it would be wise of us to begin to reduce Co2 in the atmosphere so it no longer needs to be a factor in these kind of discussions.
mortdeus 7y ago
Paul Staments is actually doing something about this. https://fungi.com/pages/bees https://fungi.com/pages/bees The biggest problem I see when it comes to global warming (and countless other issues) is that there is no one place everybody knows to go to see the list of all the actual promising solutions to these kind of doomsday problems that need our support and financing. I mean it seems like the biggest agenda right now when it comes to global warming activists is to just get everybody to accept there is a problem and/or exploit the fact that there is a problem to try and gain leverage and control over politics when it hasn't been proven that the public sector is more capable to address this kind of issue than the private sector is. What I mean to say is how exactly does a carbon tax at the gas pump decentivize us from using gas pumps in the first place, when everything in history suggests that where there is a profit stream there is a benefactor willing to protect it no matter what? In other words, doesn't a carbon tax make the more liberal leaning political parties more dependent on fossil fuels if the taxes produced pay for other unrelated endeavors (e.g. medicare for all, canceling student debt)? I don't mean to make this about politics because I respect the collected intelligence here enough to know that we can all agree we are the people who actually understand there is an actual tangible problem here, considering we're the lucky few who can actually do the rather straightforward math (co2 has a heavier molecular weight than everything else in the atmosphere therefore it knocks lighter molecules up and away and produces more temperature when the heavier molecules collide with each other more often due to there be more molecules present, i mean this is basic chemistry/physics 101), and know the consequences if we don't do something about it soon.... All I am saying is why aren't we personally doing more to try and solve this issue like it was any other issue? I mean either we can figure out the solution, or literally the only alternative is we kill all the livestock, tear down all the structures made out of wood (that houses farting termites), and go back to horse back riding. (because as of right now there is nothing to indicate that Tesla can scale to our traveling/energy needs) Realistically, we need to build a site that is heavily curated so it doesn't get heavily polluted with all the hack scholar noise and lobbyist confusion bullshit, and focus on this problem like the bug it is. The fact that the ocean cleanup and paul stamets bee solution are both literally something I only luckily managed to stumbled upon because Joe Rogan is for whatever reason the "Bro" form that Christ chose to return this time as, shows that frankly were not doing our jobs. Literally a comedian is doing a better job at solving these kind of problems than we are right now. Politicians aren't going to do a better job than us figuring out how to solve this issue so we really need to stop depending on them (they aren't smart enough, and none of us are willing to take on the burden of having to kill people in order to ensure a smarter class of politician is elected into office) If we can do folding@home to simulate protein folding, we can do the same thing to figure out how to fix our carbon output problem. Just saying. I want a website where I can go to figure out whats going on with paul stamets endeavor, whats going on with that thing Bill Gates was talking about where we use depleted nuclear fuel to make a new kind of reactor, whats going on with the ocean clean up, whats going on with the building sized CO2 suction thing in China, what is going on with fusion, what is going on with solar panel and electric car tech, etc etc. One site, for everybody... Were not going to be able to make every American care about this issue. They just aren't smart enough to grok it. And that means Government can't help us because they are bound to serving the will of the dumb idiot people who will never get on board with the reality that we all need to be go back to horses and vegan diets (therefore no politician will ever be able to push such hardcore measures, its a dead end.) Which that fact alone also suggest we need an engineering solution. If the solution is that we need to build a million building sized vacuums and a space elevator or pipe made out of carbon nano tubes, then that sounds like something we need to start doing NOW because that will probably take 30 years to build and every single tech corporation to take the first step and say "hell yes im going to put a billion dollars down on this idea". All it will take is us coming up with an actual real solution and convincing every tech giant to drop a meager billion dollars on the crazy initiative, and then all of a sudden the rest of the world will be like "drkkkk wut r dey doin ober der O.O"???? And then they will be like oh shit this is an actual solution that doesn't require us to stop using fossil fuels. (though we probably should stop using them for the health reasons though hell crisp-r might solve that problem too?!) Im just saying, we need to figure out either how to get the CO2 into space, into our oceans, or economically split back into C and O2.
bryanrasmussen 7y ago
ok but lots of unusual events is statistically valid given that climate change theories predicts lots of unusual events.
socialdemocrat 7y ago
Agree that they are likely not related, but I think it fits in with the overall message that we seriously not to take our natural environment serious. My understanding is that this is caused primarily by large scale industrial farming. A lot of diverse is destroyed as one creates monocultures and cut down trees, bushes, flowers and other things getting in the way of maximum utilization of a monoculture. It is our extreme profit driven approach to everything. I think we need a combination of a tech oriented solution and a "back to nature" style approach. More of our farm land should probably be grown in the more labour intensive manner with crop rotation and diverse crops which are more favorable to insects. Meanwhile to keep output high I think we should do more indoor hydroponics style growing. That takes less land area and so we can afford to leave larger areas producing food in a less intensive manner.

