Scepticism on verge of extinction, not millions of species Reason on way out

WE learned one thing this week from the media’s frantic hyping of an “extinction crisis”. Scepticism is as dead as the dodo.

The headlines were breathless with fear and without even a zephyr of doubt.

“One million species at risk of extinction, UN report warns. (ABC)

“‘Our last chance’: Warning one million species at risk of ‘annihilation’.” (news.com.au)

“The world is ‘sleepwalking into an extinction crisis’.” (ABC)

Predictably, the taxpayerfunded ABC, already the chief propaganda arm for the global warming movement, flogged this scare hardest.

From dawn to dark, ABC radio on Tuesday promoted the alarmist findings of a 400page report of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

It started with Fran Kelly, the green activist who hosts the ABC’s Radio National Breakfast: “Now we’ve got these twin arms … we’ve got the climate crisis and a biodiversity crisis looming.”

No warning bells were sounded over the report’s claim that “approximately 25 per cent of species are already threatened with extinction in most animal and plant groups studied” and that up to a million species were “committed to extinction, many within decades”.

But let me point out a few facts omitted by this UN report.

First, the report – which pushes the global warming scare – doesn’t mention one

terrific thing that’s come from having more carbon dioxide in the air. The planet is actually getting greener.

Yes, as a Boston University study in the journal Nature Climate Change has pointed out: “From a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.”

Why does this report not mention this great environmental news? Does it want only bad news instead?

Then there’s the inherent improbability of the UN’s numbers.

We are told to believe that up to one million species could become extinct in just a few decades, yet this “extinction crisis” doesn’t seem to be backed up by observed extinctions right now.

The International

Union for Conservation of Nature is the global authority for monitoring species at risk of extinction, issuing annual updates to its “Red List”.

This year’s update lists not a single species that became extinct in 2018.

Last year’s update listed just one extinction – a herb from Hawaii, Amaranthus brownie. But it said three other species listed as extinct in 2017, including the Quito Stubfoot Toad and Aldabra Banded Snail, were actually not, after all.

That doesn’t just cast doubt on how real the “extinction crisis” is. It also suggests there’s lots of guessing going on.

And there is. These latest predictions are actually the product of computer models working on mathematical calculations that at times seem little better than a guess.

One involves the most basic fact: just how many species actually live on this planet?

In 2010, a catalogue launched at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity said it was

1.9 million.

The very next year, the Census of Marine Life used a new analytical technique and announced the true number of species was around 8.7 million.

But they, too, were then trumped by Indiana University researchers who declared that lots of undiscovered microbes would take that number to a trillion.

Who really knows? And who really knows how many species we will really lose this century?

Indeed, a 2011 study in the journal Nature warned that the United Nations was actually relying on questionable extinction rates. But, hey, the publicity for its scare is the UN’s reward.

Don’t mistake me. I don’t like animals becoming extinct. I miss the dodo. I wish I could see a mammoth. I’m glad polar bear numbers are growing, despite what global warming alarmists once claimed. But extinctions are also part of nature’s story, as is the evolution of new species. More than 99 per cent of all species that ever lived on this planet are now extinct, by best estimates, yet we still seem to have more species than ever.

I’m also optimistic. The IUCN has documented only 800 extinctions in the past 400 years, during which humans exploded in numbers and introduced feral animals and pests to newly “discovered” lands.

But by century’s end the world will depopulate and probably quickly. We’ve also learned from most of our environmental mistakes and are getting rich enough to fix them.

I just wish more journalists would learn from another mistake: not being sceptical when cause-pushers predict Armageddon.

See, it turns out that what’s really endangered is our reason. Watch Andrew Bolt on The Bolt Report LIVE 7pm week nights