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Three-quarters of the total insect population lost in protected nature reserves
Since 1989, in 63 nature reserves in Germany the total biomass of flying insects has decreased by more than 75 percent. This decrease has long been suspected but has turned out to be more severe than previously thought. Ecologists from Radboud University together with German and English colleagues published these findings in the scientific journal PLOS ONE [open, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0185809] [DX] on October 18th.
In recent years, it became clear that the numbers of many types of insects such as butterflies and bees were declining in Western Europe and North America. "However, the fact that flying insects are decreasing at such a high rate in such a large area is an even more alarming discovery," states Hans de Kroon, project leader at Radboud University.
Entomologists (insect researchers) in Krefeld, Germany, led by Martin Sorg and Heinz Schwan, collected data over the past 27 years in 63 different places within nature reserves across Germany. Flying insects were trapped in so called malaise traps and the total biomass was then weighed and compared. The researchers from Nijmegen, Germany and England have now been able to analyse this treasure trove of data for the first time.
Also at CNN.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 25 2017, @03:55PM (3 children)
You are arguing circularly here. You haven't established that there is or will be a phosphate problem and hence, your claim that the green revolution is "wobbling" because of that phosphate problem is in error.
You're just not getting it. Turning resources into reserves is not just a developed world thing. Saudi Arabia can do that as well and keep its gravy train going longer than expected.
Further, my point behind the oil example is that it's not following the peak resource model at all. And as a result, defenders of that model have to keep making excuses like you did above. Phosphates aren't any different. It doesn't make any sense to speak of present day costs of extracting future phosphorus resources, when human innovation will reduce those costs in the future just as they did for oil resources of the past 50 years. Let us keep in mind that the same arguments you made now, were made back in the 1970s. And they failed hard since because new reserves were created to replace the old ones that were depleted.
Show there's a problem first.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 25 2017, @09:23PM (2 children)
Starting with the basics, here...
First: Mineral phosphates are a limited, non-renewable resource. (Reference the exact same study that you linked above.)
Second: Every crop taken off a given field removes some phosphates from that field. (Feel free to google this. Unless you think the magic phosphate fairy blesses crops, in which case I can't help you.)
Third: We presently do not have any kind of phosphate cycle in place with any kind of volume to compare with the rate at which we are extracting phosphates and using them on fields. (If we did, we wouldn't bother with mining for the stuff.)
Fourth: As a result of the three foregoing positions, we are exhausting phosphate on which our agricultural productivity rests. Unless the third proposition is somehow replaced with a high speed closed phosphate loop, analogous to the water cycle, we will run up hard against a fundamental, chemistry-based wall, beyond which natural replenishment rates are our best available rate - and that brings us back to productivity rates last seen (in the western world) in the nineteenth century. If that.
Fifth: Even before we hit the wall, we are running down available resources in approximate order of accessibility. Current reserves hit the market at low, bulk commodity prices.
Sixth: Current non-reserve resources are in many cases not as bioavailable as current reserves. This advances the need for refinement from relatively crude bulk management into the realm of industrial-scale chemical engineering. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, but it takes more energy, more capital, and more inputs. Regardless of advances, the comparative advantage in price terms lies with the more bioavailable sources.
Seventh: Current non-reserve resources are in many cases not as physically available as current reserves. Whether that means deep mining, oceanic extractions or complex management of the environment such as nearby river flows, all of these raise the cost of extraction. Regardless of advances, the comparative advantage in price terms lies with the more physically available sources.
Eighth: Even stipulating that presently ill-defined advances occur, that might reduce some of the costs of extraction, logistics and refinement, we have no guarantees of when those advances will be available, nor of how big a difference they might make. The most confidently expected changes are incremental, such as the putative benefits of moving heavy machinery to hybrid powerplants, and the net results are marginal.
Ninth: As a result of factors 6 through 8, absent a technological black swan, future reserves are likely to be created by price rises (reference the same study that you linked above) rather than capability shifts. These price rises will be necessary to reflect increased costs of extraction, refinement and the logistics surrounding both of those factors, without which exploiting those resources would be uneconomical.
Tenth: Net world demand trends are upwards, driven by both regional and international politics. Short run demands are clearly affected by exogenous events and business cycle concerns, but the general trend is clearly upward and has been for decades. This means that straightforward current-usage analyses are over-optimistic in terms of current reserve lifespans.
Eleventh: For the time being, world population is trending clearly upwards. This, over and above policy demands on the parts of governments and NGO groups, will raise demand for food. Sheer supply and demand factors suggest that the long run price trend for food articles will rise, unless the production pushes mentioned in factor 10 increase supply to meet that. This motivates increases in demand for phosphates.