NikolaNovak 7y ago

I agree that "Climate Change" != "Environment Concern", i.e. there are many, many other environmental impacts that we make in addition, over and above specific subset of climate change. I notice that some articles summarize the study as "Climate threads now dominate", others as "Environmental risks now dominate", and in my mind the two are not at all the same (to me, Climate Change is a proper subset of Environmental Risks). The original link seems to talk about "Environmental Threats" as a summation of individual concerns such as Climate Action Failure, Biodiversity Loss, Water Crises, etc. I'm OK with that summation myself.

baddox 7y ago
I also agree that it's clearly possible to misattribute an environmental concern to climate change, but at the same time, it's probably reasonable to seriously investigate climate change as a cause in any significant environmental concern that does not otherwise have a clear and sufficient explanation. It feels a bit like nutrition and health. Of course there are plenty of health problems have little or nothing to do with nutrition, but if you know that you have poor nutrition it's a reasonable cause to investigate whenever you have a non-obvious health problem.

take_a_breath 7y ago

==I find it far easier to believe that the consistent global drop in insect populations has far more to do with deforestation and chemical disbursement rather than fractions of degrees of warming that we've seen so far.== They did add "large-scale biodiversity losses" as part of the climate change threat. Either way, what are your personal qualifications on the subject? It shouldn't be about what's "easiest to believe", but what the data shows us. Here's some data that just came out [1]: 2019 was the second-hottest year on record, continuing a global warming trend, researchers say. "Six of the warmest years on record occurred during the past decade" [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/15/2019-was-the-second-hottest-year-on-record.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/15/2019-was-the-second-hottest-...

IanDrake 7y ago
What are your personal qualifications on the subject?
- IanDrake 7y ago
  I parrot the parent post's question and nobody likes it. If you think GW is a man made disaster, then you need no qualifications. If you don't, there aren't enough qualifications on earth for your opinion to matter.
  - take_a_breath 7y ago
    The people quoted in the article are named and have their titles presented. We are able to research their history and expertise if we desire. An anonymous poster on the internet has neither name or qualifications. When the anonymous poster posts "they find it far easier to believe" a theory counter to an article, knowing their qualifications helps level the playing field. If you had to choose between investing advice from a named financial expert or from me, an anonymous internet poster, you would be wise to either go with the named expert (who you could research their qualifications) or ask me for information on my expertise.
    - 7y ago

watertom 7y ago

Phytoplankton populations are collapsing due to increased ocean acidity and warming. Phytoplankton is the basis for the entire marine food chain.

