The other day, when I was taking a tour of the UMM EcoStation, I learned that they are currently leasing a few acres to a local farmer, but that there were restrictions on what he could plant. No corn! No planting corn in our ecologically conscious field station, because corn fields get soaked in neonicotinoids, a potent pesticide.

Of course, as we returned home, we drove past immense fields of corn everywhere.

Neonicotinoids are great for killing insects — they’re a nerve poison that binds to acetylcholine receptors, found in the central nervous system of insects, triggering excessive activity and killing them with overstimulation. It kills bees and butterflies and fireflies, those charming and charismatic creatures everyone loves, but also flies and spiders, which no one seems to care much about. Well, except maybe me and weirdo entomologists.

It’s been a poor summer for spiders, but then, I’ve noticed them declining in numbers for years. This summer, though, it was particularly obvious — in previous years, my lawn has been dotted with little tents, the webs of grass spiders, that are vividly obvious in the morning dew. This year…I’ve seen a handful, and some mornings, there are none at all.

Orb weavers haven’t been common around here. We’ve looked at the local horticulture garden, and aside from the rare tetragnathid, they’ve been mostly absent. It’s getting a bit creepy. Maybe you’re not as fond of spiders as I am, but you know you’re in trouble when levels of the food chain start dropping out.

It’s not just me. When we spot one or two monarch butterflies now, it’s noteworthy, and my wife will drag me out to the garden to see. Years ago we’d see huge flocks of them coating trees. It’s worldwide; butterfly populations in the UK are down.

Richard Fox, head of science at Butterfly Conservation, said: “The previous lowest average number of butterflies per count was nine in 2022, this latest figure is 22% lower than that, which is very disturbing. Not just that, but a third of the species recorded in the Big Butterfly Count have had their worst year on record, and no species had their best. The results are in line with wider evidence that the summer of 2024 has been very poor for butterflies.

“Butterflies are a key indicator species; when they are in trouble we know that the wider environment is in trouble too. Nature is sounding the alarm call. We must act now if we are to turn the tide on these rapid declines and protect species for future generations.”

Crashes in flying insect populations including beetles and wasps have been widely observed during the summer after a prolonged wet and cold first half of the season.

Weather is part of the reason — we also had a weirdly wet early summer here in Minnesota, and our trees are showing signs of stress. This isn’t the only stressor in our environment, and it’s rare to be able to blame extinctions on a single source. When you get multiple factors harming a population, that’s when you get an extinction vortex.

There is something going on here. You should be afraid. I am.

The exception: the sunchokes have rocketed up to 3 meters high, heavy with blossoms.

The local pollinators are pigging out on these flowers right now.

It’s not looking good for Florida today.

• Helene is currently a category 2 hurricane with wind speeds of 100 mph. It is expected to make landfall on Florida’s Big Bend this evening as at least a category 3 hurricane, bringing the risk of devastating damage.
• The storm was 320 mph south-west of Tampa as of 8 a.m. ET, traveling north-east at 12 mph.
• A storm surge warning is in place for almost the entirety of Florida’s west coast, where surging waters described as “unsurvivable” could reach as high as 20 feet in places.
• Hurricane and tropical storm warnings are in place across coastal areas of southern Florida. The National Hurricane Center said: “Preparations to protect life and property should be rushed to completion.”
• A state of emergency has been declared in 61 of Florida’s 67 counties and several are under evacuation orders.

If you’re in Florida (or the states above it), quit reading this stupid blog and get yourself to someplace safe.

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The Waffle Houses are closing! Time to panic!

This opinion piece is so on-brand for the New York Times: “I Swore Off Air-Conditioning, and You Can, Too”. We’re facing a serious threat from global warming, so let’s tell all the little people to get off their butts and fix it rather than addressing the systemic contributions of capitalism and the petrochemical industry.

Most of those savings were likely the result of using fans instead of air-conditioning. We also kept other appliances and devices turned off as much as possible because they, too, generate heat. Dishwashers are double trouble, putting out heat and humidity. We don’t have one.

