[HN Gopher] Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?
___________________________________________________________________
Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?
Author : nsoonhui
Score : 218 points
Date : 2022-06-25 13:09 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (backreaction.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (backreaction.blogspot.com)
| rob_c wrote:
| Simply put.
|
| Please America stop using more and more artificial modern
| chemicals in your farming and go back to tried and tested
| agricultural methods.
|
| Your soil is getting destroyed through mega tractors. Your buying
| everything glaxo can sell and your harming your own wasteland
| that for some reason you grow copious amounts of corn on.
|
| The problem is still there and making an article suggesting that
| it's not for a (surprise twist...), "the problem is worst than
| you think" ending, is just turning a topic into a discussion that
| should be settled fact.
| jl6 wrote:
| Artificial modern chemicals increase yield, which reduces food
| price. Yes, we should use less of those chemicals. Yes, that
| will hit the poorest hardest.
|
| Is this problem solvable? Maybe. But let's not pretend it's
| simple.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > go back to tried and tested agricultural methods
|
| https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/images/US...
|
| "Tried and tested" agricultural methods produced about 20
| bushels of corn per acre.
|
| Current "artificial modern chemicals" methods produce about
| 160. Eight times as much.
|
| > your harming your own wasteland that for some reason you grow
| copious amounts of corn on
|
| The reason is that it feeds a substantial portion of the
| planet.
| haspok wrote:
| Long live High Fructose Corn Syrup!
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| The same is true for wheat, rice, and virtually every other
| staple crop.
|
| Not to mention that going back to the "traditional" methods
| would require that 90% of the population be dedicated to
| performing manual agricultural labor, the bulk of which has
| historically been performed by unfree people (i.e., slaves
| and serfs).
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| It's no worse than sugar. Both are unnecessary for humans
| and can be extracted as needed from fats and proteins by
| the human body.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Agreed, but we didn't used to shove sugar in literally
| everything. Corn syrup mixes well into solution, it's
| pretty damn stable, cheap, easy to store and measure,
| won't clump... and yea people used to like x product
| fine, but really prefer it sweeter.
|
| It's not that corn syrup is bad, it's too good which is
| bad.
| ephbit wrote:
| According to Dr. Robert Lustig of University of
| California fructose is indeed worse than sugar. [1]
|
| It's been a good while since I've watched this video. As
| far as I remember, he argues that fructose is to the
| human body strikingly similar to alcohol. Since (unlike
| glucose) fructose can neither be utilized by muscles nor
| by the brain, it gets treated more or less like a toxic
| substance in the liver. In the video Lustig claims that
| fructose might even be harder on the liver than alcohol.
|
| So I'd conclude: more fructose --> less healthy. Thus
| High Fructose Corn Sirup HFCS = far from healthy.
|
| [1] https://www.uctv.tv/shows/Fat-Chance-
| Fructose-2-0-25641
| LightG wrote:
| Well, this year in the UK I've seen practically none when
| normally I'd see hundreds.
|
| n=1
| jspash wrote:
| n++
|
| (sorry if this comment doesn't abide by the HN rules. i just
| thought it would be appreciated around here)
| peteradio wrote:
| > However, the numbers may sound more alarming than they really
| are because honey bees are efficiently bred and managed by
| humans.
|
| Could that be part of the problem, they mention diversity loss in
| habitat, how about diversity of honeybee genetics. At the same
| time, HoneyBees are basically barnyard animals, we don't monitor
| the collapse of pig populations as they head to the
| slaughterhouse. I understand its not quite an apt analogy because
| that is the known causative agent and nobody is trying to
| slaughter their HoneyBees. All the same, they are not natural, I
| wonder if the public realizes that.
| solardev wrote:
| Honeybees are basically an invasive species that humans brought
| to the Americas in order to pollinate old-world crops (and also
| harvest honey). The thing is, we've replaced a lot of native
| new-world ecosystems and foods with old-world crops that depend
| on old-world bees.
|
| There are a few separate problems that the media often mixes
| up:
|
| One is that our old-world crops aren't getting enough old-world
| bees to meet their pollination needs.
|
| Separately, new-world bees (what the article calls "wild bees")
| are also being replaced by old-world bees, losing out in
| competition, and not being cared for by professional
| beekeepers. They're more vulnerable, less protected, and less
| monitored.
|
| To top it all off, many kinds of bees, old-world or new, are
| also suffering from the cumulative (and unfortunately complex)
| domino effects of habitat loss, pesticides, climate change,
| etc.
|
| I think what's happening in the media is that journalists,
| knowingly or not, are using #2 and #3 to amplify the concern of
| #1 even though they're not always aligned (e.g., old-world bees
| are often one of the reasons contributing to the decline of
| native new-world bees).
|
| It's relatively harder to get the public to care about an
| industrial economics problem (#1, where farmers have to resort
| to expensive human manual pollination instead of cheap bees),
| so trying to sell that as environmental crisis a la Silent
| Spring gets more eyeballs.
| peteradio wrote:
| To which old-world crops do you refer?
| solardev wrote:
| (Not my knowledge, just repeating sources): almonds, some
| apples, melons, alfafa, plums, avocado, blueberry, cherry,
| pear, cucumber, sunflower, cranberry, kiwi, etc.
|
| Source: PDF page 4: https://www.beyondpesticides.org/assets
| /media/documents/poll...
|
| Background, in order from "most readable" to "scholarly":
|
| https://www.museumoftheearth.org/bees/agriculture
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_crop_plants_pollinate
| d...