chadcmulligan 7y ago
and a lot of the air we breathe
bashinator 7y ago
Not to mention a potentially significant amount of the free oxygen on Earth
- agumonkey 7y ago
  And here I thought Total Recall was my favorite movie.
ageofwant 7y ago
> Phytoplankton populations are collapsing due to increased ocean acidity and warming. Do you have a citation for this ?
- hootbootscoot 7y ago
  it's old news by now, matey... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/phytoplankton-population/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/phytoplankton-pop... https://edition.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/08/14/satellite.plankton/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/08/14/satellite.plan... https://news.mit.edu/2015/ocean-acidification-phytoplankton-0720 https://news.mit.edu/2015/ocean-acidification-phytoplankton-... https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/What+is+Ocean+Acidification%3F https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/What+is+Ocean+Acidificat... https://www.sciencebuzz.com/the-effects-of-ph-on-the-abundance-of-phytoplankton-for-mariculture/ https://www.sciencebuzz.com/the-effects-of-ph-on-the-abundan... Why would the onus be on a commentator to provide citations for a fact one could readily <branded search engine verb> for in less time than our roundtrip efforts combined? (me not being the commentator either, to boot!) it almost sounds like you can't believe peanut butter is sticky... I mean, I suppose "calfiferous plankton" is kinda a giveaway that ocean acidification would affect it...

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago

Confirmation bias muddies the discussion around what the changing weather patterns are actually doing immensely.

ggggtez 7y ago
The reason science is an improvement over previous types of thought is that it is both explanative and predictive. Denying that climate change exists at all is what muddies the conversation. All serious scientists in this field believe in climate change, and only debate about which models are most predictive and accurate.
- fhbdukfrh 7y ago
  Isn't the real debate about the cause of climate change, and hence the best addressed aspects? I would hope all true scientists can agree on what they see but still debate there underlying phenomena and this the predictive models
  - avip 7y ago
    The scientific "debate" about the cause of climate change (not to be confused with insects population drop, which is a much more involved issue) at this point is similar in spirit to the "debate" about natural selection or the health impact of smoking. In other words, there is no debate at all. We (the human race) have known about the GHG mechanism for over 50 years. We've had the instruments to validate our understanding for well over 20 years now. There is some disagreement between projections, the models definitely don't converge to the same point in 20-100 years, but they just don't agree on the breadth and depth of the catastrophe or the timeframe we have left to take action. There is also disagreement wrt proposed solutions. Some things (like mass afforestation) are really too complex for us to predict the impact.
    - dlp211 7y ago
      We've known about GHG effect for over a century now. https://www.livescience.com/63334-coal-affecting-climate-century-ago.html https://www.livescience.com/63334-coal-affecting-climate-cen...

perfunctory 7y ago

>> He pointed to the rapid disappearance of insect species around the world > ... > More evidence that the academic institution is increasingly broken and driven by dogma. To be fair, "he" in your quote is Peter Giger, chief risk officer for the Zurich Insurance Group, not a scientist. Second, he did say "climate change and other pressures".

colecut 7y ago
My guess is that very few "global leaders" are scientists, so based on the headline alone I'm not sure why this survey matters.
- avip 7y ago
  It matters if said "global leaders" happen to manage loads of cash. When Blackrock's CEO states his firm will divest away from fossil fuels in 2020, this has (sadly imo) roughly the impact of e^9 climate scientists ringing alarm bells for a decade.
  - xiphias2 7y ago
    Saying that Blackrock's getting out of coal, or that it will take a position of $1T in sustainable energy is just saying that they will invest profitably. At this point it's cheaper to build new sustainable energy plants (and sadly natural gas) than to maintain running coal plants.
    - hodder 7y ago
      “...is just saying they will invest profitably”... Couldn’t be more false. Existing coal companies can easily make money for investors when they trade at earnings yields of 25%. no new coal plants need to be built. Coal can even be phased out. If you get 6-7 more years of earnings at a flattish 25% earnings yield you can do very well. This is why deep value investing works on average.
      - 7y ago

samename 7y ago

> the consistent global drop in insect populations has far more to do with deforestation and chemical disbursement That is climate change as a result of human behavior, is it not?

