4 ms·

6 upvotes and no comments for the single most important story on HN for the year so far. To quote a poster: A smiling bee says, "When we go, we're taking you

6 upvotes and no comments for the single most important story on HN for the year so far. To quote a poster: A smiling bee says, "When we go, we're taking you with us!" The ongoing human-caused insect apocalypse signals that the same is coming for humanity. Most flowering dicotyledonous plants don't make fruits or seeds without pollinating insects. There goes many human crops. There go the forests that catch and slowly release rainwater to irrigate those crops. There goes much of on-land CO₂ absorbtion and capture. Here comes the big dustbowl, there goes the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, goodbye to every coastal town and city in the world.

dtx1 4y ago
> But what about the poor SUV drivers? And all this green stuff is gonna make us poor! That's basically been the reaction of the boomer generation I heard when talking about the looming eco disaster. When getting decent bicycle infrastructure in cities is impossible because half the population does not only doesn't care but actively opposes any change we can forget about changing any of this. It's going to happen. The question then becomes: What can we do to deal with that? How can we replace the polinators?
- lproven 4y ago
  I don't think we will, TBH. I am colossally pessimistic but at the rate we are going, I think we are heading for between 4-7⁰ C of warming this century, 5-10m of sea level rise, the extinction of 95%+ of species, and a small remnant of humanity, maybe a few million people, living at the poles, after the collapse of our technological civilisation. We're not going to have time to invent magic mini flying robots to do pollination when the bees are all dead.
  - dtx1 4y ago
    Thats unrealistic. Sure, some countries are going to become unlivable for humans, afghanistan, pakistan etc. but large parts of now permafrost will become habitable in exchange. And there are also many plants that dont rely on polinators.
    - urfullofsht 4y ago
      [dead]
  - galangalalgol 4y ago
    Latitude isn't as good as altitude for avoiding warming. They'll all be perched on the tops of mountain ranges hoping for rain.
nerdponx 4y ago
> 6 upvotes and no comments for the single most important story on HN for the year so far. I have nothing to say. I feel powerless and robbed of my own future by my parents' generation. Forget the dustbowl, if we can't pollinate crops, we will all either starve or kill each other long before the rest of the ecosystem collapses.
- birdyrooster 4y ago
  We mechanically pollinate plants all the time, it’s not the end of our ability to feed ourselves. I think people are ignorant to and are overestimating how difficult it is to make pollen blow in the air or transfer using mechanical means.
  - stuven 4y ago
    ... how much are you willing to stake on that assumption?
    - birdyrooster 4y ago
      What other options are working? Geopolitics isn’t changing anytime soon.
  - dumpsterlid 4y ago
    [dead]
  - pseudolus 4y ago
    There have been stories documenting how the decline of bee populations has necessitated the introduction of hand-pollination. [0] Hand-pollination seems both tedious and difficult to scale. Mechanical pollination might be viable in some environments but basically it amounts to extensively paying for something that historically has been free. [0] https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/life-without-bees-hand-human-pollination-rural-chi/ https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/life-without-bees-h...
    - 4y ago
stinos 4y ago
Most flowering dicotyledonous plants don't make fruits or seeds without pollinating insects Is it really 'most' (I honestly don't know, I've never considered only looking at dicotyledonous plants)? In any case: I'm very well aware of how dramatic the decline is, but imo there are more than enough 'if all the bees die we die as well' memes out there and perhaps it's a pet peeve of mine but that's a correlation at best and it ignores so many nuances it's not funny anymore (not that it ever was, but you get the point). It's HN so let's not ignore all other pollinators (wasps, flies, butterflies, moths, beetles, bats, spiders, birds, ... in no particular order - and of which I know many people actually go like 'erm, what, bats?'), nor that there's also wind pollation, and also not the fact that there's a bunch of crops whos yield doesn't depend on pollinators at all and another bunch who'd see dercreased yield without pollinators but not quite zero.
- eimrine 4y ago
