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Scientists find there are 70% fewer pollinators, due to air pollution
- Victerius 5y agoThe average person doesn't care because there aren't food shortages yet. The current inflation of food prices is driven by snarls in the supply chain rather than a lack of pollinators.
- cobookman 5y agoWould we even have food shortages if all pollinators died out? Couldn't we automate artificial pollination? Such machines already exist: https://www.fastcompany.com/90463417/in-our-dystopian-future-farmers-will-use-these-artificial-pollination-machines-to-replace-bees https://www.fastcompany.com/90463417/in-our-dystopian-future...
- omosubi 5y agoLet's not run that experiment
- prawn 5y agoI toured a very advanced tomato-growing facility last year where people roamed the rows with battery-powered blowers to aid in pollination. Pest-control was in-part handled by strategically released wasps. The entire facility was powered/heated/cooled by a heliostatic field. At a smaller scale, my parents were pollinating the tomatoes in their car-sized home greenhouse using an electric toothbrush!
- pvaldes 5y agoYou can automate artificial pollination, Japanese do it routinely. Is just that then you need to pay Japanese prices for your pears.
- yeetaccount4 5y ago
- JetAlone 5y agoDrink your corn syrup, it's full of nanomachines.
- dang 5y agoWe've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- StanislavPetrov 5y agoCertainly if we can squeeze a few billion more people on the planet this problem will be easier to solve.
- mrpopo 5y ago"If there aren’t enough people for Earth, then there definitely won’t be enough for Mars :(" Elon Musk. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1483486559336910850 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1483486559336910850 How anyone can believe the future of humanity is to push ourselves to breed in order to fill in more planets is beyond me. EDIT: there are more humans and we are living longer than ever before. Our science helped us survive one of the trickiest virus ever with a death toll of barely 1/1000th of the world's population. Our technology allows us to monitor asteroids. And yet people are more worried that we might go extinct from that in a few thousand years, instead of the more obvious and glaring impacts on our for-now only planet that is undergoing the climate crisis, biodiversity collapse, ocean fish depletion due to overfishing, chemical pollution, literal overpopulation of many countries in the sense that they cannot feed themselves within their nations' borders. We have millions of years to conquer space. But only 50 years to protect our cradle planet from becoming inhospitable.
- i_heart_elon 5y ago[dead]
- newsbinator 5y agoIf we don't fill more planets, eventually we will die out. Whether via asteroid, plague, grey goo, etc. We're keeping all our eggs in one basket and our number of eggs is shrinking. Planets like Mars are empty and waiting to be filled with life, as far as we can tell. I see no good reason why we should give up as a species and die. If other species have a right to exist, so does ours. If nobody is currently living on Mars, why don't we?
- Dylan16807 5y agoThe criticism isn't about the idea of spreading over multiple planets, it's at the idea that we need so many billions of people. If we go back down to 5 billion [per planet], the same number of people we had in 1985, that's not a bad thing. Edit: Okay, do people disagree with the first sentence or the second one?
- blakesterz 5y agoIt seems there are far fewer bugs in general. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations Anecdotally, remember when you would drive any distance on a freeway and your windshield was just COVERED with smashed bugs?
- King-Aaron 5y agoI just returned from a weekend trip away (in Australia) and both thankfully and unfortunately my car now resembles a Jackson Pollock tribute to insects.
- prawn 5y agoI've spent time in the wilderness in various parts of the world and Australia still seems fairly full of insects and birds. Much, much quieter in Europe and the US, for example. Still see a lot of monarch butterflies here in South Australia.
- mcbutterbunz 5y ago> Anecdotally, remember when you would drive any distance on a freeway and your windshield was just COVERED with smashed bugs? I do, now that you mention it. It's weird how much we don't notice those small changes. I remember I used to see Monarch butterflies all the time, as a child, and I, until this last year, would never see any in the wild.
- thghtihadanacct 5y agoFor what its worth I got three monarch caterpillars on my milkweed now. They seem to be still kicking around bay area. Certainly, as you said, not as many.