You can’t unplug the refrigerator, of course, but we keep ours set for just under 40 degrees, the highest safe temperature, according to the Food and Drug Administration. And we dry our laundry on the clothesline out back.

When it gets too hot, we lightly spray water on our arms, legs and faces; the water helps dissipate a lot of heat. A quick, cold shower or a little time spent with that all-American favorite, the lawn sprinkler, also can bring relief.

In summer we’ll spend as many of our at-home hours as we can outdoors, in the shady city park down the street or on our screened porch.

Well, fine. I agree with all that. We do many of those things, too — we’ve got an ’emergency air conditioner’ in the window of our bedroom that we’ve used for about a week this year, but otherwise, yes, we mainly get by on low-energy alternatives. I think it’s a good idea to be mindful about how our lives impact the environment, and turning off an appliance now and then is smart and helpful. But does this actually substantially offset the fact that we live in cities that are dependent on the automobile? Worse, we’re surrounded by pervasive marketing telling us to buy massive trucks, that we have to go to a mall with a gigantic parking lot to buy cheap plastic widgets we don’t need made in China, while wearing clothes from Shein that we’ll throw into a landfill next week. There are a lot of sensible changes we could make in our lifestyles that the New York Times would get in trouble with their advertisers if they started promoting them.

OK, here’s the Batagaika Crater in Siberia.

That’s a huge “retrogressive thaw slump”, a hole that is visible from space and is steadily growing as the permafrost thaws and its edges collapse. Here’s a drone photo of the slow-motion disaster:

Spectacular and horrifying.

Permafrost covers 15% of the land in the Northern Hemisphere and contains twice as much carbon as the atmosphere.

One study estimated that permafrost thaw could emit as much planet-warming gases as a large industrial nation by 2100 if industries and countries don’t aggressively rein in their own emissions today.

How big is the contribution of this one feature in the landscape to climate change?

In a study published in the journal Geomorphology in June, researchers used satellite and drone data to construct 3D models of the megaslump and calculate its expansion over time.

They found that about 14 Pyramids of Giza’s worth of ice and permafrost had thawed at Batagay. The crater’s volume increases by about 1 million cubic meters every year.

“These values are truly impressive,” Alexander Kizyakov, the study’s lead author and a scientist at Lomonosov Moscow State University, told BI in an email.

“Our results demonstrate how quickly permafrost degradation occurs,” he added.

The researchers also calculated that the megaslump releases about 4,000 to 5,000 tons of carbon each year. That’s about as much as the annual emissions from 1,700 to 2,100 US homes’ energy use.

If only everyone in the USA would sprinkle a little water on their arms rather than turning on the air conditioner, we could compensate for that problem. Or better yet, think of all the energy you could save by cancelling your subscription to the NY Times!

Really, though, we need something more than these piecemeal token changes in individual behavior.

SpaceX has been poisoning the environment for years, and have shown a reckless disregard for the effects their launches have on local residents and wildlife, and have been guilty of dumping toxic materials in waters nearby.

SpaceX’s Starship launches at the company’s Starbase facility near Boca Chica, Texas, have allegedly been polluting the local environment for years, possibly in violation of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Water Act. for years. The news arrives in an exclusive CNBC report on August 12, which cites internal documents and communications between local Texas regulators and the EPA

SpaceX’s fourth Starship test launch in June was its most successful so far—but the world’s largest and most powerful rocket ever built continues to wreak havoc on nearby Texas communities, wildlife, and ecosystems. And after repeated admonishments, reviews, and ignored requests, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) have had enough.

Don’t worry, though, Elon Musk is on the case. Here he is responding to a news report on his awful company.

CNBC sucks, Elon Musk tweeted in a reply to his company’s statement.

What this reminds me of is the bro who buys a bunch of illegal fireworks, heads down to the lake and blows stuff up and makes an obnoxious racket, and then leaves a mess of cardboard and paper and scorched debris to go back home and be an asshole to his neighbors.

It’s fine. I suggest that every state dump its garbage on Texas, they don’t care.

It would much scarier and less stupid than this one, and much cheaper to make.