|
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.262413599
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8396518/
| tacocataco wrote:
| Corn beans and squash?
|
| https://www.reneesgarden.com/blogs/gardening-
| resources/celeb...
| h2odragon wrote:
| Remember "Killer Bees"? People killed a lot of wild honeybee
| hives from _fear_ they 'd hybridize and introduce new genes
| into the domestic population.
|
| There's a few people who will talk about the lack of diversity
| in domestic bee genetics. AFAIK they're not popular, everybody
| wants to blame anyone but regulators.
| dontbenebby wrote:
| The bees are very much alive, the only decent beam* for parkour
| near me has a hive inside it now.
|
| * the key is do it next to a bike lane, they're easier to look
| out for and rarely in the lane at all in cyberpunk appalachia
| jb1991 wrote:
| I thought this was going to be about the impending doom of the
| Mexican killer bees we were all warned about in the 80s but that
| never came. It was in the news for months about a cloud of killer
| bees.
| artmageddon wrote:
| I thought they were the Africanized ones? Those were the ones I
| read about as a kid in my school library, and the way they
| depicted their projected spread across the USA made it look
| like a pestilence worthy of Revelation. I honestly thought I
| wasn't going to live to become an adult because we'd all be
| over taken by super aggressive bees.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| One problem with the news is that every issue of concern gets
| blown way out of proportion in the news until it sounds like
| some kind of existential disaster, and then when total disaster
| does not come, people think the issue wasn't nonsense. But in
| reality many of these things are a real problem, just not quite
| at the scale the news has made it out to be. But what I see
| time and time again is people dismissing issues of concern
| because of how the media treated the issue, when what we should
| really be doing is trying to read through the media's
| sensationalism to the underlying facts. But I don't think
| enough people have really internalized how much of the media is
| sensationalism and lies. People know it when you ask them, but
| then they go on and believe it all anyway.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| People will always click on apocalypse stories, so the market
| will keep supplying them.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Succint and accurate.
|
| Massive rebound of the coral growth? No one wants to report
| that:
| https://twitter.com/alexepstein/status/1440696877079433220
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| Alex Epstein? The one that is a self-professed Fossil Fuels
| advocate and is starting a lobbying group with Thiel's
| backing?
| https://twitter.com/alexepstein/status/1516091577227255810
|
| Anyway, I went to his source material he and it said
|
| _" The last couple of years have revealed that recovery is
| underway across much of the GBR, a promising sign
| illustrating that the GBR still has the capacity and
| necessary ecological functions to recover from disturbances.
|
| The Central and Southern GBR had periods of recovery within
| the last decade which have been curtailed by disturbances,
| arresting recovery, and causing further coral declines.
| Sustained recovery of the GBR back to historical high coral
| cover requires the next few years to be disturbance free to
| allow corals to continue to grow and increase their
| populations.
|
| While there have been hard coral cover increases across all
| three regions over recent years, the Northern and Southern
| GBR are still below the highest recorded coral cover in the
| 1980s, and preliminary analyses have documented shifts in the
| dominant corals on some reefs.
|
| 2021 has been a low disturbance year, while the period from
| 2014 to 2020 was an intense period of widespread
| disturbances. There were numerous severe tropical cyclones
| and three mass coral bleaching events in five years. The
| fourth wave of crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks began
| around 2010 between Lizard Island and Cairns, and by 2020 had
| progressed south to reefs offshore from Townsville."_
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I read his book, Fossil Future, and found it quite
| convincing. Also agree with Peter Thiel's political stance
| which is horribly smeared and mischaracterized by media as
| Fascist.
|
| So if your rebuttal starts out with smearing of the
| character instead of refuting the points, it just further's
| the credibility of Alex Epstein.
|
| Climate alarmicism leaves no option to engage in criticism.
| There is no room left. It just shows how deranged it has
| gotten. There are a lot of lunatics that deny climate
| change, but Alex takes a data-based approach and advocates
| that we improve human flourishing, and solve the problem of
| CC.
|
| Highly recommend his Google Talk to anyone that wants to
| see how sloppy some of the Climate alarmicism has gotten:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6b7K1hjZk4
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| No, I am contextualizing what Epstein is saying. It is
| from an industry advocate/lobbyist, not a scientist.
| Epstein has a bias, and is being up front about it, and I
| am repeating his own words. He may be right, and he may
| be wrong, but his goal is to persuade not to find the
| truth. I hope they overlap more often than not for all
| our sakes.
|
| I note that you didn't address the scientific portion of
| my response - that while everyone is happy for the GBR
| recovery, that there was an element of luck in it vs they
| other years 2014-2020 and isn't a trend.
|
| Look at your repeating the phrases "deranged",
| "lunatics". How can I be expected to have a good faith
| conversation with you when you are saying that I'm
| mentally ill and illogical. I didn't do the same to you,
| and I'm disappointed.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| > his goal is to persuade not to find the truth.
|
| I found it to be exactly the opposite. The current CC
| movement leaves no room for dissent. Just like the first
| year of COVID where we left no room to listen to credible
| scientists, CC movement is singularly focused often
| ignoring inconvenient truths.
|
| > Look at your repeating the phrases "deranged",
| "lunatics"
|
| I mean, I wasn't calling you mentally ill, but there are
| people that with close approximation resemble precisely
| someone that has no logical basis and has taken on a
| religious pro or anti CC agenda. Watch Fox news sometimes
| and you'll get what I mean. Alex is quite the opposite,
| but your first instinct was to smear his character by
| aligning it with Peter Thiel. Bad faith arguments start
| with ad-hominem attacks on the person's motives instead
| of the content of the argument. You kind of did the same
| thing with me by criticizing my language instead of
| engaging in arguments, just one step shy of a false moral
| superiority card (you're insulting mentally ill people).
