I’m 51, I spent the 90’s in Louisiana, and since my wife doesn’t fly, we have driven across the USA more times than we can count. In the 90’s, if you didn’t have a bug screen on your grill, the LoveBugs would clog your radiator and you would over heat. You also needed the windshield scrib and squeegee to scrub off the bug splatter every time you filled up. Now, you don’t need either of them.
I have been thinking about this recently. How much of this is lack of bugs vs aerodynamics. I mean back in the day we all drove big rectangles. I’m not denying the fact that it could be a mass extinction of bugs. Just curious.
Nope, seems to purely be the mass extinction thing. In fact:
modern cars hit more bugs, perhaps because older models push a bigger layer of air – and insects – over the vehicle.
We’re undoubtedly in the midst of another mass extinction, caused by human activity. Here’s another one that will freak you out:
Here’s a fun one about the fish:
You can see where they decided “Profit, with no consideration of anything else!” was the answer
I’m going to guess it wasn’t a decision, so much as tech availability and pricing. radar, sonar, more powerful boats with bigger trawl nets.
If they’d had that stuff earlier it’d be the same tragedy of the same commons.
This is kind of misleading since they closed the fishery (I think in the 90s), so the amount of cod catch would naturally plummet. The fishery did, however, need to be closed due to overfishing.
Not exactly; it collapsed, then they closed it once it was too late, and now it’s still fucked, 30 years later.
In the early-1990s, the industry collapsed entirely.
In 1992, John Crosbie, the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, set the quota for cod at 187,969 tonnes, even though only 129,033 tonnes had been caught the previous year.
In 1992 the government announced a moratorium on cod fishing.[12] The moratorium was at first meant to last two years, hoping that the northern cod population would recover and the fishery. However, catches were still low,[16] and thus the cod fishery remained closed.
By 1993 six cod populations had collapsed, forcing a belated moratorium on fishing.[14] Spawning biomass had decreased by at least 75% in all stocks, by 90% in three of the six stocks, and by 99% in the case of “northern” cod, previously the largest cod fishery in the world.[14] The previous increases in catches were wrongly thought to be due to “the stock growing” but were caused by new technologies such as trawlers.[13]
That’s a fair point. It still is a misleading plot since it isn’t an estimate cod population, and isn’t representative of population after 1992. As you said the numbers are still bleak. I found this plot
, Source , which does tell a similar story around the early 90s but indicates greater recovery in more recent years.
That is not fun. That is the opposite of fun 🤕
😢
Dude. This is loaded as fuck misinformation and you should be ashamed of yourself.
Cod fishing on Canada’s eastern coastal area has been banned since 1992. That’s why it’s flattened out to nothing all of a sudden. They stopped Cod fishing there.
Cod fishing on Canada’s eastern coastal waters was halted in 1992 for two years, with the plan being that the population would recover and they could start fishing again. Did you think the population recovered and they just decided not to start fishing again because they forgot? Or that they just had woken up one day and decided to take the drastic step of banning fishing and throwing 30,000 people out of work and destroying one of their thriving industries because nothing had happened to the fish?
The collapse happened before the ban, not after. And they took long enough to notice and implement it that the fishery was driven to total, semi-permanent collapse before the ban, to an extent that they didn’t fully realize until several years had gone by and the fish still hadn’t recovered.
Here’s a pretty detailed summary of the before and after. In 2005, after 13 years of the ban, the cod biomass off Canada’s coast was still about 3% of its pre-industrial-fishing levels. That’s why there’s still a ban: Not that they just hate sending out boats and bringing in fish, but that the population’s still fucked and not really recovering, and so any fishing would be simply giving some additional cleaver-whacks to the already dead golden goose. I don’t know what the numbers are now, but I would be surprised if they are dramatically better, and I think the chart I cited is an extremely honest and vivid picture of the results of overfishing, and not loaded or anything else as-fuck.
This makes no sense… It says pets aren’t included.
There are 500-700 million dogs worldwide. There are only just under 59 million horses.
I don’t believe any of this as a result.
Edit: and 35 million camels …and only a billion cattle. This entire thing is demonstrably bullshit.
700 million dogs x 17 kg per dog = 12 Mt of dog
59 million horses x 700 kg per horse = 41 Mt of horse
If horses are 2%, then dogs are 0.5%, less than 1% just like they said
35 million camels x 500 kg per camel = 17 Mt of camel, a little less than 1%
I think the key thing is they’re measuring biomass, not just the number of animals, otherwise it would all be stuff like mice and rats (not to say that wouldn’t be a valid thing to look at also)
This has bothered me for years. It’s a really strange thing to be telling younger relatives about how you legitimately could not drive any substantial distance without windshield cleaner at certain times of year. I remember them being plastered across the front edge of the hood and against the radiator after a long trip.
