The United Nations has produced a report warning that a million species are threatened with extinction.
Here is why you shouldn’t take it seriously.
It’s politics, not science
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which produced the report, is a political organisation not a scientific one. Just like its sister organisation the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — IPCC — in fact.
As Donna Laframboise notes here, both exist purely to give a fig leaf of scientific credibility to the UN’s ‘sustainability’ agenda.
When the IPBES was established in 2010, we were informed point blank that its purpose was “to spearhead the battle against the destruction of the natural world.”
In other words, there’s all sorts of deception here. This is no sober scientific body, which examines multiple perspectives, and considers alternative hypotheses. The job of the IPBES is to muster only one kind of evidence, the kind that promotes UN environmental treaties.
That’s how the United Nations works, folks. Machinations in the shadows. Camouflaging its political aspirations by dressing them up in 1,800 pages of scientific clothing.
This is the usual suspects crying wolf. Again
No one would dispute that habitat loss is a problem for plants and animals. But it’s a big stretch from there to suggest that a million species are ‘threatened’ with actual extinction. The ‘E’ word has long been overplayed by environmentalists because it’s so dramatic and final and because everyone has heard of the dodo. There is no evidence whatsoever, though, that the world is heading for its so-called Sixth Great Extinction. As Willis Eschenbach once pertinently asked at Watts Up With That? – Where Are The Corpses?
Harvard ecologist EO Wilson once estimated that up to 50,000 species go extinct every year. How did he calculate this? Using the same method the IPCC uses for its junk-science prognostications on catastrophic climate change: computer models.
Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore exploded this myth long ago:
Moore said in 2000: “There’s no scientific basis for saying that 50,000 species are going extinct. The only place you can find them is in Edward O. Wilson’s computer at Harvard University. They’re actually electrons on a hard drive. I want a list of Latin names of actual species.” Moore was interviewed by reporter Marc Morano (now with Climate Depot) in the 2000 Amazon rainforest documentary:
Environmental activist Tim Keating of Rainforest Relief was asked in the 2000 documentary if he could name any of the alleged 50,000 species that have gone extinct and he was unable.
“No, we can’t [name them], because we don’t know what those species are. But most of the species that we’re talking about in those estimates are things like insects and even microorganisms, like bacteria,” Keating explained.
R-i-g-h-t. So there are all these species going extinct. But we don’t know what they are because we haven’t yet discovered them. Hmm. Sounds terrible. Let’s cancel Western Industrial Civilisation right now, just in case.
Seriously, these people are like a stuck record
Here – h/t Dennis Ambler at Homewood’s place – is the Independent from 2006:
Life on earth is facing a major crisis with thousands of species threatened with imminent extinction – a global emergency demanding urgent action. This is the view of 19 of the world’s most eminent biodiversity specialists, who have called on governments to establish a political framework to save the planet.
Scientists estimate that the current rate at which species are becoming extinct is between 100 and 1,000 times greater than the normal “background” extinction rate – and say this is all due to human activity.
Anne Larigauderie, executive director of Diversitas, a Paris-based conservation group, said that the situation was now so grave that an international body with direct links with global leaders was essential.
The scientists believe that a body similar to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change could help governments to tackle the continuing loss of species.
They get away with presenting it as “news” every time because the mainstream media is so thoroughly compliant and dutifully bigs up each scare every time it appears.
“Nature is in its worst shape in human history’
This is exactly the kind of scaremongering claim the report was designed to generate. It gives environmental correspondents from on-message outfits like the BBC and CBC the excuse to put in a call to their favourite eco-alarmists, who helpfully respond with hysterical drivel like this:
“Humanity unwittingly is attempting to throttle the living planet and humanity’s own future,” said George Mason University biologist Thomas Lovejoy, who has been called the godfather of biodiversity for his research.
Actually, as Patrick Moore notes, there have been many worse times for species extinction.
Moore, in an interview with Climate Depot, refuted the claims of the species study. “The biggest extinction events in the human era occurred 60,000 years ago when humans arrived in Australia, 10-15,000 years ago when humans arrived in the New World, 800 years ago when humans found New Zealand, and 250 years ago when Europeans brought exotic species to the Pacific Islands such as Hawaii,” Moore explained.
“Since species extinction became a broad social concern, coinciding with the extinction of the passenger pigeon, we have done a pretty good job of preventing species extinctions,” Moore explained.
“I quit my life-long subscription to National Geographic when they published a similar ‘sixth mass extinction’ article in February 1999. This [latest journal] Nature article just re-hashes this theme,” he added. Moore left Greenpeace in 1986 because he felt the organization had become too radical.
Polar Bears and Tigers
By curious coincidence perhaps the two most overhyped of all doomed species are now enjoying a remarkable recovery, not least because – contrary to the claims of environmentalists – humans actually do care about flora, fauna and diversity and have made great strides in preserving them.
It has been a century since the last species of any significance – the passenger pigeon – died out. Almost all the species extinctions that have occurred in the last two centuries have been on islands, the result of predation by invasive species such as rats or cats accidentally introduced by sailors.
Polar bear populations have exploded from about 5,000 60 years ago to around 26,000 now – making a mockery of their status as an emblem of man-made environmental catastrophe.
Meanwhile, the number of tigers in India has risen dramatically in the last decade, according to the Irish Times:
The estimated population of the endangered big cat has increased from 1,411 in 2006 to 2,226 in 2014, according to the report published by the Indian government’s National Tiger Conservation Authority.
Read the small print
When you get to the bottom of the scaremongering report, the authors show their true colours.
Here is the BBC’s summary:
The study doesn’t tell governments what to do, but gives them some pretty strong hints.
One big idea is to steer the world away from the “limited paradigm of economic growth”.
They suggest moving away from GDP as a key measure of economic wealth and instead adopting more holistic approaches that would capture quality of life and long-term effects.
They argue that our traditional notion of a “good quality of life” has involved increasing consumption on every level. This has to change.
Yes, we’re back to our old friends – Agenda 21 and sustainability – the UN’s code phrases for a new world order in which technocrats of the international elite impose their globalist agenda of wealth redistribution, regulation, enforced renewables, higher taxes and enforced rationing on sovereign nations in the name of ‘saving the planet.’
If the UN really cared about species extinction, of course, it would be doing the exact opposite.
As Jo Nova points out:
1. The worst pollution is in countries with a low income per capita — when people are hungry they raze forests. The most polluted cities are in places like Ghana, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Zambia, Argentina, and Nigeria. The most deforestation occurs in Brazil, Indonesia, Russia, and Mexico. The worst air is in India and China.
2. Only rich nations have the resources to save the environment.
3. Countries that produce more CO2 are richer.
Ignore everything the UN tells you about the environment. It’s drivel – and dangerous drivel at that.
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