|
| Most NYT reporters that invest in propelling Climate
| catastrophe agenda are not scientists either.
| agumonkey wrote:
| If there's one bubble that should burst it's the media. There's
| too much noise nowadays. And yeah it taps onto lazy human
| reflexes.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| You didn't read the article, did you? The author did not
| diminish CCD. Let me spoil it for you, this is the summary
|
| _" It's really just a matter of time until there'll be too few
| bees to pollinate some of the flowers or too few insects to
| support some of the birds, or too few birds to spread seeds and
| so on. And we may be able to fix a few of these problems with
| technology, but not all of them. So, while it is important to
| talk to your kids about the birds and the bees, it really is
| important to talk to your kids about the birds and the bees.
|
| We simply don't know what's going to happen in response to what
| we do, and I'm afraid we're not paying attention which is why
| I'm standing here recording this video. Because if we don't pay
| attention, one day we'll be surprised to be remembered that in
| the end we, too, are just part of the ecosystem."_
|
| Our situation is still really bad and we don't even know the
| extent of how bad it is. Everyone just reflexively has to
| believe it's not really the end of the world as we've known it
| for most of human history, and that we can't really be bringing
| about an extinction cycle that will end a significant
| percentage of species. We are, though, every scientist in the
| field knows it. We are inducing a hot earth out of the
| planetary cycle because of carbon dioxide at the same time
| we're weakening ecosystem. It's going to end badly, and
| instinctively we all know it.
| hammock wrote:
| The bee apocalypse is still here. The bees haven't come back.
|
| Other fauna have declined as well, without us noticing.
|
| I go to northern Maine a few times a year and I'm always looking
| for moose. I used to be able to find them. Now I only see them
| when I'm in the air (from a plane).
|
| My friend showed me a study the state did tracking 60 newborn
| moose calves. Due to overwhelming winter tick population, 90%(!)
| did not survive the first year, and therefore could not
| reproduce. This problem has led to a massive decline of moose.
| mulmen wrote:
| Do you have a link to the study? I'm curious how that survival
| rate compares to the past.
| scruple wrote:
| I found an article about it because I was also curious.
|
| https://www.mainepublic.org/environment-and-
| outdoors/2022-05...
| Jedd wrote:
| I thought that Varroa destructor (a mite that attacks bees) had
| been determined to be a big causal factor? Improving tools for
| beekeepers, mostly chemical treatments, have ameliorated the
| situation.
|
| Here in Australia we're _V. destructor_ free. Well mostly. We 've
| had 3 incursions, two of which were controlled, and the third is
| happening now with some fierce responses (colony and equipment
| destruction within a wide radius).
|
| It's understood that this pest would destroy remaining feral
| colonies of honeybees (probably a good thing), but also have a
| huge cost for beekeepers and other susceptible (native) species.
| tehchromic wrote:
| Humans are wiping out the planetary biome as predicted
| tacocataco wrote:
| Do you think industrialization led to atrophy of our ability to
| adapt to our environments? (The reason we're apex predator)
|
| Or maybe modern civilization requires more long term planning
| then our brains are wired for?
| excalibur wrote:
| > Whatever happened to the Bee Apocalypse?
|
| The same thing that happened to the regular apocalypse. It's
| still moving closer every day, it's just taking longer than
| anticipated and causing some to lose patience.
| epgui wrote:
| These things tend to happen slowly and then very, very quickly.
| vr46 wrote:
| It probably helps that millions of people are helping insect and
| bird populations by planting stacks of wildflowers, doing No Mow
| May, and being a bit nicer to local wildlife which all adds up.
| hinkley wrote:
| If you're trying to help bumble bees, they tend to like to
| build their nests in the ground under/around rocks, or
| occasionally in dense duff like straw bales/wattles.
|
| Last year I had a plant to move a flat stone behind a masonry
| retaining wall on my property to be a hat on a low stone wall
| that extended off of the end of it, hoping to create some bee
| habitat. The rock turned out to be too heavy to move, and as
| soon as I started jostling it, bumble bees came out from under
| it to see what the ruckus was. So apparently that rock was
| working just fine where it was. Instead I bought some new
| stone, but I haven't observed any bees so far this year.
|
| Some people use old pots for this task, but I know people, and
| an upturned pot is going to be inspected, potentially
| destroying the hive. Kids in particular would be both more
| prone to this, and more traumatized to learn what they'd done.
| A big ol' rock is less of an attractive hazard.
| peteradio wrote:
| I unwittingly disturbed a solo bumblebee who made his winter
| home in my compost pile. I wasn't quite sure what I came
| across, I'd unearthed a wildly vibrating ball of fine fluff,
| once I teased it apart out flew a big ol' bumblebee. I've got
| dozens of bumblebees around my yard this part of the summer
| as our comfrey goes to flower. I believe they winter among my
| raspberries where its basically an undisturbed hugelkultur
| mound. Besides bumblebees and carpenter bees I'm pretty much
| unaware if I'm looking at a wild bee or some type of fly.
| There are at least a dozen probably closer to two dozen
| different bee/fly species on the raspberries alone this time
| of year. I also see honeybees but they stick to the clover, I
| will see more of them when sunflowers and stonecrop flower. I
| feel very fortunate to see that kind of variety, we even get
| monarch butterflies enough to cause the branches to move
| under their collective weight, I wasn't aware that happened
| outside of Mexico.
