AndyH wrote: Mon Feb 11, 2019 6:16 pm
featureless wrote: Mon Feb 11, 2019 2:21 pm
Fun thing about the agricultural pressures on our insect friends, as climate change continues to put additional pressure on feeding 7.5 billion (and growing) people, we'll bring more land into production (such as there is in a changing climate), destroy more habitat and dump more chemicals on it. As insect decomposes decline, we'll find ourselves with even less fertile soil and the loss of organic matter will result in greater soil aridity so we'll have to dump more water on it to get things to grow. Not to mention, when we lose our decomposers, we'll be eyeball deep in bullshit (among other nastiness we'd rather have returned to the soil). Climate change itself is altering insect habitat and food availability at the first level of the food web that will expand on upward resulting in food shortages to the critters we do see. The feedback loops contained in climate change are mind boggling when you start looking at them.
Conventional agriculture practices turn living soil into dirt already - no climate change necessary. They're just mining the ground of nutrients at this point and watching the soil blow away. Since there's no life left in the dirt, and literally tons of insecticides, we can't even go back to spreading manure. Additionally, we lose about 10% of grain production for every 1°C the temp rises. We're rapidly approaching a point where the bubble will have to burst.
There's a segment in the series "The Expanse" where a botanist is examining the hydroponic system maintaining the air-cleaning plants and talking about how the ecosystem can't survive the sort of disruption that just occurred. He noted that the station is "dead already - they just don't know it yet". (Season 2, Episode 10, "Cascade")
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1 ... aa5e6d/pdf
Happy thoughts.
Yup. Prax, who sees everything in botany terms. My favorite sci-fi show! (Actually, the only sci-fi show I watch, one of only 4 that aren't straight news).
We think of insects as "bugs!". They bite, they get into our food, they eat our houses, they destroy our vegetable and fruit gardens...but, without insects, we're all dead.
1/3 of our food directly requires pollination. They convert and revitalize soil, process and recycle all kinds of stuff. They provide food for all kinds of animals, even plants!
Without the bugs, we're all dead and the most aggressive estimate is that they'll all be extinct in 100 years.
"Even if the bee could explain to the fly why pollen is better than shit, the fly could never understand."