[harpersealtako]

I think one of many issues with the car windshield observation is we don't have a good baseline. So we notice that in 1990 there were more bugs on our windshields compared to 2020 after a drive through Kansas. But maybe 2020's insect levels are actually a return to normal, preindustrial levels after an anomalous century of high bug populations? We don't have a bug windshield strike stats from 1890.

Honestly it's such a dirty metric with so many compounding variables I'm shocked that anybody is seriously considering it as a meaningful data point beyond the most basic, surface-level understanding of the issue. To be honest the whole thing reeks of the usual hacker-news crowd issue where people want to pretend they know about a topic (e.g. systemic issues in pollinator/agricultural pest population management in high-intensity modern industrial agriculture) but are underestimating the complexity of the issues by a huge magnitude.

[henearkr]

No. There is no suspected cause for any such "anomalously high insect population in the past", while we have a lot of suspected causes, verified by the way (so rather culprits than suspects) for the insects decline. The "anomalously high" "is possible" but is actually pure baseless speculation. Also, there is no such observation in the available litterature, scientific or layman.

You know, it is just a matter of knitting all of our knowledge bits together. Lots of nasty chemicals in the environments, especially design to harm insects. Add to that anormal temperatures and rain levels.