
Insect collapse - crispinb
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/15/insect-collapse-we-are-destroying-our-life-support-systems
======
fsloth
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
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
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.

~~~
ryanmercer
"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...](https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/13/5-billion-people-now-have-a-
mobile-phone-connection-according-to-gsma-data/)

That alone should be an indication people are living quite different now than
just 10 years ago.

------
thebradbain
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...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2018/11/14/giraffes-risk-
extinction-animals-listed-critically-endangered/)

~~~
brazzy
> When do we do something?

When it significantly impacts the daily lives of a majority of people, and not
a second earlier.

~~~
petilon
When it significantly impacts the daily lives of _uneducated Americans_.

Educated people around the world already want to do something. Uneducated
people outside America already want to do something (because their governments
are on board.) It is uneducated Americans -- and their president -- that is
going to do us all in.

This means the survival of the planet depends on our ability to communicate
with and convince uneducated Americans. That's hard. Al Gore tried long ago
with his movie.

~~~
WhompingWindows
It's sort of delusional to say that un-educated people and Trump are the
problem. Educated people have vastly huger carbon footprints than non-educated
people, thinking globally. Is it the poor people in Africa and
Southern/Southeastern Asia that are to blame, or is it the rich people who
literally use 10X or 100X more carbon emission in their daily lives? What
about the historical emissions of our ancestors - I know mine as an
American/WASP are HUGE considering all the cars/planes/meat that have been
consumed by my ancestors. Compare that to a line of subsistence farmers in
other countries. While I believe in climate change, it doesn't matter, I'm
still on the hook for FAR more historical emissions than those un-educated
people.

Carbon emissions are going up globally, carbon emissions went up in the USA,
slightly different political environments won't change the reality that the
vast majority of people, societies, and companies have done far less than they
need to already. We can't fool ourselves into thinking a democratic
presidential win in 2020 will stop this crisis, it simply won't be enough by
any rational view of the emissions already out and coming out every day. Even
the favorite policy of democrats/progressives, the carbon tax, got voted down
in multiple progressive-state reforanda.

In summary, it feels good to point the finger of blame at the current
political regime, but the reality is very little is being done anywhere except
for pockets of hope like Norway, California, Iceland, Hawaii, which are NOT
enough to balance out historical emissions and rising emissions in China,
India, etc.

~~~
petilon
> _Educated people have vastly huger carbon footprints than non-educated
> people, thinking globally._

But the resistance to doing something about it is not coming from educated
people, at least in the US.

Regarding India and China, their governments are on board and they are making
progress: [https://qz.com/india/1475736/india-is-now-a-world-leader-
in-...](https://qz.com/india/1475736/india-is-now-a-world-leader-in-renewable-
energy/)
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/dominicdudley/2019/01/11/china-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/dominicdudley/2019/01/11/china-
renewable-energy-superpower)

------
graeme
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...](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1472-4642.2009.00578.x)

------
titzer
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.

~~~
Regardsyjc
I used to feel this way and I found that it wasn't productive. What can you
do? If you can do something, do it. If you think you can't change the future
possible destruction of our ecosystem or millions of people, then you also
need to make peace with it.

I think you can either do or not do things without the negativity. I found
that the negativity made me think emotionally and not rationally or
productively, and also sometimes came off in my conversations with people
which was also not helpful-because I was clearly very emotional about the
issue.

My thought process is whatever happens, happens. I can't do much to prevent
whatever systemic collapse that might happen or not happen. But whatever I can
do, I will. When I first learned about this, I thought it meant the future
that I took for granted could be nonexistent - the dying happily carefree of
systemic collapse part after having a family and growing old. It made me
bitter and resentful. What's the point of doing anything if the world's going
to go to shit by 2030? I decided to be more optimistic or maybe stoic. Make
sure I can do what I can or all I can and not let some potential apocalyptic
future darken my life. Sorry if this is a trash comment.

~~~
radiorental
I view our success as a product of evolution. It is the driving factor that
got us down out of the trees, cultivating our food and to where we are today.

Would we be putting a little less pressure on the environment without people
like Edward Bernays, possibly. However, I think our collective consciousness
can put itself a little at ease. As we enter the 6 mass extinction event, it's
a natural cycle and if it wasn't us, some other species would dominate the
planet.

It's never a bad time to listen to George Carlin's "saving the planet"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c)

~~~
honkycat
I think you vastly over-estimate our power.

