Species Extinction Claims Are Overblown

The claim of impending mass extinction of the Earth's species is a never-ending drama. In 1979, the biologist Norman Myers declared that a fifth of all species on the planet would be gone within two decades. Did we really lose that fifth by 1999? Hardly.

In the 1990s, E. O. Wilson popularized various numbers ranging from 4,000 to 100,000 species a year being lost and these number were repeated over and over again in environmental groups' fund raising literature and in congressional testimony. In 1993, Al Gore (who has been awfully quiet lately) said that “one-half of all species could disappear in our lifetime.” (1) These wild numbers still get bandied about. On recent example: Diane Ackerman in her new book, The Human Age, says this,”We are losing between seventeen thousand and one hundred thousand species a year. Many scientists predict that, at the pace we're going, about half of all the world's plants and animals will vanish by 2100.” (2) She obviously bought into Wilson's numbers mentioned above. Some contrary facts:

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- After more than 90 percent of the Atlantic coastal forests of Brazil were cut down, mostly in the 19th century, the actual number of animal extinctions has been zero, even though many of the Brazilian species are highly endemic, found nowhere else in the world. (1) - A paper in Science says there are far fewer species than the up to 100 million some folks have estimated and species extinction numbers are even less troublesome. Mark Costello and colleagues state that he number of species on earth today is 5 plus or minus 3 million, of which 1.5 million are named. (3) - Dennis Avery adds, “Biologists are again predicting massive species losses as the world warms. But where are the corpses? There have been few findings of extinctions among the continental bird and animal species over the past 500 years. The species extinctions have been virtually all on islands, as humans have brought such alien predators as rats, cats, and Canadian thistles to places where they had no natural enemies.” (4) Then there's the IPCC, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In their assessment report in 2007, the IPCC predicted that 20 to 30 percent of all animal and plant species faced a high risk for extinction should average global temperatures rise 2 to 3 degrees C (3.6 to 5 degrees F). However, surprise, surprise!! The recent IPCC report includes a shocking admission—that it doubts its own computer simulations for species extinction. “There is very little confidence that models currently predict extinction risk accurately,” the report states. Very low extinction rates despite considerable climate variability during the past hundred of thousands of years have led to concern that “forecasts for very high extinction rates due entirely to climate change may be overestimated.” (5) Someone should notify all the doomsayers mentioned earlier in this article that they need to find something else to scare people about. Also inform the naysayers that in 2014, researchers at the California Academy of Sciences added a whopping 221 new plant and animal species to our family tree. The new species include 110 ants, 16 beetles, three spiders, 28 fishes, 24 sea slugs, two marine worms, 9 barnacles, two octocorals, 25 plants, one waterbear, and one tiny mammal. More than a dozen Academy scientist along with several dozen international collaborators described the discoveries. (6) Jack Dini Livermore, CA References

1. Stephen Budiansky, “The Teflon doomsayers,” budiansky.blogspot.com, September 26, 2010
2. Diane Ackerman, The Human Age, (New York, NY, W. W. Norton & Co., 2014) 154
3. Mark J. Costello et al., “Can we name the earth's species before they go extinct?”, Science, 339, 413, January 25, 2013
4. Dennis Avery, “Species safe even if the world warms,” cgfi.org, May 2, 2010
5. Axel Bojanowski, “UN backtracks: will global warming really trigger mass extinctions?”
speigel.de/international, March 26, 2014
6. Anthony Watts, “Despite posited threats of extinctions caused by global warming, 221 new species described by the California Academy of Sciences in 2014, wattsupwiththat, December 29, 2014