| hinkley wrote:
| Sometimes I just stand at arm's length and lean over an
| stare for a bit. The bees in such cases are too busy to
| bother with you (and indeed I've used this exercise as
| exposure therapy for myself and two kids who were all
| previously nervous around bees) and seeing three or four
| species in a five minute span, you can start to tell them
| apart in a way you won't get if you spread that duration
| out over a month.
|
| Lavender and rosemary are very good stages in this regard,
| roses and the whole rose family (including blackberries,
| apples, cherries) are also good. If you're on the west
| coast the ceanothus bush is pollinator paradise.
| bmitc wrote:
| Just as a note, it is important that people plant native
| wildflowers and not just any wildflowers.
| unity1001 wrote:
| Eu banned neonicotinoids on 1 September 2020. That's what
| happened. Which caused the US to pressure the Eu to dump
| Monsantanto on Bayer as a retaliation. Bayer bought Monsanto.
| Thats it.
| cainxinth wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations
|
| > "Some of the insects most affected include bees, butterflies,
| moths, beetles, dragonflies and damselflies."
|
| Great. It's gonna be nothing but roaches, mosquitos, and ants
| eventually.
| hinkley wrote:
| Don't forget house flies.
| akrod1 wrote:
| Honeybees are dying en masse from diseases. Yet they are being
| neglected by the animal health industry. We need safe and
| sustainable solutions to help protect the world's honeybees.
| Dalan Animal health is developing the worlds first honeybee
| vaccine. To learn more go to: https://www.dalan.com/
| BirAdam wrote:
| What happened is that the apocalypse did happen, is still
| happening, and will continue to happen until such time as people
| quit using tons of pesticides.
|
| Worse is that warmer air usually means more oxygen is available
| which should make insect and arachnid populations explode, and
| should result in physically larger insects and arachnids. That we
| do not see this speaks to the health of these populations.
| zahma wrote:
| I appreciate that she draws the link between monoculture crops,
| land use, and the health of ecosystems upon which agriculture
| depends.
|
| Organics are important not because GMOs are the enemy but rather
| because the land use change is inherently bad for all life in
| that area. GMOs don't have to lead to monoculture crops that span
| acres or rampant neonicotinoid insecticides, but they often do,
| and it's precisely at that point we can see drastic changes in a
| biome's stability and therefore the health of bees among many
| other pollinators. That's why we need to be talking about insect
| numbers at large and not only bees.
|
| The study of biodiversity has an extremely difficult time
| modeling these kinds of changes, and that's probably why many
| scientists won't go to bat against this kind of land use change.
| A self-respecting scientist won't say that converting croplands
| to monocultures ready for insecticide use lead to biodiversity
| die-off because it's hard to actually track the fluctuations
| between species. It takes so much time to collect data to analyze
| before we even get an inkling of the interplay. We understand so
| little about the microscale interactions and how it fits into our
| larger understanding of agriculture and land development.
|
| For those who think this is all overblown and alarmist, go sit on
| the grass -- if you can find a patch -- and stare at a spot until
| it comes alive. Things are moving around and teeming with a
| multitude of species of plants and insects. The reality you see
| escapes unnoticed until you stop to think about the ecological
| systems that underpin our fragile existence. Our health depends
| on a functional biosphere. If we cannot figure out how to share
| the earth with its other inhabitants, what the fuck are we doing
| going to Mars?
| veddox wrote:
| While I heartily agree with most of your comment, I must
| strongly disagree with the third paragraph (this is exactly
| what I'm doing my PhD on):
|
| > many scientists won't go to bat against this kind of land use
| change. A self-respecting scientist won't say that converting
| croplands to monocultures ready for insecticide use lead to
| biodiversity die-off because it's hard to actually track the
| fluctuations between species
|
| Although you are correct that the details are complicated and
| different species respond in different ways, the overall
| picture is abundantly clear. Intensive agriculture with large
| monocultures, simplified landscapes, and heavy
| fertiliser/pesticide input is wreaking havoc on biodiversity
| around the world. The scientific literature has been very
| explicit about this for over twenty years [e.g. 1-5], and lots
| of scientists (including my colleagues and I) are actively
| engaging with farmers, NGOs, and policy-makers to find workable
| solutions to ameliorate the problem.
|
| [1] https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2005.00782.x [2]
| https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1253425 [3]
| https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.03.002 [4]
| https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.14606 [5]
| https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abg6995
| 40four wrote:
| Great article! One of the first I've ever seen that breaks down
| the complexities of the bee problem in a thoughtful, reasonable
| way. The slew of articles we've seen is the last 5-10 years about
| the 'Bee Apocalypse' were largely either highly misleading,
| poorly researched, or just plain biased by one agenda or another.
| It used to make me really angry. I'm sure I could dig up past
| rants I've made about it here on HN. Very nice to finally see a
| detailed objective explanation of the situation.
| epgui wrote:
| What's on the agenda, please?
| bergenty wrote:
| Is the agenda to save bees?
| MrYellowP wrote:
| > or just plain biased by one agenda or another.
|
| When it reaches mainstream news, there's always an agenda.
| synu wrote:
| So just insinuations and "do your own research?" I'm
| intrigued as to who the nefarious entity is with their
| shadowy plan to protect pollinators that the media is
| conspiring to hide.