deleted 7y ago
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susijdjdjxa 7y ago
Sure you could choose to define the terms that way, but I think it would cause confusion given the wide understanding that climate change refers specifically to the phenomenon formerly known as global warming.
djsumdog 7y ago
Pesticides and climate change? Not really. Not shipping bees across the country to pollinate crops and reducing the use of round-up are things that can be done to deal with that right now. Colony collapse is a big problem, but I don't think you can blame it on climate change. Insects are super adaptable, and it's much more likely an overuse in pesticides and other pollutants. If you stop using them and stop trucking bees across the nation, you reduce CO2 incidentally, but that shouldn't be the main focus at all. I feel like climate change turns into "When all you have is a hammer, all you see are nails." There is a shit ton of plastic particulates in the ocean. That's not due to climate change. There are lakes of sludge in factory cities all over China. That's not due to climate change. Both of those are due to pure consumption; shipping and waste. If you reduce other real forms of pollution, by consuming less, you incidentally reduce CO2. You focus on CO2 and the world is still going to rip itself apart as we replace CO2 for other pollution.
- samename 7y ago
  That’s fair; I concede climate change is more about whether patterns. I was trying to extend the concept to all environment-related concerns caused by human activity.
  - 7y ago

7952 7y ago

Look at the recent fires in Australia. Can you directly attribute the cause to climate change? Probably not. Should the government be held morally reprehensible based on their support for coal power? Yes, absolutely. They do not deserve the benefit of the doubt. Politics has a lower threshold of proof than science.

nl 7y ago
Can you directly attribute the cause to climate change? Probably not. This is actually a much easier argument to make than the political argument. Even the Prime Minister "has always made the connection between climate change and extreme weather conditions"[1] Obviously they haven't always made that connection, but it is indicative that the PM's argument is now "yes it's climate change but we shouldn't do anything about it". The argument is easier because in Australia it's pretty obvious that the last few summers have been hotter and dryer than usual (except in Queensland), and the record is clear that pattern has been happening for some years. Hotter and drier weather leads to bush that is drier and more flammable, and no one has even attempted to argue otherwise. The politics are harder in Australia because of the combination of the powerful coal lobby and a large part of the press trying to portray climate change as "a leftist conspiracy". This combination has led to the election loss of the Labor party in 2013, and Malcolm Turnbull losing the Prime Ministership in 2018. [1] https://twitter.com/albericie/status/1213624003992141825 https://twitter.com/albericie/status/1213624003992141825
- nl 7y ago
  Are the downvotes because people don't think the PM has acknowledged it or because they think the "it's happening" argument is still going on?

zahma 7y ago

> I find it far easier to believe that the consistent global drop in insect populations has far more to do with deforestation and chemical disbursement rather than fractions of degrees of warming that we've seen so far. It’s not that easy. The intersection of climate and other environmental issues creates a kind of feedback loop.

yongjik 7y ago

> Defaulting to unusual event->climate change is statistically invalid in the same way as cold snap->no climate change. That's technically true, but irrelevant. We already have mountains of evidence for man-made climate change, we don't really need more. Of course, whether a particular event is linked to climate change is a different question, but even when it's invalid, it's not invalid in the same way as "cold snap->no climate change". The latter is already disproved by mountains of evidence; the former isn't.

