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:
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 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.Fuck. Fish near China, India and Indonesia are doomed
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.
Fair.
If we could’ve fucked things over a decade ago, we definitely would’ve!
Somewhere there was an asshole who made a decision, one of our failures as a (global, makes it harder) society is failing to hold responsibility accountable. Do the crime, do the time.
There’s something wrong with this data.
The fraction of asses should be way higher.
That’s some badass ass assessment.
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)
BioMASS is not about the number of animals but about their mass. Sure there’s a lot of dogs and cats but they don’t weigh as much as a camel.
TIL there are animals called Ass
Isn’t it just another word for donkey?
Mammal biomass is 1% ass
And yeah, they’re donkeys. We have wild donkeys where I live, they’re feral asses
Why is that supposed to freak me out? We cultivate animals for consumption and there’s not a 1:1 absorption/usage ratio. Now add insect biomass.
Asses?
Ass = Donkey
Arse = Butt
Yo Brit donkey
Fits on a graph better than “Donkeys” I suppose.
And that’s only because whales and elephants are so massive.
It doesn’t help that we chose the meatiest animals to keep as livestock and then made sure they got even fatter than they started by any means necessary. One factory farmed cow probably weighs like 12 wild deer and a few wild rabbits for good measure.
yes exactly
Presumably subway rats and other vermin count as wild?
and how is that relevant to what I said?
How isn’t it relevant? Large animals like whales make up a disproportionate amount of ‘wild animal’ biomass. But rats, mice etc will make up a sizeable proportion too while being human centric pests in much of the world.
4% is actually worse than it looks.
Don’t worry guys, the billionaires already built their bunkers and their space ships! Just as planned.
There is no cow level.
Similarly, watch this music video
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.
Unless they use shit-tons of insecticide. The farms around my home-town did, or started too a bit before I left.
Waaiiittt… How fast you need to go to get flies on your windows? I think my place has much more flies but i never saw this thing
Couldn’t that also be new improvements in car aerodynamics where bugs simply glide off instead of getting squished?
Apparently, it’s the other way around, presumably because unaerodynamic cars pushed around a big air cone, which deflected the insects.
I was thinking the other day that we no longer see bugs around the house I grew up in. When I was a kid my house was always full of bugs, we live next to a protected natural area, so it was impossible to keep them out. Anyways, I’ve always loved bugs so they were welcome. I moved out and whenever I go there are no animals to be seen. I can’t even hear birds or see iguanas walking around. It’s so disturbing.
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.
Same in Europe.
Drove a ton in the 90s all across the US as well every year there was a couple several thousand mile vacations starting from near Kansas city.
The bugs were bad, but we never needed a bug screen on the grill. I never even remember seeing something like that exist, actually. Definitely less bugs now, though.
Lucky. I-10 could get ridiculous between the black cricket things, the love bugs, the dragon flies, etc.
Same age. Dad taught me to always clean the windshield when we filled up. Yeah.
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.
I remember the wasps always buzzing around the vehicle grills munching on all the dead bugs too. Now it’s just shiny and chrome.
I still remember 10 years ago when I was driving on the Autobahn at 130 km/h and a juicy bug hit the windshield. It was literally a loud splat. Besides the grill always being covered in bugs.
Hasn’t happened since, nowadays I can count the number of bugs on the grill with one hand. And that’s after months of driving.
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 😕)
Governing bodies regularly consist of bored narcissists who only act in their own self-interests.
They wanted less mosquitoes and held a mock election to confirm their interests and did what they wanted even though the people disagreed because they knew better, as they were the ruling class elected to carry out the piblic good aa they understand it.
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.
I try to help what little I can there by not raking (or if I do, I collect and move into our fenced in section so insects can still make use of them). It does also help my laziness that I have a legitimate reason to not rake.
Not sure if it helps or not since I do mow the leaves with the grass at the start of the summer.
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.
Oh I remember 2 years ago where I live there was so much fucking pollen. And we had no rain for like 2 months so the streets were yellow with it. I am not allergic to pollen and yet I was constantly sneezing and my eyes were irritated. It was such a relief when we finally had some rain to clear everything.
But girls are gross! We can’t let our city streets and parks be sissies!
(/s)
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
Some explorations for you: (steam links for reference, but I recommend going into all of these blind, don’t read a lot of reviews)
“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
Future civilization will be adding glue to pizza once humanity rebounds
Orlando Jones was my favorite part of that movie lol.
Whoa, this is disconcerting. My folks used to run a rental car agency and I helped out every now and then by cleaning cars. I remember cleaning so many bugs off of cars 20ish years ago, and now on my own car - barely nothing. :(
I’m [emotionally*] ready for the hyper-industrialized moon-scape our planet will become once our environment completely collapses. I think there will be a point past which any environmental protection measures will be useless because there’s nothing left to protect so industrial landscapes will become the norm.
industrial landscapes need a base of natural resources and less developed regions with high birth rates (as a source of labor) to support them.