Twelfth: Increased demand for phosphates as per current long run trends (see factor 10), motivated to continue as per factor 11, strongly suggest that phosphate commodity prices are unlikely to drop unless extraction increases massively, and in fact are set to increase modestly at least. This will reduce some supply constraints as per factor 9, but still place a price floor for phosphates as availability drops and extraction costs ratchet upwards. As the constraints become greater with incrementally less available resources requiring higher prices to justify extraction, purchasers will be faced with the question of how much they want that phosphorus.
Thirteenth: At some point (combined with other price and land stresses) phosphorus becomes notionally too expensive to justify. Even if there are phosphate resources left, and regardless of the size or scope of those resources, at that point we run into the wall as far as agriculture is concerned, as per factor 4.
Fourteenth: Regardless of other factors, such as nitrogen, potash, calcium and so on, some of which bid fair to create problems before we run down plausible phosphate reserves, we have a clear clock running on the future of agriculture as we know it, based on phosphorus availability.
Fifteenth: The most optimistic estimate is that we have reserves to last a hundred years at current usage rates (as per the document you linked). However, there is no reason to believe that those rates will remain constant, and in fact there's plenty of reason to believe that structural sources of demand are driving higher usage (note factors 11 and 10). While it's equally problematic to simply do linear extrapolation on the long run demand curve, even a conservative basis for estimate would place the current reserves at offering us a window closer to seventy than a hundred years.
Sixteenth: It is well recognised at this point that food security, food stresses and the cost of access to food are major drivers of instability. Studies on recent events in Tunisia, Libya and Venezuela all tell the same story.
Seventeenth: Agriculture is a capital-intensive, bulk commodity industry. This means that margins are thin, returns are low, and even minor incremental costs get passed on rather than swallowed.
Eighteenth: Agriculture is a primary production industry, that supplies a wide range of secondary and (indirectly) tertiary and service industries. Agricultural cost increases affect much of the real economy indirectly.
Nineteenth: Agriculture is an industry with a long planning horizon, owing to the thin margins and the need to show a return on capital. This is a consequence of factor 17. This means that disruptions decades in advance are a planning concern today.
Twentieth: Combining factors 4, 9, 12, 15, 16 and 19, we have a picture of an industry with a foreseeable, medium term problem, well within the planning horizon, with knock-on effects that affect economic and social stability.
Now, you're at liberty to say that this isn't a problem because technology is magic, or because a few decades aren't really in the planning horizon, or because you'll be dead by then, or because other problems are bigger and more immediate, and who cares? That's fine. That's on you. But to people actually engaged in this kind of planning? Yeah, it's a problem. So I guess you're welcome to your opinion, just don't expect it to get a lot of respect in agricultural economic circles.
See above. Yeah, I put your quotes out of order. Deal with it.
I get it just fine. Turning resources into reserves is global. That is entirely consistent with everything I've said, I've never denied it and if you'd bothered to raise that question I'd have vigorously asserted that it is global. Saudi Arabia's gravy train has some flex in it - well, that was understood. They've played games with their rates before, and will doubtless do so again. However, there's not a thing about this that contradicts peak oil. Peak oil is simply the observation that your supply on any given source ramps up, peaks, and then tails off. Funnily enough, because of the way these curves add up, that's more or less what the total supply does as well. It doesn't predict any kind of catastrophic event that will bring all the things crashing down to a grinding halt in the grime and dust of a failed civilisation; it's more like saying that yeah, we'll run out, but long before we run out it'll get harder and harder and more and more expensive. Sure, Saudi Arabia can try to undercut their supply competition, and can ride that pony as hard as possible for geopolitical reasons, but that pony's legs run out when they start to run short.
I guess you could be one of the replenishment mindset - do you think that oil replenishes itself on some sort of ongoing basis? I knew a pilot who thought that oil was the planet's blood, and that Gaia creates more for us all the time. In that case, the peak oil concept is refuted.
Part of the problem with leaning on the idea of technological advances pushing out the envelope of reserves is that they give you diminishing returns. For example, fracking takes a lot of energy, and your net returns of energy are therefore lower than the headline value of what comes up the pipe. Moreover, at each incremental rise in the price or improvement in technology, you don't convert the whole world into reserves, but only a small slice. Taking this back to phosphates, it's not as if we don't know how to extract more phosphates; it's just not worth it at current prices. And the easy answer is: raise the prices! But at that point, we're back to the results of doing so. And this is why it's a problem for the green revolution; we can feed the world, for a bit, but it will get harder unless we completely change the phosphate cycle. As long as we have ample energy, nitrates won't be a huge problem (what the hell, let's pretend energy is infinite ...) but at some point, you either need to find a way of recapturing phosphate runoff, or you're going to have crops that just can't grow faster than seagulls shit on them.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 26 2017, @03:40AM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 28 2017, @06:54PM
Got it. The miraculous power of innovation is specifically guaranteed to produce an eternal availability of low-cost phosphorus, so planning for a reduction in availability is insane.
So glad you clarified that for the benighted heathens.