German ecologist Jörg Müller and his colleagues concluded in their article that the decrease in insect abundance is due to climate change and that this downward trend has reversed since 2016. The study was a reanalysis of the data in the Nijmegen-German article from 2017 which showed that we have lost three-quarters of our flying insects, a story that received worldwide attention.
In a new Nature publication, titled 'Weather anomalies cannot explain insect decline', Nijmegen ecologists Caspar Hallmann, Hans de Kroon, Eelke Jongejans and Henk Siepel, together with German colleagues, demonstrate that the statistical models are misleading, and render conclusions of Müller and his team as invalid. With new data, they also show that there is no reversed trend.
De Kroon: "There is no doubt that climate change affects insect survival and shifts between species. Work on this is just beginning. But this paper takes giant leaps to unwarranted inferences, by which it diverts attention from major threats such as habitat loss, pesticides, and excess fertilizers."