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posted by mrpg on Wednesday October 17 2018, @03:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-care-is-not-america[sarcasm] dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Two degrees decimated Puerto Rico's insect populations

While temperatures in the tropical forests of northeastern Puerto Rico have climbed two degrees Celsius since the mid-1970s, the biomass of arthropods—invertebrate animals such as insects, millipedes, and sowbugs—has declined by as much as 60-fold, according to new findings published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The finding supports the recent United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warnings of severe environmental threats given a 2.0 degree Celsius elevation in global temperature. Like some other tropical locations, the study area in the Luquillo rainforest has already reached or exceeded a 2.0 degree Celsius rise in average temperature, and the study finds that the consequences are potentially catastrophic.

"Our results suggest that the effects of climate warming in tropical forests may be even greater than anticipated" said Brad Lister lead author of the study and a faculty member in the Department of Biological Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "The insect populations in the Luquillo forest are crashing, and once that begins the animals that eat the insects have insufficient food, which results in decreased reproduction and survivorship and consequent declines in abundance."


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  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 17 2018, @04:39AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 17 2018, @04:39AM (#749816)

    In the past decade, has anybody published research that didn't mention climate change? Maybe there is a paper on gravity waves that somehow forgot to relate them to climate change?

    It has gotten absurd. I have my suspicions. It could be that, correctly or not, the researchers think that this will get them through peer review or get them more funding.

    In any case, I can't take climate change seriously at all. So much obvious nonsense is getting published. We were also predicted to be killed by it already, so whatever... I must be dead.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 17 2018, @09:14AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 17 2018, @09:14AM (#749869)

    Its just a way to try to hijack the argument from consensus heuristic. Basically its argument from authority disguised as consensus. Same as the fake news all reading the same script:
    https://youtu.be/rCuX4Up-plc [youtu.be]