insect BIO
see west nile and bees
for devil term see vermin parasite bug
Some watchdog groups like Accountable.US have accused ASL of crossing a legal line for nonprofits. In 2021, Accountable.US filed an IRS complaint alleging that ASL was engaged in lobbying work, in violation of its 501(c)(3) status.
ASL is scheduled to hold a three-day “Stop 30x30” conference in Texas this week. The event will feature the screening of a new film by the right-wing media group Epoch Times. The film, “No Farmers No Food: Will You Eat The Bugs?” is a reference to a conspiracy theory aboutelites trying to crack down on food supplies and making people eat insects.
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locust Swarms, Some 3 Times the Size of New York City, Are Eating Their Way Across Two Continents
:{BY: BOB BERWYN
Climate change is worsening the largest plague of the crop-killing insects in 50 years, threatening famine in Africa, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. Read More}:
https://www.ecowatch.com/plastic-eating-caterpillar-2645437623.html
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/new-study-warns-climate-chaos-is-driving-a-rapid-decline-of-bumblebees/
no lnx
New study warns climate chaos is driving a rapid decline of bumblebees
Written by Jessica Corbett / Common Dreams February 8, 2020
The rising frequency of extremely hot temperatures tied to human-caused global heating is creating “climate chaos” that drives widespread declines of bumblebees, some of the planet’s most important pollinators, according to a new study published in the journal Science.
Researchers at the University of Ottawa in Canada and University College London in the United Kingdom developed a new measurement of temperature based on species’ heat tolerance. “We have created a new way to predict local extinctions that tells us, for each species individually, whether climate change is creating temperatures that exceed what the bumblebees can handle,” explained study co-author Tim Newbold.
The team applied their technique to data on 66 different bumblebee species across North America and Europe collected from 1901 to 1974 and 2000 to 2014. They concluded that more frequent extreme heat “is increasing local extinction rates, reducing colonization and site occupancy, and decreasing species richness within a region, independent of land-use change or condition.”
“We found that populations were disappearing in areas where the temperatures had gotten hotter,” said the study’s lead author, Peter Soroye. “Using our new measurement of climate change, we were able to predict changes both for individual species and for whole communities of bumblebees with a surprisingly high accuracy.”
The New York Times
@nytimes
Researchers found that bumblebee populations had recently declined by 46% in North America and by 17% across Europe when compared to a base period of 1901 to 1974 https://nyti.ms/2vhE1Oc
Climate Change: It’s a Buzzkill for Bumblebees, Study Finds
Climate change could increase the risk of extinction for the bees, which are already threatened by pesticides and habitat loss.
nytimes.com
The researchers found that the rate at which bumblebees are declining is “consistent with a mass extinction.” Over the course of a single human generation, the chances of a local bumblebee population surviving has fallen by an average of more than 30%. Soroye noted that the findings have implications for more than just the bees.
“Bumblebees are the best pollinators we have in wild landscapes and the most effective pollinators for crops like tomato, squash, and berries. Our results show that we face a future with many less bumblebees and much less diversity, both in the outdoors and on our plates,” he said. “If declines continue at this pace, many of these species could vanish forever within a few decades.”
Although the study serves as a bleak warning about the need for urgent action to address the declines of bumblebees, the authors are hopeful that their technique for gauging the impact of extreme events like droughts and heatwaves can also aid with conservation efforts for other species.
“We’ve known for a while that climate change is related to the growing extinction risk that animals are facing around the world,” Soroye said. “In this paper, we offer an answer to the critical questions of how and why that is. We find that species extinctions across two continents are caused by hotter and more frequent extremes in temperatures.”
“Perhaps the most exciting element is that we developed a method to predict extinction risk that works very well for bumblebees and could in theory be applied universally to other organisms,” he added. “With a predictive tool like this, we hope to identify areas where conservation actions would be critical to stopping declines.”
InsideClimate News
@insideclimate
A new study links extreme heat waves to declining populations of bumblebees in North America and Europe. "Bumblebees are disappearing from areas eight times as fast as they are recolonizing others," said Peter Soroye of @uOttawa, the study’s lead author.http://bit.ly/2UxJAD8
Bumblebee Decline Linked With Extreme Heat Waves
Climate chaos is wiping out important pollinators and hastening the loss of global biodiversity, a new study says.
insideclimatenews.org
Study co-author Jeremy Kerr said that “predicting why bumblebees and other species are going extinct in a time of rapid, human-caused climate change could help us prevent extinction in the 21st century.”
