Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
As Anthony Watts highlighted, the recent paper in Nature (paywalled, reported here) on extinctions agreed with the main conclusion that I had established in my post “Where Are The Corpses“. The conclusion was that the “species/area relationship” as currently used doesn’t work to predict extinctions, and thus there is no “Sixth Wave of Extinctions” going on.
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This example of an imaginary “wave of extinctions” once again highlights the difficulties of over-credulous scientists as well as the public. The consensus of scientific and public opinion has been that we are in the middle of a mythical “sixth wave” of extinction. In fact, this consensus was much more far-reaching than the claimed consensus regarding climate science … and just as wrong. Sadly, the “Sixth Wave of Extinction” meme is likely to be very hard to kill.
Figure 1. Another alarmist hockeystick. This is the most common graph that comes up on Google Images for “rate of extinction”. I cannot find any attribution for the graph. I do note that we haven’t seen the hundreds of extinctions claimed by whoever made the graph, and that the person who made the graph can’t spell “extinct”. But the graph is hugely popular, replicated on blog after blog.
One web site where this Fig. 1 image is found titles the thread “Bigger Threat Than Global Warming: Mass Species Extinction” … it is good that we have a new measurement standard for threats, because “Terrorism Threat Level Orange” sounds so last decade. And since we already have been informed that global warming is a bigger threat than terrorism, we now have a complete multi-level threat scale — mass extinction > global warming > terrorism. I also like how no animals went extinct from 1700 to 1900. But I digress … here’s the real historical extinction picture since the year 1500, from my post cited above;
Figure 2. Mammal and Bird Extinctions. All causes, all locations. 17 year Gaussian average. The first recorded extinctions resulted from introduced species during the first wave of European exploration of the Western Hemisphere, mostly on Caribbean Islands. The second wave of extinctions is coincident with the spread of various colonial empires (and their concomitant introduced cats, rabbits, diseases, mongooses, rifles, rats, dogs, etc) through the 18th and 19th and into the 20th centuries.
I have pleaded for common sense in this question by asking, where are the corpses of all of these supposedly extinct species? I looked high and low for birds or mammals that had gone extinct through habitat reduction. I found none. I searched the Red List. I searched the CREO list. I started investigating this question of extinctions at the end of 2001, as a result of E. O. Wilson, Stuart Pimm, and other co-authors publishing their extinction claims (pdf) in December 2001 as a rebuttal to Lomborg’s “The Skeptical Environmentalist”.
By March 2002 I had written and privately circulated what eventually (with much interesting research and analysis omitted) became my 2010 WUWT blog post on extinction, “Where Are The Corpses”. By dint of burning gallons of midnight oil (organic CO2-free oil, I might add), it took me three months, while working full-time at a day job, to establish from the actual extinction records that Wilson was wrong. I tried to get the results of my analysis published in 2004 with no success. And fair enough, my submission was not in the best of shape. If I were the editor I might have turned me down. Although the ideas were all there, the problem was I didn’t speak the scientific dialect of Journalese all that well back then. Still don’t, for that matter. But all along I have said that the huge, overblown extinction numbers were a fantasy. And almost a decade later, the latest study in Nature agrees.
There are several lessons that I draw from all of this. I sometimes divide lessons into three piles—the good, the bad, and the interesting. First, the good. Science eventually is self-correcting. The claim that 27,000 species are going extinct every year and the “Sixth Wave of Extinctions” will end up in the trash-bin of alarmist scientific claims.
Next, the bad news. The self-correction is way, way too slow. The claim of extraordinary extinctions was made by E. O. Wilson in 1992. It’s 20 years later, and the process of throwing out the garbage is just begun. C’mon, folks, this the 21st century. We need to become much more skeptical overall. The self-correction process of science needs to start moving faster. We can no longer afford the delays occasioned by the blind acceptance of incorrect theories. Scientists these days are nowhere near suspicious enough. And there’s more bad news.
Once again, we have a “scientific consensus” which is based on heartfelt emotion rather than actual data. I see Wilson’s claim as the source of all of this. In 1992, he said that some 27,000 species were going extinct each year. When I read that, my Urban Legend Alarm started ringing loud enough for Helen Keller to notice. I said “No way that can be right, the number’s way too big” … and it appears I was correct.
Unfortunately, this claim fit right in with the environmentalists reasonable desire to minimize clear-cutting of tropical forests. Confirmation bias raised its ugly head, and as a result the extinction numbers were never examined. Instead, the bogus claim immediately found its way onto bumper stickers and T-shirts and rainforest campaigns.
Now, I grew up in the middle of the forest, with no neighbors for miles, and I love the forest. So don’t get me wrong. The problem was not the environmentalists’ legitimate desire to properly protect or manage the forest.
