Extinction is a fact of... well, life, in biology. 99 percent of all species that have ever lived on this planet are now extinct. There have been mass extinction events, five, in fact, none of which were caused by human carbon emissions:
- The Ordovician, caused possibly by a gamma-ray burst
- The Late Devonian, caused by ocean oxygen depletion due to volcanism and possibly asteroid impacts.
- The End-Permian, known as the "Great Dying," in which life on Earth was very nearly erased; this one was caused by a massive volcanic event known as the Siberian Traps.
- The End-Triassic, caused by vulcanism associated with the splitting up of the ancient continent of Pangea.
- End-Cretaceous, caused by the Chicxulub asteroid impact.
You'll notice that none of those happened when humans were around. Now some, many of them among the ranks of the climate scolds, are maintaining that there is now, ongoing, a 6th mass extinction event, that they are calling the Holocene mass extinction. The problem is, the data doesn't back that claim up. A new study from the University of Arizona Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology is now debunking these claims.
Prominent research studies have suggested that our planet is currently experiencing another mass extinction, based on extrapolating extinctions from the past 500 years into the future and the idea that extinction rates are rapidly accelerating.
A new study by Kristen Saban and John Wiens with the University of Arizona Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, however, revealed that over the last 500 years extinctions in plants, arthropods and land vertebrates peaked about 100 years ago and have declined since then. Furthermore, the researchers found that the past extinctions underlying these forecasts were mostly caused by invasive species on islands and are not the most important current threat, which is the destruction of natural habitats.
One might note that 100 years ago was just a few years prior to the developed world's growing concerns over things like air and water pollution. Even 50 years ago, our cities were much different places than they are now. Older cars burning leaded gas were a major cause of environmental damage. We older folks remember city air that one could see, rivers that caught fire, lakes in which the fish, if you could find one, weren't safe to eat.
Those days are long gone. We've largely won this battle. And the claims about the Holocene mass extinction are overblown.
The paper argues that claims of a current mass extinction may rest on shaky assumptions when projecting data from past extinctions into the future, ignoring differences in factors driving extinctions in the past, the present and the future. Published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, the paper is the first study to analyze rates, patterns and causes of recent extinctions across plant and animal species.
Extrapolating from questionable data isn't good science. Like the claims of the climate scolds, these claims are fraught. they appear to be serving an agenda, not science.
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Here's the methodology of the University of Arizona study:
For their study, Saban and Wiens analyzed rates and patterns of recent extinctions, specifically across 912 species of plants and animals that went extinct over the past 500 years. All in all, data from almost 2 million species were included in the analysis.
That's a lot of data. And the results?
“We discovered that the causes of those recent extinctions were very different from the threats species are currently facing,” said Wiens, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. “This makes it problematic to extrapolate these past extinction patterns into the future, because the drivers are rapidly changing, particularly with respect to habitat loss and climate change.”
Those are good points. In the developed world, the environment is cleaner now, today, than it has been since before the Industrial Revolution. In the late 1800s, city skies were darkened with smoke, and surfaces were covered with soot from burning coal. Now, people heat and cook with electricity and clean-burning natural gas. Our cities are cleaner than they have been in decades, and that effect carries over into the countryside, or, as we might call it, the environment. Habitat loss is still a problem, but human populations over most of the world are expected to peak in the next generation or two, and then begin to decline; this will, in large part, address this issue, unfortunate as it may be for humanity. We may not like it, but it sort of negates the argument that we must dial back our technologies to deal with this mass extinction that isn't.
Also, humans have stopped capriciously killing the wildlife that surrounds us. People hunt, and in the developed world, game animal harvests are managed by professional wildlife biologists to maintain populations at a sustainable level, within carrying capacity. There are no more incidents like the mass killing of the dodos; that wouldn't happen today.
In other words, humans in general care a lot more about the environment than they used to. And, we're enjoying a vastly cleaner surrounding than we did just a few years ago. This is a battle that has been largely won, and there's no reason to submit to panic and erase much of our comfortable, modern, technological lifestyle to address the questionable claims of climate scolds or anyone else engaging questionable data to support a cause.
