...to address the real problem.
In general, newspaper reports are always a little off the mark when discussing science; I'm certainly developing a sense that one cannot get a journalism degree if one has actually passed a college level science course.
This said, I think the newspaper reporter may have picked up on the real crux of the issue in the rain forest about which what the paper being addressed apparently is.
The newspaper reporter writes:
Lister and Garcia attribute this crash to climate. In the same 40-year period as the arthropod crash, the average high temperature in the rain forest increased by 4 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperatures in the tropics stick to a narrow band. The invertebrates that live there, likewise, are adapted to these temperatures and fare poorly outside them; bugs cannot regulate their internal heat.
Maybe the problem is that self satisfied but overly bourgeois people who spend lots of time with bogeymen and very little with science books thought that the real environmental problem on earth was to displace nuclear energy with solar and wind, and not fossil fuels with nuclear. So we bet the entire planet on solar and wind.
The latest results on the huge investment - on a multi-trillion dollar scale - in so called "renewable energy" are in, and are written in the atmosphere: We hit over 411 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere this past May.
As of 2016, combined, solar and wind produced less than 10 exajoules of energy out of the 576 the world was consuming then, less than 2% of world energy demand in the percent talk so called "renewable energy" advocates love so much. The WEO report for 2018 will be out next month, and having followed them for roughly 20 years, I predict that they will show that energy conservation is non-existent - energy demand will rise - and further that the solar and wind industry combined will not match the growth in the use of dangerous fossil fuels.
There are plenty of bogeymen in the
real tale, I think, but mostly I think we can find them by looking in the mirror.
If Monsanto disbanded tomorrow, insect populations and the populations of many other species will still be threatened, because we continue to do nothing about climate change other than to look for bogeyman.
The first step to not being a bogeyman seeker might be to open a science book.
Enjoy the rest of the weekend.
= new reply since forum marked as read