| [deleted]
| tcmart14 wrote:
| Still happening, it's just now maintaining bee colonies and
| taking them on the road to pollinate is now an industry.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| there is a single man who was/is credited with starting this
| so-called industry -- it was on the cover of a New York Times
| sunday supplement, long ago.. not everyone was thrilled by
| this, as you can imagine. When big trucked-bee death event
| happened contemporaneously with documented colony collapse, I
| bet that he had his name scrubbed from more than one website.
| ck2 wrote:
| Horizontal well fracking was perfected/took-off in 2006
|
| https://ballotpedia.org/File:EIA_fracked_wells_2015.png
|
| Wells are burnt off for months, the more wells the more burnoff.
|
| People get sick up to 60 miles away from the burnoff, I wonder
| how that affects wildlife.
| erulabs wrote:
| If fracking was related, we'd see a dramatically higher die-off
| around the permian basin and more or less no die-off whatsoever
| in the north-west and north-east. This isn't quite what we see:
| https://fractracker.org and
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-map-highlights...
|
| Now, as for fracking and air pollution, I am not an expert, but
| I did have a very interesting set of discussions with a
| fracking engineer who made a good argument that fracking shale
| in particular has _dramatically decreased_ air pollution from
| oil extraction. Here is an article about it
| https://www.energyindepth.org/report-data-indicate-that-mass...
| (should be noted that this website is run by the oil industry,
| so take this line of argument with some salt).
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Thanks for the information. What about water table pollution?
| Those videos of people's tap water lighting on fire certainly
| stuck with me [1]
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/1zagvo75RJo
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| Tangentially related, I wonder if anyone has done a meta-analysis
| about media reported calamities, like Zika, the bee population
| dying off, etc., and doing a follow up. Then comparing it to what
| the media reported initially. Was this accurate, blown out of
| proportion, understated, or simply sensational reporting?
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Endemic zika virus is horrible if you're in a region that has
| it like me. As if we didn't have enough with dengue,
| chikungunya, yellow fever and malaria... Any of these diseases
| feel like getting run over by a bus to get and only two of
| those have effective preventative vaccines (Yellow fever and
| now thankfully malaria), but if I get dengue again I could
| possibly die. The fact that herd immunity kicked in is
| definitely why you haven't heard as much about it but trust us,
| this isn't a fun thing to get used to and many, many lives are
| affected daily by neglected tropical diseases. Maybe you will
| notice when these diseases make it north of Florida.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I am very fond of the Summer of the Shark.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| It might be hard to tell whether a foretold disaster never
| materializes because a) it was sensationalized or b) because
| the attention spurred action (which is good!).
| kergonath wrote:
| Also sometimes things just don't happen for some unforeseen
| or unknown reason. It does not mean that initial reporting
| was sensationalised.
| lkbm wrote:
| SSC did a blog post about the various environmental panics of
| the 1990s. Some were real, some weren't; some were solved, some
| weren't[0].
|
| [0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/01/what-happened-
| to-90s-e...
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| This article is notable in that it contained this sentence:
|
| > Recycling remained inefficient and of dubious benefit, and
| never really caught on.
|
| Which made me realise, the first time I read it, that he
| didn't know what he was talking about and was just repeating
| what he heard in his weird echo chamber with unwarranted
| confidence. If you're in that bubble that will apparently
| seem like a totally normal thing to say, if you're not then
| it will seem like utter insanity.
|
| Even more so when you follow the link, and realise he's
| linking to a New York Times op-ed, which doesn't even agree
| with the claim (though it's trying pretty hard to give the
| impression it is).
|
| > THE environmental benefits of recycling come chiefly from
| reducing the need to manufacture new products -- less mining,
| drilling and logging. But that's not so appealing to the
| workers in those industries and to the communities that have
| accepted the environmental trade-offs that come with those
| jobs.
|
| Oh so recycling actually works, but we need fake jobs for
| people who don't care about economic efficiency? I'm glad we
| got some clear eyed realists in to explain this all to us.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Oh so recycling actually works, but we need fake jobs for
| people who don't care about economic efficiency? I'm glad
| we got some clear eyed realists in to explain this all to
| us.
|
| That's not what the op-ed is saying. The existence of
| benefits does not mean the benefits are bigger than the
| costs. In context, that sentence is part of an argument
| against the idea that landfills are filling up.
|
| So how big are the benefits relative to the costs?
|
| Well, it cites some data to say that recycling paper and
| metal does a good job, and that everything else combined is
| pretty useless. That doesn't strike me as wrong in any
| obvious way.
|
| Combine that with "That money could buy far more valuable
| benefits, including more significant reductions in
| greenhouse emissions." and "He concludes that the social
| good would be optimized by subsidizing the recycling of
| some metals, and by imposing a $15 tax on each ton of trash
| that goes to the landfill." and this doesn't sound like an
| argument for fake jobs or ignoring economic efficiency to
| me.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| So the quote:
|
| > Recycling remained inefficient and of dubious benefit,
| and never really caught on.
|
| Linking to an article that, in your words:
|
| > cites some data to say that recycling paper and metal
| does a good job
|
| and
|
| > the social good would be optimized by subsidizing the
| recycling of some metals
|
| But also says metal mining and logging communities are
| against it because they 'have accepted the environmental
| trade-offs'.
|
| Again, from within a certain bubble that may not seem
| contradictory and illogical, but it is.
|
| Nor is cheaper ways of reducing CO2 a sensible argument.
| Every method of reducing CO2, except for one, has cheaper
| options. We should do all the ones that are a net
| positive, and so save us money, not only the very best
| one.
|
| The whole article is weak sophistry of this kind. As I
| said, it doesn't support the argument, just does its best
| to pretend it does.