est31 7y ago
> > Defaulting to unusual event->climate change is statistically invalid in the same way as cold snap->no climate change. > That's technically true, but irrelevant. I think it's very relevant. If you keep blaming all catastrophies on climate change by default, then as other causes are found one by one, you are discrediting the good name of climate change. This may lead normal non scientist people to become more sceptical of the concept of climate change. Furthermore, it causes scientists to be scared to point out those alternative reasons. In the worst case, this puts people who fight against climate change into the situation that they have to defend things they know are wrong in order to not tarnish their name. Climate change is a major problem and the more we fight it at this early point, the lower the toll it takes. Just don't blame everything on it. Otherwise in the long term, you are playing into the hands of the deniers.
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  I wish people put as much energy into shutting down eco-deniers as they do policing other eco-advocates.
  - est31 7y ago
    > I wish people put as much energy into shutting down eco-deniers as they do policing other eco-advocates. Everyone is an eco advocate today. If you check out the bp home page you find pictures of solar deployments on green meadows. If you check out shell's website you see a statement by the CEO how climate activists "give me hope". Should bp and shell be policed? Absolutely. As for the "traditional" eco advocates, many of them are often the first to protest when you want to build a dam or a wind turbine, explaining how precious the nature is that you are destroying. This is actively harmful to the goal of stopping climate change. The more protests, the more requirements that the activists push through, the larger the cost of the project, and the longer it takes. Increased prices of the renewable energy you are providing ultimately slows down the expansion of renewable energy generation due to market effects as well as population. The risk of climate change is far greater than the risks of fairly small ecosystem disruption to fight it. Many eco advocates don't want to realize this and believe that everyone should live like a monk and go vegan or something. They are completely removed from reality. In itself, it's good for the climate to have more vegan people, but when those advocates protest construction projects to provide green energy for the people who do not want to live like monks, they should step aside instead of standing in the way.

ajross 7y ago

> Defaulting to unusual event->climate change [is] evidence that the academic institution is increasingly broken and driven by dogma. That quote was from "Peter Giger, chief risk officer for the Zurich Insurance Group", not part of the "academic institution" in any way I can see. It's also pretty cherry picked, as there is a ton of other evidence presented in that short article that you're choosing to ignore while you pick on bees. So... tell me, what is your threshold for action? If bees, wild fires, worsening storms/floods/droughts, CO2 charts, temperature measurements, sea ice levels, etc.. don't meet your criteria for proof because they aren't certain enough, what possibly could be? Broadly: how certain are you that your opinions are really well considered and not driven by "dogma"?

gravelc 7y ago

> I find it far easier to believe that the consistent global drop in insect populations has far more to do with deforestation and chemical disbursement rather than fractions of degrees of warming that we've seen so far. You might find it easier to believe, but that doesn't make it so. Ecosystems are interconnected. A degree of warming might not do much to a loan insect in a cage, but a degree can contribute a lot to the spread and range of bacterial and fungal pathogens of insects. It can change how plants behave (they can't get up and move, so have to respond physiologically to survive in the same location), and that change impacts insects. Competitors for the same resources may respond better to temperature rise or other climate related changes. Climate change also changes farmers' behaviour - more pests due to warmer conditions can mean more sprays, which have unintended consequences.

ouid 7y ago
we've seen about 1.5 degrees fahrenheit of warming so far.
- tunesmith 7y ago
  Is that true? I thought we were still below a degree, but had just reached the point where 1.5 was inevitable later due to delayed effects. That was depressing when I figured out that even if the world became carbon-neutral tomorrow we'd still be getting warmer for a while.
  - cstejerean 7y ago
    We are below 1 degree Celsius. 1.5F is about 0.9C.
- jdnenej 7y ago
  It seems that people seriously struggle to understand how significant a single degree change in average temperature is.
  - FooHentai 7y ago

soperj 7y ago

I think this is a major thing that people don't realize is a massive danger. People here point to disappearing fish stocks and massive forest fires, and say it's climate change when Fish farms and over fishing, and forest management have been massive contributors to the issues. You take a solve-able by a local government and make it an issue that really isn't.