Imagine a world in which most of the insects are dying, told from the perspective of the perpetrators, not the victims. The monsters who have murdered all the pesky little bugs wander around their homes, wondering why it’s so quiet, but appreciating the absence of mosquitos. Slowly it dawns on them that they don’t hear any birds, either, and they notice that all their fishing trips to the lake turn up fruitless. The more discerning members of the community are horrified to learn that the spiders are missing.

Maybe we could have a few species that are exempt from the holocaust. They’d probably be ticks. The killers’ pets are infested, large mammals are dying in agony. Crops fail. The protagonists respond by poisoning the environment further, trying to confer safety for their few chosen favored food organisms. Unforeseen consequences arise, worsening the problem.

It would be one of those tense, slow-build movies, where the danger increases and the outcome becomes unavoidably inevitable. All attempts to restore the planet are futile. It would not have a happy ending.

Maybe we could title it Silent Spring. Has that been taken already?

OK, how about Silent Earth?

Damn. I guess we’re fucked.

I wouldn’t mind going there myself. But you know who really loves going to Spain? It’s not the British. It’s the invertebrates.

There is a path through they Pyrenees, the Pass of Bujaruelo, which is where all the insects funnel through on their way to summering in Spain. It’s been known for a long time that this is the place to find swarms of insects flocking south.

In autumn 1950 David and Elizabeth Lack chanced upon a huge migration of insects and birds flying through the Pyrenean Pass of Bujaruelo, from France into Spain, later describing the spectacle as combining both grandeur and novelty. The intervening years have seen many changes to land use and climate, posing the question as to the current status of this migratory phenomenon. In addition, a lack of quantitative data has prevented insights into the ecological impact of this mass insect migration and the factors that may influence it. To address this, we revisited the site in autumn over a 4 year period and systematically monitored abundance and species composition of diurnal insect migrants. We estimate an annual mean of 17.1 million day-flying insect migrants from five orders (Diptera, Hymenoptera, Hemiptera, Lepidoptera and Odonata) moving south, with observations of southward ‘mass migration’ events associated with warmer temperatures, the presence of a headwind, sunlight, low windspeed and low rainfall. Diptera dominated the migratory assemblage, and annual numbers varied by more than fourfold. Numbers at this single site hint at the likely billions of insects crossing the entire Pyrenean mountain range each year, and we highlight the importance of this route for seasonal insect migrants.

Who is caravaning over the mountains? Everyone. But mostly flies, and mostly pollinators. Lots of midges, gnats, hoverflies, all these small underappreciated flies that do a lot of the work of pollinating (it’s not just bees, you know.)

We’re talking millions of migrants, probably billions. Of course, they estimate that the total mass of all those insects was about 140kg per season. One or two Cantabrian brown bears ambling across the pass would outweigh all those insects in mass, but would probably have a negligible ecological impact in comparison.

This was a study of one pass with a convenient bottleneck to enable effective counting. Insects are flooding across the length of the Spanish/French border, and further, some of them keep going across the Mediterranean and take tours of Morocco.

Numerous studies have found a consistent south or southwest bias in migratory insect headings across Europe, suggesting insects from a large geographical area are filtered down into the Iberian Peninsula, passing through the Pyrenees each season. This makes insect migration bottlenecks within the Pyrenees important locations for censusing species and monitoring numbers. We estimate that the total number of insects moving across the Pyrenees mountain range reaches into the tens of billions. This number is of comparable size to those from radar studies across a similar-sized area. Insects are known to cross the Pyrenees not only in the centre where the Pass of Bujaruelo is situated, but also along the coasts. Williams et al. observed some southward movement of butterflies in October along the coast at Argelès-sur-Mer, where the Pyrenees descend to the Mediterranean Sea. Similar southward movements occur along the Atlantic seaboard. To accurately quantify the total number of migratory insects crossing the Pyrenees, extensive deployment of monitoring resources and techniques is needed, including the use of vertical-looking radars.

I’m reading that and thinking that if I were a spider, I’d want to set up a nice web across the Pass of Bujaruelo. Unfortunately, this study didn’t look at spiders. They weren’t migrating, after all, they were just setting up shop in the pass and taking advantage of all the tourists.