  >> Most flowering dicotyledonous plants don't make fruits or seeds without pollinating insects > Is it really 'most' (I honestly don't know, I've never considered only looking at dicotyledonous plants)? Flowering plants is way smaller domain than dicos plants and flowers use insects (or lucky burst of wind) as the only way to make a new organism, I mean a new DNA.
  - lproven 4y ago
    > Flowering plants is way smaller domain than dicos plants It's the other way round. Dicots are a sub-domain of angiosperms (flowering plants). There are lots and lots of flowering plants. All (bar a rounding error) make seeds. Some of the seeds have 1 seed leaf (cotyledon), so are called monocotyledonous plants: monocots. The others have 2 cotyledons: dicotyledonous plants, or dicots. Some monocots use insect pollination and some make edible fruit. Bananas and coconuts are monocots. All cereals (except some false cereals like buckwheat) are monocots, but all are wind-pollinated. Hand-wavey generalisation: most monocots are wind-pollinated, and don't need insects. Many dicots use wind pollination, but most of the ones that make fruit we can eat are insect-pollinated. Some plants are self-fertile and don't need to be pollinated at all (e.g. dandelions). Some can be bred to be that way. If insects disappear it doesn't mean all fruit will. But OTOH it's not just about pollination. Insects do much more than that. They are also vital in decay, in the soil, in turning dead plants back into soil. No insects means much slower decay, means soil that's much less fertile, means plants grow much more poorly, means more crop failures.
ourlordcaffeine 4y ago
Well surely conifer forests will be fine as they are wind pollinated
rowanG077 4y ago
Huh I thought we don't know why they are dieing yet.
- lproven 4y ago
  It's a question of which causes are the more important ones. For example, the rise in Varroa mites is probably a secondary effect caused by insecticides, but which insecticides? Colony collapse disorder is a thing, but nobody is 100% sure what is causing it yet. So the scientists say "we don't know". Which is true... but it is very clear who is causing it. It's us. Humans. It doesn't really matter if it's the chemicals that we make in the millions of tonnes specifically to kill insects, or the ones we make in the billions of tonnes to do other things which happen to kill insects, or the ones we accidentally create as byproducts which happen to kill insects, or whether it's because we're destroying the wilderness that they need to survive, or it's something we don't know yet. E.g. vultures in India are doing very badly. It's humans, but it's by accident. Some Indian religions practice "air burial". They let vultures eat the bodies. Dying people often feel unwell. They take painkillers. Paracetamol is cheap. India is poor. People take a lot of paracetamol and then some of them die. Paracetamol is toxic to vultures. It's still humans, but it's indirect and accidental, but it's 100% our fault.
  - macinjosh 4y ago
    It is a fallacy to say scientists don't know what is causing it but they/we know its humans for sure! Huh? What?! That don't make no damn sense. You got to know something before you know it, you know? In your vulture example we know why the vultures died so we can tie it to a human behavior. We don't know why the bees die or what the deal is with the mites so we can't tie it to human behavior. You are still making a leap of faith, no matter how logical or likely it seems or in fact is.
  - rowanG077 4y ago
    While I agree that it's probably likely that humans are the cause I disagree with you outright stating humans are. I can still see some non-human probable causes like an undiscovered disease in or multiple species.
Maken 4y ago
To be fair, I do not think many people here (or anywhere) is qualified enough to have an informed opinion in the matter. In fact, the lack of entomologists (a boring, unexciting field of study for most of us) may be the cause of how seemly late the complete wipe-out of all insect life is being reported. Last time this happened, it was killing the birds and people noticed it much much earlier.
belorn 4y ago
There are a few scary solutions if it ever came to the point where insect population would start to seriously harm pollination for forests and human crops. We can always start engineering and breeding insects that are more resistant to global warming. What we will never know for certain is what the long term effect will be if we start to do this.
tptacek 4y ago
Human crops are generally pollinated by livestock bees, not feral pollinators. If we depended principally on natural produce, most of us would have starved to death long ago. Forget about the bees; just think about the Haber-Bosch process.
goatlover 4y ago
It has more votes now that it's been posted several hours, but why would it be more important story than recent AI advances on a hacker news site?
avgcorrection 4y ago
What you are witnessing is simply resignation.

