This 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.
It 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.
This 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.
And guess what has ZERO effect on pollinators? CO2. The only ‘pollutant’ ESG scores and activists harp about. Why? To distract from real polluting chemicals that cost a lot more to remove from our environment. Don’t even get me started on microplastics and its impact on the endocrine system of every animal, not just humans.
Its fascinating to observe people believing that mega-corporation and paid-politician promoted value systems are looking out for the interests of you and me.
I think ESG scores and activists are concerned about greenhouse gases because they are inadequately regulated by the government and private initiatives are necessary to take action on them.
It is unfortunate that the previous US administration was rolling back air and water pollution standards and I agree with you that it should get more press, along with the dangers of microplastics - but I really don't think this is about "mega-corporation promoted value systems".
People 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.
While insect population decline seems the primary cause, windshields are also more sloped and aerodynamic now. I suspect more bugs bounce off these instead of being splattered.
My one data point is that on a 2-hour rural drive with a friend my 90s SUV’s windshield and front bumper splattered a lot of bugs. While my friend’s sleeker more modern car with a sloped windshield had barely any.
> 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.
For 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.
Monarch population health is a little easier to monitor, because they do large migrations to a few main locations, which can be evaluated, and (hopefully) protected.
Being able to monitor hasn't really helped us protect them at all:
"In 2017 the annual March count of monarchs "overwintering" in Mexico's mountain forests — where 99 percent of the world's monarchs migrate for the winter — showed that numbers had fallen by 27 percent from the previous year's count and by more than 80 percent from the mid-1990s.
That drastic decline was attributed in part to more extreme winter storms that killed millions of monarchs the previous March. Monarchs need a very large population size in order to be resilient to threats from severe weather events, pesticides and climate change.
In 2020 the yearly count of overwintering monarchs showed an even more dramatic decrease of 53% from the previous year’s count. The numbers are now well below the threshold at which government scientists predict the migration could collapse.
The western monarch population, which overwinters in California, is in even greater peril. Numbering some 1.2 million in the 1990s, it declined to fewer than 2,000 butterflies in the 2020 count. This is way below the extinction threshold estimated by scientists and has to be turned around soon if the species is to be saved.
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Yeah, but I also remember there being way more diesel fumes and soot. Cars and trucks have gotten much cleaner over the past 10-20 years, so why would this be contributing to a decline in pollinators?
Persistent pollution - there is a whole class of pesticides: herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, etc. That use complex chlorinated hydrocarbons, that stay in the environment, in various forms, and which often degrade into more toxic, and more persistent (survive longer) versions.
For example there is more DDT in glacier runoff water now, than there was in the 70s and 80s, even though it hasn't been used since then.
The story is complex, and goes on, and on.
Yes indeed. I think the whole air pollution question is a distraction to the bug problem. (Rather an addition to?) There are serious issues with modern gasoline, and it's byproducts of combustion, though.
All together there are a lot of pollutants which we need to clean up, still ongoing.
It's a huge problem.
Diesel might be cleaner in dense cities leading to less smog but coal power around the world still belts out plenty of particulates, scubbers are not perfect and regulations are lax in some localities. One area is marine shipping where different countries have regulations requiring certain emissions standards in their territorial waters but out in the open ocean it's a race to the bottom burning the cheapest fuels possible. It's not just a matter of any ships that want to be able to travel to those ports being built with an exhaust system clean enough to meet regulations, they'll switch fuels going into and out of zones with stricter regulations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZZ591x0Ajs
Cars and trucks don't burn bunker fuel so thick you have to heat it with steam just to pump it into the engine. Local hotspots of pollution on land have gone down, but globally there's still plenty of heavy polluters out there.
The human population has exploded though, so presumably increases in other types of pollution have more than made up for decreases in diesel fumes and soot.
More pollution from tires due to the added weight, less from brake disks and plates due to regenerative braking. Not sure if this has a measurable impact compared to the reduced CO2 emissions.
It's less brake dust only if you use an old school automatic I'd assume. On a manual engine braking does the same in practice as regenerative braking: slowing down without using brake pads, only it does this with the force of a vacuum rather than friction in the EV motor. Coming up to a 25mph stop or an uphill offramp, its actually possible to come to an almost complete stop (assuming you'd clutch in to not stall) by engine braking in a manual without touching your brakes at all. Newer automatics seem to have some engine braking capability baked in rather than just kicking you into overdrive and coasting when you lift off the throttle.
and from the power stations which generate the electricity they run on.
EVs are certainly a step in the right direction, but if we are burning fossil fuels to generate the electricity to power them, then the EV has just shifted the point where the greenhouse gasses are produced, not lowered the total amount of greenhouse gas
(exceptions for people who use solar power to charge their EV)
Probably the most efficient thing is to cut out using a car for commuting and use it as sparingly as possible, and keep the car you already have and is already here as long as its possible. Any car represents an enormous amount of spent energy just in the form of converting those raw materials from where they are found naturally, forming it into a 3000lb car somewhere, and ultimately delivering it to you where it currently sits in front of you. Its going to take a lot of fuzzy math to negate that massive energy cost as well as the energy cost to bring this new car built from resources found around the world to your door, and the cost to do away with the old one. Limiting personal consumption imo means getting the most out of your existing materials and tools, or those found immediately locally, versus spending energy to bring in ever more things from around the globe.