If the oceans die through acidification and pollution, and all of the insects
die we will die as well.

~~~
vokep
Yes, we'll die, but only 99.99% dead. The remaining surviving will have
learned the most costly lesson yet of humanity, and will continue on and
rebuild. It sucks, but so did the millions of years of animals murdering each
other just so that I could type this and you could read it.

~~~
titzer
> The remaining surviving will have learned the most costly lesson yet of
> humanity

I wish I could believe this, but I don't. The cycle will repeat as the
collapse passes out of living memory. We will have lost civilization by then,
the only records that remain will be the trash heaps that we leave behind.

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

~~~
bamboozled
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
That term is a quote from one of the scientists. It also seems quite
appropriate. What would you use to describe this event?

~~~
lixtra
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)

~~~
chakalakasp
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.

~~~
Cthulhu_
A couple centuries? The insect collapse (from the various articles I've read)
is something that happened in the past couple decades.

------
jelliclesfarm
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
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/12...](https://www.conservation.org/NewsRoom/pressreleases/Pages/120402_global-
analysis-finds-nearly-half-earth-still-wilderness.aspx)

~~~
ryanmercer
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"

------
chakalakasp
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.

------
cs702
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
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
_> 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.

------
ackfoo
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.

------
ryanmercer
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_

~~~
tatami
I heard that pollen are more aggressive in areas with high emissions - on a
reputable German radio show. This could be one reason for worse allergies,
especially when you add in lifestyle changes such as moving to a city.

Personally, I could not remember a situation where I felt this could be true.

~~~
Eric_WVGG
Urban planning is a factor too. Someone decided that trees dropping fruit
everywhere was messy, so urban planners made a blanket recommendation to only
plant male trees. [https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/botanical-
se...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/botanical-sexism-
cultivates-home-grown-allergies/)

------
sethammons
Reminds me of my favorite demotivational poster:

Responsibility: no single raindrop feels it is responsible for the flood.

~~~
Simon_says
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)

------
StanislavPetrov
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).

------
gerbilly
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
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
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.

~~~
crispinb
That's certainly the standard narrative - Berry isn't as counter-cultural as
he thinks. He's just the mirror image of convention, but that buys in equally
to the false nature/culture dichotomy.

We don't 'interact' with nature. There's no getting outside of it to do the
interaction. When we 'take more than we need', we're acting exactly as a
hominid with tribal cognitive & affective adaptations that have been turned to
extended purposes in a global context would act. In other words: evolution in
creating H. Sapiens has explored an area of state space that will result in
large-scale ecological collapse. This is unfortunate, from our present-day
point of view, but it is not unnatural.

------
eecc
Watched this the other night:
[https://www.vpro.nl/programmas/tegenlicht/kijk/afleveringen/...](https://www.vpro.nl/programmas/tegenlicht/kijk/afleveringen/2018-2019/de-
aarde-draait-door.html) 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.

------
coldcode
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.

------
crispinb
Our world is dying.

~~~
King-Aaron
The world isn't, but the ecosystem that allows us to be alive appears to be.

~~~
stouset
To me, that’s the “our” in “our world”.

~~~
shusson
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
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
> 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
'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'.

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

------
rubarax
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
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.

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

------
peacetreefrog
It's interesting to me how often this story shows up on HN:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=insect&sort=byPopularity&prefi...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=insect&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

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
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
I meant non-tech like non-programming, start ups, Rust etc, the stuff you
usually see on HN.

~~~
pohl
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)