“This work also holds out hope by implying ways that we might take the sting out of climate change for these and other organisms by maintaining habitats that offer shelter, like trees, shrubs, or slopes, that could let bumblebees get out of the heat,” he said. “Ultimately, we must address climate change itself and every action we take to reduce emissions will help. The sooner the better. It is in all our interests to do so, as well as in the interests of the species with whom we share the world.”
In a related “perspective” article published by Science, scientists Jon Bridle of the University of Bristol and Alexandra van Rensburg of the University of Zurich wrote that the new research “adds to a growing body of evidence for alarming, widespread losses of biodiversity and for rates of global change that now exceed the critical limits of ecosystem resilience.”
Recent reports, including one published in November 2019 by University of Sussex biology professor Dave Goulson, have raised alarm about a decades-long human-caused insect “apocalypse” that has resulted from not only the climate crisis but also habitat loss and pesticide use.
Last month, 73 international scientists released a global roadmap to battle the “bugpocalypse,” emphasizing that “insects are key to our own survival.” Their recommendations included curbing planet-heating emissions; cutting back synthetic pesticides and fertilizers; limiting light, water, and noise pollution; and preventing the introduction of invasive and alien species.
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As extreme wildfires burn across large swaths of Australia, scientists say we're witnessing how global warming can push forest ecosystems past a point of no return.
Some of those forests won't recover in today's warmer climate, scientists say. They expect the same in other regions scarred by flames in recent years; in semi-arid areas like parts of the American West, the Mediterranean Basin and Australia, some post-fire forest landscapes will shift to brush or grassland.
More than 17 million acres have burned in Australia over the last three months amid record heat that has dried vegetation and pulled moisture from the land. Hundreds of millions of animals, including a large number of koalas, are believed to have perished in the infernos. The survivors will face drastically changed habitats. Water flows and vegetation will change, and carbon emissions will rise as burning trees release carbon and fewer living trees are left to pull CO2 out of the air and store it.
In many ways, it's the definition of a tipping point, as ecosystems transform from one type into another.
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The surge of large, destructive forest fires from the Arctic to the tropics just in the last few years has shocked even researchers who focus on forests and fires and who have warned of such tipping points for years.
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The projections were seen as remote, "something that would happen much farther in the future," said University of Arizona climate scientist David Breashers. "But it's happening now. Nobody saw it coming this soon, even though it was like a freight train.
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"It's likely the forests won't be coming back as we know them."[end no lnx]
The link between global warming, forests and wildfires is multifaceted but very clear, said Nerilie Abram, a climate researcher at Australian National University.
"Increasing temperatures dry out fuel and lead to more days of extreme fire weather," she said. "The poleward shift of the Southern Hemisphere westerly winds is drawing winter rainfall away from southern Australia, causing a long-term drying trend that makes the landscape more vulnerable to burning."
The cycle feeds itself, she explained: Drought and loss of forests cause higher temperatures over the land and a lower humidity, which, in turn, worsens wildfire conditions. And there's no reason to think that a gradual temperature rise will cause a similar gradual increase in fire risk, she said, citing a recent study showing that incremental warming increases fire damage exponentially by drying out fuels.
"Each degree of warming has a bigger effect on forest fire than did the previous degree of warming," that study's lead author, Park Williams of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, wrote on Twitter when the study was released.
[pix A koala named Paul recovers from wildfire burns at Australia's Port Macquarie Koala Hospital on Nov. 29, 2019. Volunteers from the Koala Hospital have been working alongside National Parks and Wildlife Service crews searching for koalas following weeks of devastating bushfires. Credit: Nathan Edwards/Getty Images
In a recent Australian television interview, Pennsylvania State University climate scientistMichael Mann said the heartbreaking loss of irreplaceable forests in Australia is a clear sign of a climate tipping point playing out before our eyes.Similar scenarios are apparent in forests around the world, he said.
Some of the forests lost to the ongoing fires in Australia aren't likely to come back anytime soon, said Australian National University climate scientist Christopher Brack.
"These fires burning through the Southern Alps (in Australia) at the moment are re-burning alpine and mountain ash trees that were regenerating from fires less than 20 years ago," Brack said.In the warming climate, the current forests are likely to be replaced by brush and other shorter-lived and more flammable species that will intensify the fire cycle,he said.