| lisper wrote:
| These historical successes are encouraging, but it is very
| important not to extrapolate any of them to anthropogenic
| climate change. The processes underlying every single one of
| the examples in the SSC article operate on time scales of
| years or decades. CO2 causes effects over centuries and
| persists for millennia. It is a completely different beast.
| whatshisface wrote:
| The atmospheric chemistry one was Ozone which turned out to
| be real, and was solved through regulation.
| lisper wrote:
| Yes, but you've missed the point: the problem with ozone
| was depletion in the upper atmosphere by CFCs. But CFCs
| do not persist for millennia and ozone is continually
| produced by natural processes. So if you stop emitting
| CFCs the problem naturally fixes itself in a short period
| of time (a few decades).
|
| But even if we reduced CO2 emissions to zero tomorrow
| that would not solve the problem because we are _already_
| at 150% of pre-industrial CO2, and CO2 persists for
| thousands of years. We 've taken carbon that was
| sequestered by natural processes over a period of
| hundreds of millions of years and released it back into
| the atmosphere in a period of a few hundred years. That
| genie will not go quietly or quickly back into its
| bottle.
| eru wrote:
| Doing this for back-issues of Zero Hedge would be particularly
| entertaining.
| foobiekr wrote:
| ZH is a great example of the asymmetric warfare of fighting
| bullshit. They report a mix of truth, distorted
| interpretations and wholly made up nonsense simultaneously.
| It costs them almost nothing to generate this trash, and
| efforts to inspect it would be stymied by the level of effort
| in tracking citations (if they exist, which is almost never)
| or even just reporting on whether some predicted topic
| occurred. Another problem is that many of the predictions are
| premised on a non-reality that in and of itself makes
| addressing the content difficult.
|
| disclaimer: I love reading ZH and have for at least a decade
| because it is entertaining in a gross way. They are basically
| consistently wrong but like crypto people, everything is
| positive signs that they are right.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| (1) Stop using neonicotinoid pesticides. There are plenty of
| alternatives for protecting food crops from insect infestations,
| such as neem oil applied as a foliar spray or a soil soak in
| response to infestations. Neonictoninoides are based on the
| tobacco nicotine molecule structure, but are typically
| chlorinated and modified to make them more persistent and toxic
| to insects relative to animals. There's a good argument for
| banning the entire class due to their persistent ecological
| effects on beneficial native insect populations.
|
| https://organic-center.org/research/neonicotinoid-pesticides...
|
| (2) Have undisturbed habitat set aside for wild bee populations.
| This can be something as simple as maintaining undisturbed
| hedgerows on the sides of agricultural fields, but in general
| means maintaining a fair amount of undisturbed native habitat.
|
| https://www.planetbee.org/planet-bee-blog//native-bee-series...
| chrisan wrote:
| Is neem realistic for large scale farms?
|
| We use it in our personal garden, but you need to continually
| re-apply every 4-5 days with really good coverage for a period
| of time for it to be effective. It has been hit or miss for us.
| If neem doesn't work then its oh well, plant something else,
| but we aren't selling a crop.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| It seems to have worked without many problems in France, they
| had a ban in 2018:
|
| https://cen.acs.org/environment/pesticides/France-bans-
| uses-...
|
| but there has been a recent exception made for the sugar beet
| crop:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/france-sees-no-easy-
| fix...
| 0des wrote:
| neem in my experience is most effective when applied to both
| sides of the leaf as well, since most critters like clinging
| under the leaf.
| seltzered_ wrote:
| There was the documentary 'nicotine bees' (2010) too:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnAoOPiimfw
|
| Colony collapse to some degree is also supposedly normal, see
| 'beepocalypse nah' (sarah taber) https://soundcloud.com/farm-
| to-taber-podcast/farm-to-taber-0...
| 42e6e8c8-f7b8-4 wrote:
| Demonization of neonics is misplaced. You can spray at night
| when bees aren't active. You can spray when your plants aren't
| in bloom and attracting bees. Oh well, the 2 minutes hate have
| emerged against neonics and farmers pivot like they ways do.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| > Demonization
|
| This is a dramatic overstatement. You're disagreeing about
| _neonics_ , I'm sorry if that's hard not to take personally
| but it seems like something than could be discussed without
| the vitriol.
| 42e6e8c8-f7b8-4 wrote:
| I don't understand how you can parse my sentence and think
| that the object being demonized is either me or farmers.
| Yes, neonics are being demonized.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| They don't think that. They're saying that your use of
| the term 'demonization' is over-dramatic and unhelpful.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| If we're talking about trying to stem the destruction of wild
| species here (The problem really isn't about domesticated
| honeybees), then you should definitely consider the fact that
| spraying at night won't help those wild bees which are
| nocturnal [1], nor does your point of view on these address
| the fact that these pesticides have a degree of environmental
| persistence. [2] This isn't demonization, it's just straight
| facts when there's plenty of alternatives out there which
| aren't feeding the giant agri-industrial complex behemoth.
|
| [1] https://www.buzzaboutbees.net/do-bees-fly-at-night.html
|
| [2] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b06388
| 42e6e8c8-f7b8-4 wrote:
| You're mistaken. _only_ big ag can pivot. The smaller your
| are, the harder it is to keep up with all the regulation.