XorNot 7y ago
Australia's bushfires are definitely climate change related, the only argument anyone can have is whether it's human-caused. But the climatic trend for the last 2 decades has consistently topping daytime temperature records, and it's been drier and hotter earlier in the bushfire season year over year (a fact which our rural fire service was warning our federal government about in July right when they were both ignored and had their funding cut). We are having problems because of a climate trend, and the reaction of skeptics in power has been to cut funding to the groups who can do forest management to deal with the year over year reality we now face.
- chrisco255 7y ago
  It would be evidence of climate change if Australia was no longer getting hit with droughts that induce wildfire conditions. We've got records of those going back to colonial times and fossil evidence going back thousands of years. Minor increases in temperature do not cause wildfire conditions. Drought, wind, fuel, and a catalyst (like an arsonist or clumsy person or lightning) are all you need for fires. Until we start controlling the rain and playing God in the sky, I doubt we're going to be able to prevent Australia from developing dry conditions from time to time.
- soperj 7y ago
  Definitely. Definitely. And what about the other bushfires they've had that were over twice as large as the ones they are currently having? Like the 74-75 bushfires that were 6 times as big as the current ones? Or the ones in 69-70 that were twice as big? or 68-69 (also twice as big)? You're talking about one of the most fire prone places in the world that has had massive bushfires documented since 1851. edit: @mrpopo, can't reply to you. But it looks like the largest set of bush fires ever recorded in Australia (290 million hectares) occured in a year where the temperature was below average for pretty well the entire country. Far below in some parts of the country.

agumonkey 7y ago

I believe we're entering a nasty turbulence zone where too many indicators and reference points are off and now everybody will start shouting whatever conclusion they believe in. Either you're too confident and won't listen or too anxious and overreact. Well the point is, truth lies in somewhere in the middle as usual.

SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
The doomers will get all the attention though. It’ll skew because the media makes money on gloom and doom, not the truth.

vincent-toups 7y ago

Its great rhetoric, though. And it will take rhetoric to solve the climate change problem.

SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
> it will take rhetoric to solve the climate change problem. Can’t that backfire? Shouldn’t the cause be built on truth and science not narrative ends over means?
- deleted 7y ago
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mempko 7y ago

How would you explain the insect collapse found in the Puertorican rain forest which is protected and doesn't have deforestation or or other human activity. That research concluded it must be climate since the number of extremely hot days grew a lot there.

joe_the_user 7y ago

I think it's a little unscientific to see literally every change in ecological and weather patterns blamed automatically on climate change. Climate change itself is well-established scientifically. It is indeed hard to determine exactly which changes in the earth's ecology are a direct product of climate change. But it is important avoid a jump from this to "well, not such an emergency after all". This is because a wide of ecological and local climate conditions are driven by temperature.

Brakenshire 7y ago
Indeed, the first part of his post was reasonable, it is true that other factors are extremely important or perhaps dominant in some of these cases, loss of habitat and insecticide use for the loss of insects, and for wildfires, suburban settlement into forests leading to suppression of regular burning and a consequent build-up on the fuel load. But then he takes a totally unjustified leap into using a quote from an insurance executive to draw sweeping conclusions about academic institutions and climate science in general. Very strange.
CalRobert 7y ago
I mean, not _every_ one of Barry Bonds' home runs were due to steroids, either. Doesn't mean steroids didn't matter.

bamboozled 7y ago

It's as easy as working on solutions to the climate crisis and removing it as a factor of concern then. Yes there may be other causes to environmental issues and it would be wise of us to begin to reduce Co2 in the atmosphere so it no longer needs to be a factor in these kind of discussions.