dtx1 4y ago

> But what about the poor SUV drivers? And all this green stuff is gonna make us poor! That's basically been the reaction of the boomer generation I heard when talking about the looming eco disaster. When getting decent bicycle infrastructure in cities is impossible because half the population does not only doesn't care but actively opposes any change we can forget about changing any of this. It's going to happen. The question then becomes: What can we do to deal with that? How can we replace the polinators?

lproven 4y ago
I don't think we will, TBH. I am colossally pessimistic but at the rate we are going, I think we are heading for between 4-7⁰ C of warming this century, 5-10m of sea level rise, the extinction of 95%+ of species, and a small remnant of humanity, maybe a few million people, living at the poles, after the collapse of our technological civilisation. We're not going to have time to invent magic mini flying robots to do pollination when the bees are all dead.
- dtx1 4y ago
  Thats unrealistic. Sure, some countries are going to become unlivable for humans, afghanistan, pakistan etc. but large parts of now permafrost will become habitable in exchange. And there are also many plants that dont rely on polinators.
  - urfullofsht 4y ago
    [dead]
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  Latitude isn't as good as altitude for avoiding warming. They'll all be perched on the tops of mountain ranges hoping for rain.

nerdponx 4y ago

> 6 upvotes and no comments for the single most important story on HN for the year so far. I have nothing to say. I feel powerless and robbed of my own future by my parents' generation. Forget the dustbowl, if we can't pollinate crops, we will all either starve or kill each other long before the rest of the ecosystem collapses.

birdyrooster 4y ago
We mechanically pollinate plants all the time, it’s not the end of our ability to feed ourselves. I think people are ignorant to and are overestimating how difficult it is to make pollen blow in the air or transfer using mechanical means.
- stuven 4y ago
  ... how much are you willing to stake on that assumption?
  - birdyrooster 4y ago
    What other options are working? Geopolitics isn’t changing anytime soon.
- dumpsterlid 4y ago
  [dead]
- pseudolus 4y ago
  There have been stories documenting how the decline of bee populations has necessitated the introduction of hand-pollination. [0] Hand-pollination seems both tedious and difficult to scale. Mechanical pollination might be viable in some environments but basically it amounts to extensively paying for something that historically has been free. [0] https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/life-without-bees-hand-human-pollination-rural-chi/ https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/life-without-bees-h...
  - 4y ago

stinos 4y ago

Most flowering dicotyledonous plants don't make fruits or seeds without pollinating insects Is it really 'most' (I honestly don't know, I've never considered only looking at dicotyledonous plants)? In any case: I'm very well aware of how dramatic the decline is, but imo there are more than enough 'if all the bees die we die as well' memes out there and perhaps it's a pet peeve of mine but that's a correlation at best and it ignores so many nuances it's not funny anymore (not that it ever was, but you get the point). It's HN so let's not ignore all other pollinators (wasps, flies, butterflies, moths, beetles, bats, spiders, birds, ... in no particular order - and of which I know many people actually go like 'erm, what, bats?'), nor that there's also wind pollation, and also not the fact that there's a bunch of crops whos yield doesn't depend on pollinators at all and another bunch who'd see dercreased yield without pollinators but not quite zero.