| Notice also the phenomenon of regulatory capture.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| If you want to stop getting downvoted try refuting my
| central points directly, I'm not really sold
| kibwen wrote:
| This article buries its lede, which is about how honey bees get
| all the attention but are at less risk than wild bees:
|
| _> And that brings us to the actual problem. The honey bee (Apis
| mellifera) is only one of about 20 thousand different bee
| species. The non-honey bees are usually referred to as wild bees,
| and each location has its native species. According to an
| estimate from researchers at Cornell University in 2006, wild
| bees contribute to the pollination of 85 percent of crops in
| agriculture. "_
|
| _> [...]_
|
| _> But last year the magazine Cell published the results of a
| study with a global estimate for the situation of wild bees. The
| authors looked at the numbers of bee species that were collected
| or observed over time using data publicly available at the Global
| Biodiversity Information Facility. They found that even though
| the number of records has been increasing, the number of
| different species in the records has been sharply decreasing in
| the past decades._
|
| _> The decline rates differ between the continents, but the
| species numbers are dropping steeply everywhere except for
| Oceania. The researchers say there's a number of factors in play
| here, such as the expansion of monocultures, loss of native
| habitat, pesticides, climate change, and bee trade that also
| trades around pathogens._
|
| _> So the problems that wild bees face are similar to those of
| honey bees, but they have an additional problem which is...
| honeybees. Honey bees compete with wild bees for food and habitat
| and they also pass on viruses. Now, a big honey bee colony can
| deal with viruses by throwing out the infected bees. But this
| doesn't work for wild bees because they don't live in large
| colonies. And worse, when honey bees and wild bees fight for food
| they seem to both lose out._
| henearkr wrote:
| The whole point of being alarmed of the Bee Apocalypse is that
| you look at the honey bees as an indicator, just like the
| lichens on trees are an indicator of air pollution (few lichens
| mean a bad air quality).
|
| When honey bees are dwindling, pretty much all the insects are
| too.
|
| The Bee Apocalypse has not gone anywhere, it's just still here,
| and it is in fact an Insect Apocalypse, which is many orders of
| magnitude worse.
| oblak wrote:
| I don't know what's driving it but I've been observing sharp
| changes in insect populations that visit our balcony which
| has been completely taken over by some kind of huge black
| wasp/hornet monsters.
|
| These bastards seem to hunt baby grasshoppers all day long
| and butcher all kinds of other wasps and bees, too. I used to
| find piles of chopped bodies but until competition got the
| message and show no more. I even found a stash of dead
| spiders they've managed to build inside a cupboard.
|
| I am starting to get worried.
|
| I do observe other changes in different species but this one
| is the wildest I've got. Haven't seen a big grasshopper in a
| decade. My cat used to hunt them all night. What changed? I
| don't know. Firebugs used to cover some trees in red 3
| summers ago. Haven't seen one in months.
|
| Edit: as to why I am replying to your post? I liked it so
| much, I decided to share my extremely limited experience.
| henearkr wrote:
| The decline of insects has brought an unbalance that may
| make some species over-represented as a consequence.
|
| But what you are seeing can also be a case of climate
| change moving the habitats of species around, and make them
| live where they did not live before (because also prevent
| them from living anymore where they had always been
| living).
|
| Edit: thanks for the compliment :D
|
| Just for the record, I'm an insects lover (also more
| generally a lover of Nature). And the situation is making
| me very, very sad.
| sshine wrote:
| Also, and I'm not saying this to deny climate change:
| variations between the coldness of a given winter and
| when spring onsets will, in general, greatly affect
| insect populations. Climate affects both how many survive
| the winter and how they migrate. Add oscillating patterns
| to that as predatory animals react delayed to that.
|
| Some years you will see huge winged ants, other years
| will be heavy with mosquitoes, other years will have
| giant hornets.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| That sounds really alarming to have to be around (no pun
| intended). What part of the world is this in, I was hearing
| something about the pacific northwest experiencing invasive
| Japanese giant 'killer' hornets at some point in the past
| couple of years, I thought the course of action in that
| case was calling the wildlife authorities to try and stem
| the spread?
| oblak wrote:
| Densely populated city in Bulgaria. I tried searching for
| the thing but aside from "$some_kind_of_asian_wasp taking
| over easter Europe", I've got nothing. I don't think it
| was the same species.
| riffraff wrote:
| Not the Japanese one, but there is an invasive Asian
| hornet in Europe since 15 years ago or so
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_hornet
| henearkr wrote:
| I have seen an other wasp (I'm in Japan) than the 'giant
| killer hornets' killing (decapitating) what looked like
| either another wasp/bee either a bee-looking fly.
|
| It was quite a small-scale wasp, a black one with narrow
| white stripes, but its technique was very good. It just
| dropped next to where I was sitting holding its prey
| which was trying to escape.
| WhitneyLand wrote:
| _> honey bees are dwindling_
|
| It seems they are not dwindling.
|
| That was one of the clarifications of the piece. The bigger
| concern is the number of species rather than the number of
| honeybees.
| [deleted]
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| I think the colloquial term for (edit; the most commonly well-
| known) many wild bees in English is "bumblebees". They're often
| burrowing species that don't have honey producing hives (They
| do stuff like make little caves in moss, dirt, and underbrush),
| and are often crucial pollinators of certain species of plants
| which are specifically attractive to certain wild bees (Orchids
| are a good example here) but which domesticated honeybees might
| not even touch.
|
| I was once dreaming how cool it would be to get into beekeeping
| but after realizing it might be at a greater detriment to wild
| species in my area those dreams have become somewhat faded.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Same here on our tiny farm. I don't need any more hobbies,
| but I often entertain keeping bees. But I also have a bias
| towards native plants and native insects. So I cultivate lots
| of flowering plants, and leave areas wild, but have never
| done anything with honeybees.