That change may also be related to the fact that modern car front windows have much larger angle to normal than the cars a few decades ago. Maybe insects will just be carried by the flow now.
I just returned from a weekend trip away (in Australia) and both thankfully and unfortunately my car now resembles a Jackson Pollock tribute to insects.
I'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.
I'm certainly not an expert but food chain collapse sounds like a very difficult event to undo.
Discovering we're unintentionally doing a domino style wipe out of ecosystems sounds like a "stop everything now" level problem.
Yet here we are. I'm going to go to work tomorrow on stuff unrelated to these urgent society collapsing problems we're facing. Pulling a salary from some company as if these crisis don't exist.
I don't think many problems are ever "every single person stop everything now". The problem is it should be "those people who are disproportionately responsible, stop them right now, and start funding solutions".
In an otherwise healthy environment, even killing billions of bugs on car windshields probably doesn't even dent the overall population. It would just free up that amount of resources in their carrying capacity in their ecological niche and they'd get replaced. The real problem comes when you start destroying the carrying capacity of their ecological niche itself with chemical pollution, and/or damaging each and every member of the whole species with ubiquitous chemical pollution, not just even a large number of unlucky individuals that end up in front of car windshields.
We splattered them on windshields incidentally, but the stuff coming out of the tailpipes probably did more damage.
I often wondered how much of an effect it has had all the bugs hitting cars. How fast do they reproduce? At what rate were they dying on cars? If an average drive remembers their car being plastered with hundreds of bugs a trip surely they don’t reproduce faster then all the cars combined kill. It has to be a net negative, right?
Taking mosquitos as an example: a female mosquito can lay ~100 eggs each time it feeds, and those eggs take < 10 days to mature into adults. Assuming each female only lays one batch of eggs (conservative), A single female mosquito can spawn over 125,000 other females per month.
I'm not sure that every single bug is like that, but the exponential growth is pretty crazy. As your parent said, the carrying capacity of the environment is all that really matters. If a population can multiple 125,000x per month, it is basically guaranteed to fill the environment's carrying capacity no matter how many you kill.
As 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.
The 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.
I 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!
The bottom line is that many things might have already collapsed without us taking notice because nature is very complex and under studied. By the time things are bad enough for us to be directly impacted we're already way too far to do anything about it.
I 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.
my 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.
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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.
If 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?
Our "number of eggs" is not shrinking. It's actually expanded by a factor of 4 in the span of 100 years, and by a factor of 400 in the span of 2000 years. Only once for a decade during the 14th century has the population actually decreased, during the Black Plague.
> If we don't fill more planets, eventually we will die out.
The thing is we have an almost unlimited numbers of issues to solve right here and right now instead of anticipating the death of the sun or a on in a trillion chance asteroid collision. Problems which are easier and cheaper to solve and would have a direct measurable impact on billions of people.
Many people do actively want to end their family lines, and they have a right to decide to do that. I don't know about colonizing other planets, but hey, it's also a choice to try to go do that. I was born on the earth, and I'd prefer to have children, and myself die on this earth. Maybe if I have some descendents, some of them will end up living on other planets or in outer space. I don't know. It's hard to overstate how gargantuan of a move leaving the planet we started on is, the emotional impact of it plus the immense challenges it will bring.
Yes, and going to another planet is at least an order of magnitude more stark and perilous of a change. I don't feel that it's the risk I'm meant to take on, I've chosen other risks and challenges. But maybe it's someone else's?
> Yes, and going to another planet is at least an order of magnitude more stark and perilous of a change.
Unlikely. As a society we’re not nearly as tolerant of knowingly sending people to their death as they were in the 1500s. A safe job of simply working a coal mine in the 1800s even would be more risky than what we end up subjecting the first mars explorers to.
Right now, we're not. I am firmly convinced that will eventually change.
EDIT: I missed out on something. "Knowingly" is a strong word for this case. Nobody knew for 100% certain if an early American colonist was going to die or achieve prosperity. Nobody knows the same about a hypothetical martian colonist. We've become more culturally sensitive about risk in this exact way, thinking we "know" the outcome based on scrutinized likelihoods. We didn't suddenly become rational in the face of nigh certain death, where before we were just being silly about it. We're not necessarily silly in either case to most heavily consider the risk or the benefit, I'd say it all really depends on what's called for at that time.
No, it was very well known that there were high risks of death just because of weather, food, disease, etc and people did it in the face of that.
