If 80% of wild plants depend on insects for pollination, the decline of insects spells trouble for just about all birds, not just the insect-eating ones. So what can we do?
Viewing entries in
The Environment
This is the exploration process: questions are paths, you keep going down them until you reach a clearing - some light! Then you look around and find another path/question. Repeat. Hope for partial illumination (a clearing!). Yeah, some people think they can achieve total illumination: out of the woods at last! I'm skeptical about the 'total' part, yet ever hopeful another clearing is just down the road. All the while aware that some problems require decisive and timely action, even though the light could be better.
"...estimates a seasonal decline of 76%, and mid-summer decline of 82% in flying insect biomass over the 27 years of study."
Is it any wonder that a lot of Republicans soured on the environmental movement or came to doubt the "consensus" on climate change? Sure, as members of a pro-business/limited government party, it's not surprising that Republicans would be a bit less gung-ho about environmental regulation than Democrats. But that doesn't explain the change in Republican opinion over the last decade or so.
Of course, we must remain vigilant! But measured optimism is not the enemy.
What stands out in this map is that Red States are less densely populated than Blue States. They're more rural with plenty of room for people to spread out. Since rural homes are bigger and traveling distances farther, it should come as no surprise that Red States consume more energy per capita than Blue States. This is a function of landscape and livelihood, not politics. If you're a farmer, you don't tootle around in a Prius - you've got a pick-up.
According to the Conference of State Legislatures, net metering policies "have facilitated the expansion of renewable energy through on-site, also known as distributed, generation." Common distributed generation sources include solar panels, natural gas, micro-turbines, methane digesters, and small wind power generators.
The hypothesis: many Republicans would like to see a reduction in Green House Gas (GHG) emissions, whether or not they believe in anthropogenic climate change. Please see Part I of this series for how I arrived at this hypothesis. ... Now, let's test the hypothesis.
According to a recent Pew Research Center report, most Republicans and Republican-leaning Americans (heretofore "Republicans") do not believe in anthropogenic climate change. Does that mean they won't support policies or regulations that reduce green house gas (GHG) emissions?
Unfortunately, the AWS authors mix well-documented facts (say, the spreading of ocean dead zones) with less widely supported claims (say, the unmitigated threat of "alien species"), blurring the line between the known and the hypothetical.
Ask a climate change skeptic why they don't trust climate change claims and you may get a history of false alarms in the environmental movement - false alarms endorsed by prominent scientists. Remember the population explosion, peak oil? So when scientists confidently predict global disaster in the very near future, a skeptic would likely file that one away as another case of alarmist rhetoric coming from the usual suspects.
These "Concerned Scientists" posts address a recent viewpoint article in the journal BioScience, World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice (2017), in terms of how effectively it conveys its message to climate change skeptics. No, that’s not me. It’s those members of the public the authors are trying to reach. They’re trying to change minds, convince people that climate change is not only real but that it's potentially catastrophic and serious action is urgent.
Family farms of various types together account for 99 percent of all farms, and those account for 89 percent of the production as of 2015.
Want to convince someone the situation is urgent and immediate action is imperative? Well, you're not going to get very far by laying it on with a sledgehammer. This approach usually backfires by triggering resistance and motivating counterarguments.
First, the energy sector. We're mostly talking methane leaks during the production, storage and transport of coal, oil, and (especially) natural gas. Fixing the leakage problem is more than affordable - it's actually profitable, because leaks cost Big Energy potential revenue to be gained from converting methane to more benign products. The reason why companies haven't moved more quickly to take advantage of this business opportunity is the upfront expense of equipment upgrades that would shut down the leaks. Making money costs money.
Home to methane-spewing microbes, wetlands are the largest source of methane emissions in the world.
Diesel transportation and household burning of solid fuels together account for almost 60% of global black carbon emissions. Transitioning to cleaner, more efficient transportation and household technologies would go a long way to making a serious dent in BC emissions.
This post will the first of many addressing the second lever: reduce emissions of short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs). The main SLCPs are black carbon, methane, tropospheric ozone, and some hydrofluorocarbons.
But will the gains erode without additional mandates? I don't know. Sometimes you need to push to get the ball rolling, but do you need to continue pushing with the same force for the ball to accelerate? We're about to find out (or at least get some relevant data) from the US example, where the mandates are being emasculated.
Unfortunately, a rise of 3.5°C could very well be catastrophic for our planet long before we even hit the 3.5 degree mark or get to 2100. Better to keep warming within 1.5°C...