There have been, throughout Earth's history, five major mass extinctions. These are no-kidding, horrible events, and we humans are lucky not to have been around to witness them. These were the Ordovician-Silurian (445 million years ago), during which 85 percent of marine species died out; the Late Devonian (372-359 million years ago), in which 70-80 percent of marine species died out (there were no land species for these two.) Then there was the Permian extinction (252 million years ago), sometimes called the Great Dying, in which 96 percent of marine species and 70 percent of land vertebrates died; the Triassic-Jurassic (201 million years ago), which saw the dying out of 75 percent of all species, and last, the Cretaceous-Paleogene (66 million years ago), which cost the planet about 75 percent of all species.
Those are bad events, and are normally caused by such things as massive volcanism or, like that most recent one, an asteroid strike. But in recent years, climate scolds have been claiming we are in the middle of a mass extinction now, and that we humans are the cause. The numbers, however, don't add up. Even Britain's Royal Society, which is normally friendly to the anthropogenic climate change crisis agenda, has had to admit that, no, we're not in the middle of the sixth great dying right now. Chris Morrison, Environmental Editor for the Daily Sceptic, has details.
In November 2024, the Guardian reported that “as the planet warms up, scientists predict a series of ‘extinction cliffs’”. We are in danger of forgetting what the climate crisis means: extinction, was the cheerful article headline. But a recent bombshell report from the UK Royal Society has knocked seven bells out of all this nonsense by showing that species-level extinctions related to climate change “have not significantly increased over the last approximately 200 years”.
It was further found that decadal extinction rates over the last 100 years had “significantly declined” for arthropods and plants, the two groups of organisms encompassing most known global biodiversity. Overall, it was found that extinction rates have increased over the last 500 years, “but generally declined in the last 100 years”. Past extinctions are said to “strongly suggest” that climate change is not an important threat to biodiversity. Such a finding is hardly the smoking gun that shows humans burning hydrocarbons of late have or are causing a sixth mass extinction.
We might note that 500 years ago, the Industrial Revolution hadn't begun, the New World was still really new to European explorers who were just beginning to settle there, and there were no sport-utility vehicles or coal-powered electrical plants. But it's the 100 years that's key; here's why and I'm going to tell you. For about the last 100 years, human industry has grown steadily cleaner, our environment steadily healthier. Those of us who were around in the 1960s remember what things were like: Cities with smog warnings, rivers where you couldn't eat the fish, assuming you could find one, and garbage-strewn roadsides.
In just one long lifetime, we changed all that, mostly due to increased efficiency in industrial processes as well as some beneficial pressure from the first environmental groups and simple things like a nickel deposit on pop and beer cans; I remember very well when they put that deposit on cans in Iowa when I was a young man, and suddenly there were no more empty cans littering the roadsides.
But it's the tragedy of "we can't admit victory" that has pushed the original environmental movement, which succeeded, into radical notions about climate change and a sixth mass extinction - which we know isn't happening.
Mr. Morrison notes another reason:
One of the tragedies of modern environmentalism is that it has been captured for political purposes by those seeking to centralise power through the hard-Left Net Zero political agenda. Taking control of energy, and by extension the rest of industry and agriculture, by peddling unproven opinions that humans control the climate by burning hydrocarbons requires constant made-up scares of climate collapse and ecological disaster. But taking care of the planet, reducing habitat loss and protecting the natural world is a separate issue. Often it involves proper waste management as in the disposal of plastic. It is often noted that societies that have prospered by using natural resources such as hydrocarbons are those best able to clean up and protect nature.
There are few sadder sights than environmentalists turning blind eyes to the bat, avian and insect carnage of wind turbines, the digging up of Indonesian rainforests for EV battery enhancing nickel and the rape of the Amazon to provide balsa wood cores for the proliferating but highly unreliable windmills. Quite how 50,000 green activists justified ripping down 100,000 mature rainforest trees to help them run a recent COP conference in Brazil dedicated to preserving the rainforest must, alas, remain a complete mystery
That strikes at the very heart of the matter.
Read More: New: The Mass Extinction That Wasn't
Georg Wilhelm Steller, the Man Who Gave America's Wildlife His Name
The environmental movement that did so much to actually clean things up has been replaced. People concerned about the environment used to read Aldo Leopold; now they read Karl Marx. The battle to clean up our wind and water has been won. Humans are not responsible for a 6th mass extinction. The planet isn't about to collapse into a climate apocalypse. No, the original environmentalists won, and the people calling themselves environmentalists today are a very different breed. Indeed, they would cheerfully take us backward, with their eagle-killing windmills and their bird-frying solar installations. They aren't concerned with the environment that most of them have never seen; they are concerned with the political environment, and they look to Cuba, not the United States, for their model.