It’s one of the most visibly different things about the world today, IMO, and it’s a little eerie.
The sounds, too.
I was talking with my dad walking near to a place that had frogs croaking, and he got a little emotional and excited to hear them over the phone. Normally it’s just traffic noises now, and silence.
Not quite correct. The 2020 image should have a car completely covered in a dust of green pollen because city planners only planted male trees for decades because female trees would produce fruit or seed and be a “nuisance” and/or create trash/animal bait etc…
But if they only planted female trees, they would never get fertilized, so they wouldn’t produce fruit anyway… Or pollen.
Worst case scenario, they would produce fruit, and cities would still smell bad and have rodent problems. But without the allergies.
But girls are gross! We can’t let our city streets and parks be sissies!
(/s)
When I was a kid, there used to be hundreds of fireflies in my backyard in the summer. Now, I get excited to see even two or three.
I blame the anti-mosquito pesticide services half my neighbors seem to hire.
Where I grew up, the city wanted to hire a bunch of trucks to drive around spraying malathion into the air. They had a vote, and the town voted overwhelmingly that, fuck no they did not want that, please don’t do that, that sounds awful. Then they did it anyway.
Same thing; now there are pretty much 0 fireflies.
Why did they even have a vote then? They just hoped everyone would say yes?
Who the fuck knows
(Not me 😕)
Blame the raking of the leaves. No leaves in fall means no place for the eggs to be laid and no place for the larvae to grow. It’s another casualty to grass lawns. A “clean” nature is a place where nothing has room to thrive.
200,050: a giant cockroach at the wheel.
Oh, my. I hadn’t even noticed how much less I’ve had to clean my Windshield lately. That is a very bad sign…
It’s been a couple years since I’ve had to scrape the bugs from my windows.
I had to last week. It was the first time in years.
In Sacramento I clean mine almost daily. Just depends where you are really. Lots of farm land will always have lots of bugs.
Let me give another example:
Traveling from Central Europe to Southern Europe to spend your holiday. In 1980/1990 you had to clean your windshield a couple of times when driving there.
Not any more.
It’s a very funny commentary on how we’re all about to die!
Why didn’t the scientists warn us that pollution was bad? Where were the scientists lighting themselves on fire in protest?
This is all science’s fault!
Sorry, can someone explain? If there are less bugs, that’s attributable to something I should know?
Pollution leads to a decline in the bug population. Pollution = human byproducts (including byproducts of imprisoned animals) causing global warming and climate change affecting habitat; pollution = pesticides and chemicals which make it harder for insects to reproduce; pollution = plastics, trash, and environmental contamination; pollution = human changes that are functionally useful for humans (like roads and farms with pesticides and cities) but may be not helpful for insects.
The joke is that at first, having fewer bugs is nicer because a lot of bugs are annoying.
The joke is also that while it’s convenient at first, in another few decades it means EVERYTHING will die, so it’s not actually a good thing.
The joke is also the obliviousness of the human driver, who is relieved to be dealing with fewer bugs, not realizing that they are missing for the same reason he’s about to become extinct.
There are decreases in pretty much all types of animals that are neither human nor domesticated by humans, and for bugs there are decreases of bees, and there’s been discussion that the world is experiencing and extinction event.
Wynn Bruce set himself on fire and died trying to alert people that these trends pose a problem for humankind and no one cared. David Buckel also set himself on fire trying to warn people. It doesn’t matter at this point.
The problem is religion. People are stupid and believe in imaginary bullshit that doesn’t exist and society accepts this as normal thinking. Psychiatry says bizarre religious thinking is a symptom of schizophrenia, but normal religious thinking is acceptable if enough people believe it (in an unscientific capitulation to popular opinion in a “scientific” field that is hardly ruled by scientific rules). Religion is always illogical and it’s dooming us all.
People believe god would never create a planet that could be destroyed and don’t understand math or how to analyze scientific data. On top of that, greed caused by capitalism means that for most poor people, they are just struggling to get by and really can’t contemplate next year much less 100 years from now.
