The Context Defined

Meet tomorrow's headliner today.

There's news, and there's news that tells the future.  Which is more significant?

The insects are dying out. According to the Washington Post, one recent study of a Puerto Rico forest showed that beetles, bees and other invertebrates have declined in number by 45%--nearly half--in just the past 35 years.  In German nature preserves, flying insects have decreased by three-fourths.

In that Puerto Rico forest where the insect crash was calculated, there is also a noticeable decline in birds, as well as lizards and frogs--animals that feed on insects.  This trend appears to be global.

The report concludes that "climate warming is the major driver of reductions in arthropod abundance, indirectly precipitating a bottom-up trophic cascade and consequent collapse of the forest food web."

In other words, when the insects go, all lifeforms are threatened--from plants and on up the food chain.

If this trend continues, there is no way that the current global population of humans, and probably its current interconnected and interdependent civilization, can survive.

But we might just call that the nail on the coffin.

 Civilization is threatened now in many parts of the world, and will be likely be in most or all of the world in this century, with conspicuous challenges evident everywhere--even the US and other rich nations-- before the century is half over.

One look at the climate crisis data concludes:

"It’s already bad. But when will things get so bad that it is obviously — obviously — the worst problem in the world? How long until we go over the cliff? That depends on how much we’ve heated up already, and how fast we’re getting hotter.

Bottom line: at the rate we’re going, we’ll hit extremely bad, possibly intolerable, probably between 2040 and 2045. Maybe a couple years later, maybe a couple years earlier, but it’s not far away."

That comports with other views. A few years ago, by the way, that date used to be 2050, but the climate news has been worse that expected.

Could the worst be avoided?  Probably, though it's too late to avoid it completely.  Twenty years ago, experts said we had ten to twenty years to address the climate crisis.  They meant take meaningful if gradual steps to reduce the output of greenhouse gases.  But not much was done.  So that option is no longer available.  Nothing will stop the climate crisis--it has started, and it's unlikely to go back to the way it was for a very, very long time.

Now you may hear some saying we have ten to twenty years to act in order to avoid climate catastrophe.  But this time, they mean going all out--transforming global civilization to reduce carbon and other greenhouse outputs to nothing-- immediately.  In the meantime, it will still be getting hotter.

There's a lot going on that doesn't make headlines.  A lot of local and regional plans, many promising new energy and carbon sequestration technologies, a high proportion of them involving sophisticated uses of plants, but also conceptually simple tasks such as planting trees (as well as a complete end to cutting down existing forests.)

But there isn't the political will, the consensus on any level, that is necessary.  Not now.  So...

So in a couple of decades, or maybe sooner, there will be no news that isn't in one way or another climate crisis news.

Among the big newsmakers will be insects.