The only people who went were doing under the promises of vast riches or having literally no other options. There was no welfare to keep them alive in Europe so a 1/4 chance of dying on the journey as a deck hand with only a 1/100 chance of ever coming back was still appealing.
We know way more about what a Martian colonist will experience even now than the people in Europe did about the various risks even after a smattering of successful journeys.
Modern society is very intolerant of unknown risks like that.
An aircraft worthy of passenger travel in the 1950s is considered barbaric by todays standards. The risks incurred by astronauts on the international space station are lower than the passengers that took flights in the 1930s.
I'm gonna zoom out here a little. I've been living a life that for decades has felt like slavery to what I confidently believe is an overly risk averse cultural mindset, applied to economic life. I see no safe path to a life I could tolerate myself choosing. If it became clear to me, I would take longer odds of death than the American colonist in your example to break free of it, because dying is preferable to me over living in the boxes most people are eager to ensconce me in. But because of the "intolerance to unknown risks" (and the fact that I refuse to become a career criminal) there are tons of hurdles now in the way of risking my own life to succeed and all I've got left realistically is burnout and feeling shame for not being or doing X, Y, Z.
So because of that, the "elephant" I'm riding is a complete behemoth. You're never going to convince me that the modern world will always be and should be so intolerant of these kinds of risks. You left behind google to work in a startup, so you've experienced something about a real economic risk if not a deadly one. Beyond that I don't know what kind of elephant you're riding on about this kind of thing but it's probably also too strong for me to expect to influence you into adopting my thoughts about risk epistemology. Possibly, precisely because they are my thoughts; they're not for you.
Having taken that step back, I don't see why I need to care so much if you really want to stick to your heuristic of approximating risk confidence into a functional "knowledge" that it's 100% or 0% at the margins of the infinitesimal. That's your choice. Maybe those are good guardrails for you. I'd hope to speak as a check and balance to stop you from pressuring (whether deliberately or inadvertently) other people who feel the same way I do into these boxes, but It would be arrogant of me to assume I know best for what you should be thinking.
Having this conversation, and realizing why I was digging into the position I held inspired me to look up the most dangerous occupations in my available area, looking at the statistics and contrasting them to salary, other benefits, and hurdles in the way of doing them. I see a possibility of a better life on the other side of all that.
Soft because I prefer not to go to space and deal with the hardships? Soft because I decide to allow other people to choose extinction instead of hoping to impose my own pro-natalism on them?
You didn't answer, so be it. On reconsideration I admit I was wrong and "soft" to use the word "right" - it's not their "right" because I don't actually think rights even really exist. It's their choice made with free will. I'd like it if they became pro-natalist like me, but it would be absurd to try and force them to. Best I can do is make an appeal: you'd be happier if you go live real, natural life. If that's on mars (which I doubt), so be it.
It's just a matter of time before every organism on earth dies if humans do not bring them to other planets.
The earth is 4.5 billion years old, and by most estimates has only 0.6 billion years left before the sun's light is insufficient to sustain photosynthesis. Even if some life survives that, earth will eventually burn up as the sun expands.
Some catastrophic event, human-caused nuclear warfare, asteroid, bioweapon could easily destroy all intelligent life on earth. If that happens it is very unlikely intelligent life will have time to evolve before the earth is destroyed.
Why gamble on an event like that not happening given how close we've come? The universe is vast, why don't humans have a duty to protect life and bring it to other planets asap? It's so strange that environmentalists want to preserve natural life but steadfastly oppose colonizing other planets (the only way to actually preserve it).
Modern humans have been around only 200-300k years. Industrialization started 130 years ago or so.
Getting off the planet in the next 600 million years is a much, much smaller concern than how we can actually keep the species going in the immediate future. While, yes, at some point we need a 'plan B' to earth, the reality is we still first need a plan A; despite how far away we are from it, we are much closer to being able to maintain equilibrium on this planet than we are to colonizing another (and if we don't fix the first in a relatively short period, but somehow manage the second, we just doom two planets anyway).
From that angle, it sounds strange. However, if you talk about colonizing other planets, it's not "preserving natural life" anymore, it's establishing several invasive species by either creating an ecosystem where there is none or (even worse) destroying a (hypothetical) extraterrestrial ecosystem to establish one that would be useful to humans. There are definitely some people who would refuse extending their own lifespan beyond its natural limits, so it's not surprising that some have the same opinion for the species as a whole...
The universe will eventually die either-way so why bother
We're two centuries in the industrial revolution and everything points to the fact that we're destroying our home planet, which means two things:
- 0.6 billion years is plenty of time
- if we fucked up so bad on this perfect planet how likely it is that we have anywhere close to a comfortable life on a dead planet that we haven't evolved to live on ? We had the best conditions possible to start with and we destroyed a good part of it for petty things in an extremely small amount of time
Actually it would be much better for us if the sun were a little smaller, and earth just a little closer to it to compensate. As the sun gets older it gives us more energy, not less. A less heavy sun would last much much longer.
"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.