Most pollution is caused by not only poor resource management and not correctly taking into account externalities of pollution into the markplace in creating government rules (and conservative economic theory means making rules to deal with externalities) but also caused by just too many people. It’s sad, but likely some horrible virus like bird flu killing most of the population is the only way in which the planet remains habitable. The fact that only Communist China has successfully been able to reduce their population through non-economic policy declarations (as opposed to restricting resources) is a sad commentary on some of the problems of democracy when so many people just can’t understand math and instead embrace religion. (China also is a large contributor to pollution and this is not meant as exculpation of the Chinese Communist Party, but rather a brutal look at how religion has played a large role in decimating the environment.)
If people weren’t religious, they could understand these problems. But instead religious idiots take pleasure in making fun of Greta Thunberg as woke because they are literally too stupid to analyze graphs and intelligently assess data. That’s okay, if humankind lacks the intelligence to deal with this problem, then war famine and plagues will perhaps succeed since human reasoning has failed. Religion allows these people the comforts and safety of their delusions as a cocoon away from the anxiety and fear caused by dealing with reality, which can be harsh. Unfortunately, people in this delusional cocoon make really stupid decisions so we’re probably all going to die.
Often when bacterial populations with limited space and infinite glucose supplies are left to their own, they pollute and pollute and population grows exponentially until suddenly the pollution is too much and nearly all of them die. Glucose = oil; petri dish = earth; colony collapse in a petri dish = 7.99 billion people suddenly dying.
If some horrible disease like bird flu suddenly killed 4 billion people, perhaps AI could swoop down from the metaphorical cloud and help humanity manage resources in time to stop us from all dying, but probably it’s too late for even that.
(When you hear Elon Musk say people need to populate the planet even more, I think he knows what is about to happen and is taking the rational position that fleeing earth is the best option for survival and it will be hard to flee earth is everyone is so scared of death they stop working. So his message of “everything is fine, let’s increase the population and also thereby pollution even more” is dishonest, but highly rational. I don’t know if this is actually what he thinks. His hostility towards trans people also seems strange so I suppose it’s possible he is that illogical, but his response to that may be a result of a lack of empathy caused by severe autism, whereas telling people to keep increasing their numbers may be a rational lie so he can increase the likelihood of fleeing earth prior to planetary collapse.)
A certain subset of people have given up on trying to convince people of anything or do anything, figuring it’s like arguing with the sun rising and setting and that planetary biosphere collapse is just an inevitable part of nature. Others set themselves on fire to warn people, some people hold cardboard signs and gather and chant and think that will change capitalist societies and wake people up from the delusions of religions, deprogramming people through signs held up by large numbers of people. A lot of people are aware on some level, but don’t like to feel existential dread and so they just sort of ignore it.
Idk but I’m reminded of the 2002 adaptation of The Time Machine. One of the great achievements of our civilization was an advanced AI with all of our collective knowledge that you could converse with. Feels like our AI tech is on track to get there by the time we start dying off en mass lol
There are quite a few wonderful stories about the AIs continuing after humans are gone. “For a Breath I Tarry” by Roger Zelazny, and the whole of the Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem, are some great ones.
That being said one of the critical points of “For a Breath I Tarry” is that the machines are just doing what they’re programmed to do, maintaining the infrastructure for no one and just sitting in their orbits keeping the power grid going and all, and are actively hostile to any effort to bring the humans back because that would make things complicated and isn’t in their programming (since although superficially they can converse and act “intelligently,” more so than humans, they can’t really grasp the purpose of things.) Also, “With Folded Hands” by Jack Williamson is another perfectly realistic one.
Honestly, having a world that’s just alone and empty, but not “abandoned”, sounds so soothing to explore, so liminal
Until insanity set in, but until then I’d have alot of fun just exploring the place for a while
“Slow Music” by James Tiptree / Alice Sheldon is another very very good story that’s exactly like that. Very liminal you could say; lots of going around alone in a world that’s all empty but still all well maintained and functional.
Even if the AI can’t converse well, there will not be many humans around to have human conversations so it will seem a normal chat.
We could put two in front of each other and let them ping pong nonsense for all eternity.
I see you, too, saw the 24/7 live Biden-Trump “debate” Twitch stream.
Trump: “I got better things to do, like stuffing my pee-hole with tic tacs, or having syrupy sex with a maple tree. Anyone else got anything to say?”
This is one of the best things I’ve seen on the internet so far
I wonder if the insects have just learned to avoid highways, is there any data to indicate a shift in behavior like that? I couldn’t find anything
Yeah the data indicates we’ve killed so many they haven’t been able to repopulate fast enough.
They’re not avoiding the roads there’s just not as many bugs flying around anymore