My parents never gave me money unless I worked for it and washing their cars was one of those few things they did pay me to do. I remember always having to scrub bugs off the front, it was the hardest part. I’ve literally never washed my road cars because its just dust.
My parents never gave me money unless I worked for it
my road cars because its just dust.
I’m sorry. I legitimately can’t tell if this is satire or not…
What are you confused about? Some cars I’ve owned cannot go off road, maybe a bumpy dirt road here and there. Other cars I have owned I bought specifically because I needed them to go where there isn’t pavement or even a road. They get a lot dirtier and need cleaning just to stay functional.
Well, It sounded like you had more than a few cars, like currently. Which I found in stark contrast to the rest. Now i’m not confused, thanks!
Removed by mod
👀
Do you need medical attention…?
Testicles diarrhea
Well this took a sharp turn
Damn, it got deleted. What did it say? Lol
"I asked you a pertty clear question and you didn’t responsible to nmy point I’m trying or you exemplify to make If you’re ever willing to actually talk go ahead and DM me since your public views do nothing for you. Cum = upvotes. Hhhhhhhggghhh gonna cum.
Loked lolyes Daddy"
-GluWu
Last panel should have one of those stock scanning robots behind the wheel.
With a human body on the windshield?
And a tesla logo on the bonnet for absolutely no reason at all wink wink
Misread that, was thinking OG BSG Cylon behind the wheel… you know, the one with the red light that goes back and forth.
Stop cutting your lawns and dig a pond. It’s not going to stop industrial scale destruction, but it’s something actionable that you can do yourself and see the positive impact right at home. If enough homes do it, a network of gardens can become a macro system.
Idk my artificial monoculture of non-native grasses kept immaculately trimmed and racially pure with toxic chemicals applied regularly makes me feel better than my neighbors’ artificial monoculture of non-native grasses kept immaculately trimmed and racially pure with toxic chemicals applied regularly.
That is how my daddy did it and that is how his daddy did it and their generations haven’t set any cultural precedents that have been incredibly predictably devastating to life and the biosphere as far as I can tell in these recordbreakingly hot and insect free times. I mean sure, those other places are experiencing historic climate events, but that is just part of normal climate cycles that haven’t existed in millennia.
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!
Bro would probably be more than 70 years old in 2050, good that he’s off the streets
Sorry, can someone explain? If there are less bugs, that’s attributable to something I should know?
Do you convert dead organic matter into fertile soil or pollinate flowers? They do. If insect populations were to vanish, so would humans. They perform too many vital functions that humans cannot.
Yes… Sorry, I didn’t mean I didn’t understand what bugs do or why they’re important. I just was trying to understand the meme. I was not aware that there’s universally less bugs. I haven’t seen this covered in news.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations
TW: this entry can be hard to read.
Thank you.
I don’t have a good source and I think it may be a more complex, but at least in Germany various media have frequently cited a number of 70% insect biomass decrease over the last 50 years or so. As a biologist, I wouldn’t be surprised if isn’t even more if you compare it to preindustrial times and the decrease in biodiversity is probably much higher as well.
OP literally never leaves the city.
I have noticed this in the suburbs specifically. Just over the span of my short life I’ve seen pretty much all the bugs in any area I’ve lived in disappear, along with the bats that eat them.
Have they built it up a lot while you were living there?
Not terribly? My hometown only expanded by one housing development, but most of those houses have not sold. But we had to close our windows at night because the mosquito sprayer trucks would spray so much fog that it impacted my mom’s breathing. When I was a kid we had fireflies and bats in the backyard.
As for my current town, I am not surprised at the lack of bugs since it’s all corn and nothing but corn; no real rivers, no big ponds, no forests near town, nothing that could shelter bugs outside the houses.
I’m not in the city right now. The key word in my post was “attributable.” As in, what’s causing the phenomenon?
Climate change.
Not just climate change, but also accumulation of and reckless overuse of pesticides plus removal of their natural habitats. We are doing our damndest to make sure we can’t get our food pollinated. On the flip side, I have noticed a huge uptick in how many predatory pests I have had to fight off in my vegetable garden over the last few years despite seeing higher high temperatures and lower and longer low temperatures. The pests adapt. Its the ones we want that are going away.
Farming is always environmentally destructive. There is no such thing as “environmentally friendly” farming. The solution is massive investment into the farming infrastructure and rewilding of vast tracts of land.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use
We use around half of the arable land for agriculture. The sad fact is we only need to use 10% of it. The rest we farm because we can make a profit. Not because it makes sense.
It would take a complete upheaval of our agricultural system. Massive investment into water storage, irrigation systems and protected culture. It would also mean the forced migration of a millions people from rural areas to be rewilded to areas under intensive agriculture.
Aka it’s not an easy fix. t’s a systematic change to the way we interact with the environment.
So, it’s not going to happen.
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.