[Smoke from wildfires in Australia's Alpine and Kosciuszko National Parks on Jan. 3, 2020, shows up clearly on satellite images. Melbourne's Port Phillip Bay is in the lower left corner. The Credit: NASA Worldview
On the world's current emissions path, with warming of about 3.5 degrees Celsius (6.3°F) by the end of the century, fire frequency is expected to increase on more than 60 percent of global land area, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in a 2018 report that identified Southern Australia, along with Central and South America, South Africa and the U.S. West as at risk.
Human activity has also contributed to increased fire risk in other ways. Logging can dry up forests and make the remaining trees more susceptible to fire, and the building of more roads and residential areas in the forests means there is more chance of fires igniting from power lines or cars, as well as more property damage and people at risk when fires break out.
Mountain Forests and Even Rainforests Are Drying
Australian Cam Walker, a forest conservation advocate and volunteer firefighter, has been battling to keep the flames away from a resort village near the Mt. Hotham Ski Area.
"This is subalpine country dominated by snow gums, a type of eucalyptus. This area has been burnt three times in about 12 years, and snow gums have a limited ability to cope with repeated fire," he said.
[pix Burned trees covered the landscape across parts of the Blue Mountains northwest of Sydney in December 2019 as Australia experienced its hottest day on record, with the average high temperature nationwide reaching 107°F. Credit: Saeed Khan /AFP/Getty Images
The fires are also threatening some of the most ancient forests on Earth, relics from 180 million years ago, when all the planet's continents were joined in the super-continent of Gondwana. The moist Gondwana rainforests, with damp microclimates under a dense canopy, have little history of fires, but global warming is drying them out.
"We are seeing ever more of these areas burning because conditions are so dry. This has been happening also in relic sub-alpine vegetation in Tasmania, where we are witnessing more regular dry lightning strikes," Walker said.
"The costs to Australia of not acting on climate change will be catastrophic. Already scientists are warning that many ecosystems will collapse under high-emissions scenarios," he said.
[twy graf]
Research in recent years reinforces that view, said David Bowman, director of the Fire Centre Research Hub at the University of Tasmania.
"Global climate change is stressing vegetation much more than we realized. Stressed vegetation recovers more slowly and rapid changes from forest to non-forest are possible," he said. "Increased fire frequency reduces the capacity of forests to bounce back after recurrent fires."
Warming Also Drives Forest Die-Offs and Fire Risk in Other Ways
Even without fire, trees are dying around the world at increasing rates because of global warming.
During extreme heat events and droughts, air bubbles can form in their moisture transport systems, essentially choking them to death. Warming also increases outbreaks of tree-killing insects. And logging, as well as land-clearing fires in the Amazon are threatening to push that critical forest ecosystem past a tipping point with global implications for carbon cycling.
"Why are these trees in all these different regions dying at the same time when they've been around for such a long time? It's heartbreaking," said Breshears. "Ten years ago, I didn't think we'd be in this situation. I'm still kind of shocked myself at how much is occurring."
[pix: Mountain pine beetle and blue fungus infections have created ghost forests of dead lodgepole pines in parts of the U.S. West. As climate change makes summers hotter and drier, U.S. forests are threatened with increasing wildfire activity, deadly pathogens and insect infestations. Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
A series of studies in the past 10 years help explain the global tree die-off,said U.S. Geological Survey research ecologist Craig D. Allen.
There's evidence that most tree species around the world already routinely operate near damaging thresholds of water stress, and that they are unable to cope with the rising frequency and intensity of heat extremes, Allen said.
Another recent study showed how a declining snowpack and rising summer temperatures combine to limit regrowth, which is clear evidence of the negative impact of human-caused climate warming on subalpine forests. Pine seedlings need cool and moist summers to thrive, but those conditions occur less frequently with global warming. As a result, some Rocky Mountain forests will pass a tipping point with "shifts from forest to non-forest vegetation types across a broad range of elevations in Front Range forests," the study concluded.
Some tipping points may be less sudden than we think and already underway, said University of Montana forest entomologist Diana Six, who studies how global warming affects destructive insects that have been killing trees in the U.S. West in the past few decades.
"Older forests are established and may look fine. But what happens when they die? What comes back?" she said. On a warming planet, there's no guarantee that those older carbon-sequestering forests will regenerate—in fact there is plenty of research suggesting that many will not.
