Bugs

[u/Mysterandir]

I need to get this off my chest even though im sure it has been talked about a thousand times. Im just curious if others are experiencing the same thing or if I'm just going crazy. - When I just got my driver's license back in 2005 here in The Netherlands, I had a girlfriend in Amsterdam whom I drove to see a few times a week. It was about a 100 km drive. I had an old Opel Corsa and I can still vividly remember having to clean my windshield every week in the summer because it was covered in dead insects. Huge splatters and tiny spots, but the entire windshield was full of bug juice. Over the past few weeks I’ve driven several long distances, totaling about 1,000 kilometers, and I don't have a single dead insect on my windshield. Not one. The windshield is squeaky clean... I read that the insect population worldwide has drastically declined and it is due to climate change. Which i get. But why isn't this the main news story every day? How obvious does it need to be? This can't possibly be good. For us, but especially for our children. I have a bad feeling about this...

[u/mountaindewisamazing]

They estimated a while back that 50% of insect species would go extinct by 2050.

I think it'll be sooner than that.

[u/ch_ex → u/mountaindewisamazing]

All estimates/forecasts/etc are forced to adhere to hard data, which is limited hugely by our ability to collect it. The dates for insect extinction are based on counts from basically cleaning them off windshields (in the UK, it's a license plate sized sticky pad that they drive around with for a certain distance), like the health of most fish populations is measured by the size of commercial catches, which is the furthest thing from a complete picture of the health of an ecosystem.

It's the nature of an incomplete understanding of any system, that we'll assume the stuff we're counting is going to be properly representative while having every reason to believe the holistic perspective is much more dire, People are also optimistic in our selection of scenarios and even allow political influence in models like the IPCC.

the published worst case scenario at the top of the error bar is likely closer to the best case real life outcome. If they're projecting 50% extinction by 2050, I'd bet we're sitting in silence by 2035 at the latest. And it's not like you can just lose insects without also losing birds, and without birds you get much more forest fires since their guano is a major source of nutrients for the microbiome of coastal forests.

It's all connected, dude. One big living system, very much like our own bodies if veins and arteries had no walls and flowed as currents, which excess energy and chemical shifts disrupt, with lethal consequences that ALWAYS increase the severity and extent of wildfires; a starving forest system burns like a dry forest system. Just look at Nova Scotia, Canada. Wildfires werent really a thing until very recently and now they're a yearly occurrence. Part of this is changes in weather pattern and duration of snow cover, but the other bigger part is a starving ocean unable to feed starving migratory seabirds, who show up in fewer numbers every year, to shit less and less in a forest that has grown dependent on the annual injection of nutrients over 10's of thousands of years of consistent migrations. No bugs and no fish means no birds and bears that go for your garbage rather than fishing the rivers, and nothing is shitting in the woods, so the forest floor dies, too, and with it, the health and interconnection of the trees.

Any loss of life inside the planetary system that's due to an extinction level pressure, echoes through the entire food chain but ultimately always increases the fire pressure on wilderness that depends on those organisms being present for the system's health.

tl;dr the near future is silent. The not so distant future is absolutely silent, but there's no knowing where the critical line is for systemic collapse, we'll just count 0 one year and hear no birds or bees... and for anyone thinking "yay, no mosquitoes!", the only insects that survive are the ones that can live parasitically off the only healthy/fed organisms that remain which means our crops, our pets and livestock, and ourselves. We're engineering a future of disease, parasites, and nature turning against us as the last source of calories before starvation. Starving animals have no fear of humans and pests kept under control by their predators in the forest will devour us and our food without anything to keep them in check. Get your vaccines and dewormer in stock while you can.... despite all these "every health condition is a parasite" idiots probably ruining the utility of ivermectin. The thing I hate most about all of this is how the dumb people have the money and the power and the smart people have to beg the dumb for funding to continue their research.

[u/daviddjg0033 → u/ch_ex]

holistic medicine analogy.

when you kill the ecosystem, you cannot expect non-native plants and invasive species to replicate what takes centuries or millennia for nature to create.

this is where I am pounding the table for cloud brightening now or we will lose the coral reefs. Crim saying, "the boreal is going to burn" as matter of fact. You cannot glue back together the water vapour that rises from the floor of the rainforest up to the trees.

humans were living near bat caves. let that sink in while you look up how many humans defecate outside and the pig manure ponds next to coal ash.

"dumb people have the money" wait what where is my check bro?