eimrine 4y ago
>> Most flowering dicotyledonous plants don't make fruits or seeds without pollinating insects > Is it really 'most' (I honestly don't know, I've never considered only looking at dicotyledonous plants)? Flowering plants is way smaller domain than dicos plants and flowers use insects (or lucky burst of wind) as the only way to make a new organism, I mean a new DNA.
- lproven 4y ago
  > Flowering plants is way smaller domain than dicos plants It's the other way round. Dicots are a sub-domain of angiosperms (flowering plants). There are lots and lots of flowering plants. All (bar a rounding error) make seeds. Some of the seeds have 1 seed leaf (cotyledon), so are called monocotyledonous plants: monocots. The others have 2 cotyledons: dicotyledonous plants, or dicots. Some monocots use insect pollination and some make edible fruit. Bananas and coconuts are monocots. All cereals (except some false cereals like buckwheat) are monocots, but all are wind-pollinated. Hand-wavey generalisation: most monocots are wind-pollinated, and don't need insects. Many dicots use wind pollination, but most of the ones that make fruit we can eat are insect-pollinated. Some plants are self-fertile and don't need to be pollinated at all (e.g. dandelions). Some can be bred to be that way. If insects disappear it doesn't mean all fruit will. But OTOH it's not just about pollination. Insects do much more than that. They are also vital in decay, in the soil, in turning dead plants back into soil. No insects means much slower decay, means soil that's much less fertile, means plants grow much more poorly, means more crop failures.

ourlordcaffeine 4y ago

Well surely conifer forests will be fine as they are wind pollinated

rowanG077 4y ago

Huh I thought we don't know why they are dieing yet.

lproven 4y ago
It's a question of which causes are the more important ones. For example, the rise in Varroa mites is probably a secondary effect caused by insecticides, but which insecticides? Colony collapse disorder is a thing, but nobody is 100% sure what is causing it yet. So the scientists say "we don't know". Which is true... but it is very clear who is causing it. It's us. Humans. It doesn't really matter if it's the chemicals that we make in the millions of tonnes specifically to kill insects, or the ones we make in the billions of tonnes to do other things which happen to kill insects, or the ones we accidentally create as byproducts which happen to kill insects, or whether it's because we're destroying the wilderness that they need to survive, or it's something we don't know yet. E.g. vultures in India are doing very badly. It's humans, but it's by accident. Some Indian religions practice "air burial". They let vultures eat the bodies. Dying people often feel unwell. They take painkillers. Paracetamol is cheap. India is poor. People take a lot of paracetamol and then some of them die. Paracetamol is toxic to vultures. It's still humans, but it's indirect and accidental, but it's 100% our fault.
- macinjosh 4y ago
  It is a fallacy to say scientists don't know what is causing it but they/we know its humans for sure! Huh? What?! That don't make no damn sense. You got to know something before you know it, you know? In your vulture example we know why the vultures died so we can tie it to a human behavior. We don't know why the bees die or what the deal is with the mites so we can't tie it to human behavior. You are still making a leap of faith, no matter how logical or likely it seems or in fact is.
- rowanG077 4y ago
  While I agree that it's probably likely that humans are the cause I disagree with you outright stating humans are. I can still see some non-human probable causes like an undiscovered disease in or multiple species.

Maken 4y ago

To be fair, I do not think many people here (or anywhere) is qualified enough to have an informed opinion in the matter. In fact, the lack of entomologists (a boring, unexciting field of study for most of us) may be the cause of how seemly late the complete wipe-out of all insect life is being reported. Last time this happened, it was killing the birds and people noticed it much much earlier.

belorn 4y ago

There are a few scary solutions if it ever came to the point where insect population would start to seriously harm pollination for forests and human crops. We can always start engineering and breeding insects that are more resistant to global warming. What we will never know for certain is what the long term effect will be if we start to do this.

tptacek 4y ago

Human crops are generally pollinated by livestock bees, not feral pollinators. If we depended principally on natural produce, most of us would have starved to death long ago. Forget about the bees; just think about the Haber-Bosch process.

goatlover 4y ago

It has more votes now that it's been posted several hours, but why would it be more important story than recent AI advances on a hacker news site?

avgcorrection 4y ago

What you are witnessing is simply resignation.