Even limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7°F) as targeted by the Paris climate agreement may not be enough to save some forests. "With the changes and extinction we are seeing now, I would say no. But less bad than if we let things go further," she said.
[pixSpot fires flare up in Victoria, Australia, on Jan. 5, 2020. In the coastal town of Mallacoota, thousands of people fled to a beach to escape fires there and were being evacuated by navy ships. Credit: Darrian Traynor/Getty Images
The multiple studies and reports on increases in fire season length, fire size, magnitude and intensity, as well as forest die-back events and pest outbreaks show that forest ecosystems at the very core of our life support on the planet are under severe stress, said Alistair Jump, head of biological and environmental sciences at the University of Stirling (UK).
"The changing climate is massively exacerbating the risk of catastrophic fire, and we are seeing the consequences of that globally," he said. "Even where fire isn't taking forests out, we are seeing drought-driven mortality risk escalate. Add to that changing pest and pathogen distributions and rampant deforestation, and trees are really in trouble just at the time that we need them most. The big risk of all of this being that carbon already locked away gets released in the blink of an eye.
"We take forests for granted—but we can see just how fast we can change the way forests work and how seriously it can impact us in return."
https://www.ecowatch.com/emergency-trump-epa-pesticides-2638979880.html
no lnx many
Trump EPA OKs ‘Emergency’ Use of Bee-Killing Pesticide on 13.9 Million Acres
Jordan Simmons Jun. 25, 2019 01:08PM EST POLITICS
More than 40 percent of insects could go extinct globally in the next few decades. So why did the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last week OK the 'emergency' use of the bee-killing pesticide sulfoxaflor on 13.9 million acres?
EcoWatch teamed up with Center for Biological Diversity via EcoWatch Live on Facebook to find out why. Environmental Health Director and Senior Attorney Lori Ann Burd explained how there is a loophole in the The Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act under section 18, "that allows for entities and states to request emergency exemptions to spraying pesticides where they otherwise wouldn't be allowed to spray."
In a press release sent to EcoWatch, the Center for Biological Diversity stated:
The approval includes 2019 crops of cotton and sorghum in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. Ten of the 11 states have been granted the approvals for at least four consecutive years for the same "emergency." Five have been given approvals for at least six consecutive years.
If an occurrence is happening six years in a row, does that justify an emergency?
"This administration has been grossly abusing this exemption to allow the use of this one pesticide calledsulfoxafloron a vast acreage year after year," said Burd.
Our biodiversity is at serious risk. For example, in Texas — where 5.8 million acres got emergency exemption to spray — more than 800 native bee species and eight species of bumblebees reside. It is also an important migration route for monarch butterflies.
"Monarch butterflies and eight species of bumblebees do overlap with Texas counties where there is sulfoxaflor spraying," said Burd. "Even at subacute, very low doses, sufoxaflor will have a very dramatic effect on bumblebee reproduction." The purpose of sulfoxaflor is to kill insects.
Farmers have only gotten away with spraying sulfoxaflor because they were granted emergency. The EPA has not approved the lethal insecticide sulfoxaflor to be used on sorghum because it is known to attract bees. At one point the EPA did allow the use of sulfoxaflor on cotton, however the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit vacated the approval — the result of a lawsuit brought to them by beekeepers.
In a summary following the vacated approval in 2015, The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit published conclusions:
The panel held that because the EPA's decision to unconditionally register sulfoxaflor was based on flawed and limited data, the EPA's unconditional approval was not supported by substantial evidence. The panel vacated the EPA's unconditional registration because given the precariousness of bee populations, leaving the EPA's registration of sulfoxaflor in place risked more potential environmental harm than vacating it.
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Insects Must Be Saved to Prevent Collapse of Humanity, Top Scientist Warns
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalypse.html
The Insect Apocalypse Is Here
What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth?
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Mosquito-Borne 'Disease Danger Days' Rise Across U.S.
The number of days each year when mosquito-borne illnesses are more likely to spread is rising as average temperatures soar across the U.S., according to a new analysis.
Climate Central examined 244 cities across the country for its analysis, finding that 94 percent are experiencing more "disease danger days"—days with temperatures between 61 degrees and 93 degrees F, optimal conditions for transmission of diseases like West Nile and other vector-borne diseases—than they were in 1970
ew