mortdeus 7y ago

Paul Staments is actually doing something about this. https://fungi.com/pages/bees https://fungi.com/pages/bees The biggest problem I see when it comes to global warming (and countless other issues) is that there is no one place everybody knows to go to see the list of all the actual promising solutions to these kind of doomsday problems that need our support and financing. I mean it seems like the biggest agenda right now when it comes to global warming activists is to just get everybody to accept there is a problem and/or exploit the fact that there is a problem to try and gain leverage and control over politics when it hasn't been proven that the public sector is more capable to address this kind of issue than the private sector is. What I mean to say is how exactly does a carbon tax at the gas pump decentivize us from using gas pumps in the first place, when everything in history suggests that where there is a profit stream there is a benefactor willing to protect it no matter what? In other words, doesn't a carbon tax make the more liberal leaning political parties more dependent on fossil fuels if the taxes produced pay for other unrelated endeavors (e.g. medicare for all, canceling student debt)? I don't mean to make this about politics because I respect the collected intelligence here enough to know that we can all agree we are the people who actually understand there is an actual tangible problem here, considering we're the lucky few who can actually do the rather straightforward math (co2 has a heavier molecular weight than everything else in the atmosphere therefore it knocks lighter molecules up and away and produces more temperature when the heavier molecules collide with each other more often due to there be more molecules present, i mean this is basic chemistry/physics 101), and know the consequences if we don't do something about it soon.... All I am saying is why aren't we personally doing more to try and solve this issue like it was any other issue? I mean either we can figure out the solution, or literally the only alternative is we kill all the livestock, tear down all the structures made out of wood (that houses farting termites), and go back to horse back riding. (because as of right now there is nothing to indicate that Tesla can scale to our traveling/energy needs) Realistically, we need to build a site that is heavily curated so it doesn't get heavily polluted with all the hack scholar noise and lobbyist confusion bullshit, and focus on this problem like the bug it is. The fact that the ocean cleanup and paul stamets bee solution are both literally something I only luckily managed to stumbled upon because Joe Rogan is for whatever reason the "Bro" form that Christ chose to return this time as, shows that frankly were not doing our jobs. Literally a comedian is doing a better job at solving these kind of problems than we are right now. Politicians aren't going to do a better job than us figuring out how to solve this issue so we really need to stop depending on them (they aren't smart enough, and none of us are willing to take on the burden of having to kill people in order to ensure a smarter class of politician is elected into office) If we can do folding@home to simulate protein folding, we can do the same thing to figure out how to fix our carbon output problem. Just saying. I want a website where I can go to figure out whats going on with paul stamets endeavor, whats going on with that thing Bill Gates was talking about where we use depleted nuclear fuel to make a new kind of reactor, whats going on with the ocean clean up, whats going on with the building sized CO2 suction thing in China, what is going on with fusion, what is going on with solar panel and electric car tech, etc etc. One site, for everybody... Were not going to be able to make every American care about this issue. They just aren't smart enough to grok it. And that means Government can't help us because they are bound to serving the will of the dumb idiot people who will never get on board with the reality that we all need to be go back to horses and vegan diets (therefore no politician will ever be able to push such hardcore measures, its a dead end.) Which that fact alone also suggest we need an engineering solution. If the solution is that we need to build a million building sized vacuums and a space elevator or pipe made out of carbon nano tubes, then that sounds like something we need to start doing NOW because that will probably take 30 years to build and every single tech corporation to take the first step and say "hell yes im going to put a billion dollars down on this idea". All it will take is us coming up with an actual real solution and convincing every tech giant to drop a meager billion dollars on the crazy initiative, and then all of a sudden the rest of the world will be like "drkkkk wut r dey doin ober der O.O"???? And then they will be like oh shit this is an actual solution that doesn't require us to stop using fossil fuels. (though we probably should stop using them for the health reasons though hell crisp-r might solve that problem too?!) Im just saying, we need to figure out either how to get the CO2 into space, into our oceans, or economically split back into C and O2.

bryanrasmussen 7y ago

ok but lots of unusual events is statistically valid given that climate change theories predicts lots of unusual events.

socialdemocrat 7y ago

Agree that they are likely not related, but I think it fits in with the overall message that we seriously not to take our natural environment serious. My understanding is that this is caused primarily by large scale industrial farming. A lot of diverse is destroyed as one creates monocultures and cut down trees, bushes, flowers and other things getting in the way of maximum utilization of a monoculture. It is our extreme profit driven approach to everything. I think we need a combination of a tech oriented solution and a "back to nature" style approach. More of our farm land should probably be grown in the more labour intensive manner with crop rotation and diverse crops which are more favorable to insects. Meanwhile to keep output high I think we should do more indoor hydroponics style growing. That takes less land area and so we can afford to leave larger areas producing food in a less intensive manner.