|
| I kinda wish there was a native Northeastern American bee
| that had some of the utility of honeybees for sugar and/or
| wax production.
|
| TIL that bumblebees actually have a history of domestication
| but that international movement of bees led to serious health
| issues and transmission of pests that decimated both wild and
| domestic populations:
| https://www.sare.org/publications/managing-alternative-
| polli...
| LurkerAtTheGate wrote:
| Consider caring for some other solitary bees. Personally, I
| like leafcutter and mason bees, which mostly just means
| providing homes (hollow tubes), construction materials
| (leaves & mud respectively), and flowering plants. In late
| winter, you harvest the cocoons to remove parasite-ridden
| or diseased (fungal, usually). They are aggressive
| pollinators and if you grow fruit & vegetables you will see
| increased yield that makes up for the lack of wax & honey.
| hinkley wrote:
| Other bees include mason bees, leafcutter bees, carpenter
| bees. Other pollinators include green flies, hoverflies, and
| some beetles and wasps.
| m-i-l wrote:
| Random trivia I learned from a visit to a fruit farm a few
| weeks back: Fruit farmers much prefer bumble bees to honey
| bees because they're much better fruit tree pollinators -
| bumble bees start much earlier in the day than honey bees
| (e.g. 07.30 vs 12.30), will work at much lower temperatures,
| and will pollinate 6 flowers in the time a honey bee takes to
| do 1 (because the honey bees tend to stick around longer on a
| flower to get more nectar out).
| mark_h wrote:
| They're loved by crop farmers where I live too (I also
| learnt recently), but they're illegal to cultivate because
| they're an introduced species.
|
| (Now that I write that, I assume honeybees are too, but
| perhaps the honey industry is well entrenched)
| mandelbrotwurst wrote:
| Hi, why would beekeeping harm wild species please?
| henearkr wrote:
| This is a problem very specific to North America.
|
| In Europe, the honey bee has always been there, and is no
| threat to anything else.
| jessaustin wrote:
| Domesticated bees might eat the same food that wild species
| eat.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| They spread diseases like mites to the wild bee species
| chiefly, as well as out-competing them for food.
|
| Details are in the parent comment and in the article but if
| watching a video is more captive of your attention here's a
| report on Deutsche Welle which I found pretty good and more
| to the point. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSYgDssQUtA
| Hemospectrum wrote:
| GGP contains a quote from the article explaining why. To
| summarize, honeybees compete with wild bees for food, and
| can spread illnesses that they can't defend against.
| michael1999 wrote:
| For the same reasons that domesticating any animal leads to
| the extinction of the wild variant -
| habitat displacement - competition for food
| - disease
| [deleted]
| synu wrote:
| Aren't there still some wild dogs, cats, horses, sheep,
| goats, and everything else humans have domesticated? Or
| are you being very specific about what went extinct, or
| maybe predicting future extinctions (in which case I'm
| curious more about what you mean?)
|
| Edit: sorry if the question came off as rude and that's
| why it was downvoted, I was sincerely curious what you
| meant.
| User23 wrote:
| The aurochs[1] has sadly been hunted to extinction. The
| last one was killed in Poland during the 17th century.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs
| Maursault wrote:
| If there weren't hunters around to hunt them to
| extinction, they would have depleted natural resources
| and starved and been a lethal danger to people on future
| roads and highways. Hunters are entitled to our eternal
| gratitude for providing these services.
| tcmb wrote:
| I don't know, maybe one day we will see that we are part
| of a balanced ecosystem, and that this balance is
| ultimately more important than having good roads.
| jfk13 wrote:
| > balance is ultimately more important than having good
| roads
|
| ...or ever-increasing numbers of humans living an ever-
| more-consumerist life.
| JoBrad wrote:
| I did some light searching, and it would seem that your
| examples don't support your viewpoint. I didn't look into
| all of them, but there is only 1 truly wild horse
| species, which was actually extinct in the wild at one
| point. The rest are feral horses. Canis familiaris is the
| descendent of an extinct species. Many (most?) wolves and
| other wild dog species that do not live well among humans
| are either currently or were until recently endangered.
| synu wrote:
| Thanks for the explanation, I was definitely including
| animals like bighorn sheep, bobcats, mountain goats,
| wolves, and so on which wouldn't really qualify.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| Not really true, bumble bees are the furry fat ones, but
| there are lots of other types of wild bees.
| nend wrote:
| Worth noting that carpenter bees are also furry fat bees,
| and often confused for bumble bees.
|
| Carpenter bees tend to be a bit shinier, and at least
| around me, bigger. Which is how I can tell them apart.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Yeah you're correct, I'm just making clear the example of
| wild bees that most people know. There's a ton of really
| interesting species that don't even really look like bees
| (Different coloration like iridescent and black) for sure.
| iratewizard wrote:
| It's a very useful example. I didn't know that bumblebees
| were separate from honeybees or that they didn't produce
| honey
| BbzzbB wrote:
| Bumblebees are a genus[1] (_Bombus_) of (wild) bees. There
| are many more genera of bees (taxonomic superfamily
| _Apoidea_) out there. They are, however, adorable chubby
| fluffs.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomic_rank
| multjoy wrote:
| I believe they prefer to be referred to as fluffy chonks.
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| I always called them flying cotton balls. They're also
| not aggressive, so working around them isn't likely to
| get you a sting, as opposed to those damn yellow jackets.
| I get all species are important but I hate those things.
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