- YetAnotherDavid 5y agoFull face helmets were "required" for motorcycles, unless you wanted to eat a few bugs.
- MattGaiser 5y agoI would be curious to know what other completely normal things have actually radically changed. I probably live in a much more different world than I imagine.
- liveoneggs 5y agoRemember when there were birds? Or.. what were they called.. frogs? oh yeah
- MattGaiser 5y agoMaybe I’m too young, but I have rarely ever seen a frog in the wild and birds have never seemed that abundant.
- whatshisface 5y agoWhere do you live, a densely populated urban area? Inside Bladerunner?
- MattGaiser 5y agoI live in an urban area, but my grandparents live out in a rural one on a lake and I have spent a lot of time there. I just asked them. There used to be a lot more frogs.
- ardme 5y agoWhere do you live? There is still wildlife in the midwest.
- mistrial9 5y agomy father told me stories that included frogs and other fresh water creatures, as a regular everyday thing. In my lifetime, those are mostly gone. This is measurably true.
- olyjohn 5y ago
- tjmc 5y agoGood time to become a beekeeper! We have one of these and we've harvested over 6kg of honey in the last couple of months https://www.honeyflow.com.au/ https://www.honeyflow.com.au/
- progre 5y agoAs a beekeeper on (indefinite) hiatus, yes, more people should try beekeeping. It's fun and you learn a lot! It won't really help the problem though. Honeybees are good at polinating comercial crops but there are tons of other flowering plants that requires specialized polinators, like moths. There is also some worry that honeybees might push out some of the endemic bee species (mostly solitary bees) from an area.
- pvaldes 5y agoLoss of habitat by the obsession of mowing anything at sight is also a problem.
- tptacek 5y agoAren't honey bees in North America displacing native pollinators?
- temporalparts 5y agoSounds like there's at least 70% more pollutinators. I'll show myself out and accept the downvotes.
- BrianHenryIE 5y agohttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2022.118847 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2022.118847
- JamisonM 5y agoThis is a misleading title here, there are as much as 70% fewer pollinators in circumstances where specific pollutants are present: "Scientists studying air pollutants from both urban and rural environments found that there are up to 70% fewer pollinators, up to 90% less flower visits, and an overall 31% in pollination reduction in test plants when there were several common ground-level air pollutants present – including diesel exhaust pollutants and ozone." That's just not going to be the most common interpretation of "Scientists find there are 70% fewer pollinators, due to air pollution" as a title. Anyhoo, air pollution is very bad and governments should be laser focused on selling the benefits of reducing fossil fuel burning for transportation as a personal health benefit more so than as a climate change mitigation strategy.
- halpert 5y agoThis comment is misleading. As you quoted "when there were several common ground-level air pollutants present." Sure, the exact number may not be 70%, but this decrease is a common occurrence.
- JamisonM 5y agoSorry, what?
- stjohnswarts 5y agoIt is an awful title. "Scientists find 70% fewer pollinators in Heavily Polluted areas" or something similar would have been a lot better. The title implies that it's everywhere.
- pvaldes 5y agoAny title that starts with "scientists say that" or "scientists did something" is clickbait by default.
- asdff 5y agoPeople wouldn't even wear a mask as a personal health benefit, they also haven't quit soda or cigarettes. I don't think personal health is going to be the most effective PR strategy with the public today.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- digitcatphd 5y agoHow was this study conducted? I don’t see any explanation of this. I imagine where it’s conducted will have a massive impact on the data.
- yosito 5y agoI'd also like to know. If it's a model, compared to a counterfactual model, it would be more of a hypothesis than a fact.
- aaron695 5y ago
- missedthecue 5y agoIf this is accurate, my first thought would be that it seems pollinators are far less important than I previously had figured.
- Markoff 5y agoAh, so that's why I've had never seasonal allergy when in China unlike at home. But TBH it seems better also in big European cities. :-)