The problem was the bogus claim of thousands of extinctions, a claim that unfortunately fit too perfectly into the reasonable desire to stop wantonly clear-cutting the rainforest. Here at last was the magic bullet, the way to the public’s consciousness (and wallet). It fit so well that nobody wanted to listen to their own urban legend alarms. Nobody wanted to be the one to say “27,000 extinctions a year since 1992 … that’s half a million species that are supposed to be dead … how come we haven’t seen any of them yet?”. So as in the CO2 debacle, the environmental movement once again, and from the best of motives, threw its not inconsiderably weight behind bogus science.
That’s the good and the bad, now for the interesting part. How does such a consensus persist? Generally, by special pleading. If you can’t argue the pig, you argue the squeal.
For example, one of the main exponents of the species/area consensus on extinctions is Dr. Stuart Pimm. He was one of the authors of the attack on The Skeptical Environmentalist that I mentioned above. He was also courageous enough to comment on this issue on the thread Anthony started that I cited above, and that gets my respect. I like to see a man who is willing to publicly stand up for his ideas.
Dr. Pimm says that his studies have shown that the species area relationship is actually borne out by the evidence. In his comment to that thread, he lays out his explanation in one of my favorite ways, the “thought experiment”, as follows:
Imagine destruction that wipes out 95% of the habitat in an area metaphorically “overnight”. How many species have disappeared “the following morning”? The paper tells you. It is not many, just those wholly restricted to the 95% (and absent from the 5% where they would survive). The important question is …
How many of additional species living lonely lives in their isolated patches (the 5%) would become extinct eventually because their population sizes are too small to be viable? A different species-area curve applies — the one for islands, which are isolated. It is a much larger number of extinctions, of course, and the one used in the studies mentioned above that find such compelling agreement between predicted against observed extinctions.
That sounds right … if his species/area relationship theory is correct. Some species would go extinct immediately. The rest would follow an exponential decay from that time to when they reach their new equilibrium. So we’d see an immediate effect, then a decreasing number of extinctions as the years went by until the final equilibrium was reached. If his theory is correct.
But when I read Dr. Pimm’s actual work, I don’t find the names of actual species that have gone extinct from habitat reduction. I don’t find “compelling agreement between predicted against observed extinctions”. Instead, I find things like this example, from “Timeline Between Deforestation and Bird Extinction in Tropical Forest Fragments” :
Our previous work employs the familiar, empirical relationship between the size of an area, A, and the number of species it contains, S, to predict how many species should eventually be lost when forest area is reduced. We have two cases studies: the Atlantic Forest region of South America (Brooks & Balmford 1996) and the islands of Southeast Asia (Brooks et al. 1997). The global survey of Collar et al. (1994) includes lists of the bird species threatened with extinction in these regions. The predicted numbers of species lost from deforestation closely match these independently compiled totals of threatened species. This match suggests that these threatened species will indeed become extinct in due course and thus that we can predict the eventual species losses.
Note that the “species/area relationship” being applied to extinctions is described as the “familiar, empirical relationship”. This is an indication of the strength of the consensus regarding the claimed relationship.
OK. What’s wrong with the logic in Dr. Pimm’s paragraph?
His logic goes as follows. Having noticed that there have not been any bird extinctions from habitat reduction, he explains this by saying that the birds are “destined for extinction”. His species/area relationship predicts a certain number of extinctions. He finds that according to the Red List, about that same number of birds are “threatened with extinction”. This, he says, shows that his estimates are very reasonable, supporting the idea that the species/area relationship is correct.
There are two problems with that. The first is a problem with the evidence. Even if we assume a fairly long period until the calculated number of species goes extinct, the cutting of the tropical forests has been going on for many decades now. Plus as Dr. Pimm says, some species, perhaps not a lot but certainly some, should have gone extinct immediately. So from those two effects, we should have seen some bird and mammal extinctions by now. But we haven’t seen those predicted extinctions from habitat reduction. This makes his claim very doubtful from the start.
So that’s a problem with the evidence. I go through the actual numbers in “Where Are The Corpses?“. By now, if we really were in the midst of the “Sixth Wave of Extinctions”, someone should be able to point to dozens of bird and mammal species that have gone extinct from habitat reduction even if the extinctions occur very slowly. So the evidence doesn’t support his claim.
(Let me digress a moment and request that people not say “but what about the quagga, it’s extinct”, or “you left that noble bird, the nimble-fingered purse-snatcher, off the list of bird extinctions”. CREO says the quagga is extant under a valid species name, but that’s not the point. I don’t wish to be sidetracked into debating the reality of one or two extinctions. According to Wilson we should have seen dozens and dozens of bird and mammal extinctions by now. Unless you know where those missing dozens and dozens of extinctions are, I don’t want to debate whether I should have included the extinction of the double-breasted seersucker. End of digression.)
Those are problems with the evidence. But what’s wrong with Dr. Pimm’s logic?
The problem with the logic is a bit more subtle. If you go to the Red List, yes, you will find that those birds he mentions are indeed listed as being threatened with extinction. So at first blush, it seems this supports his “species/area relationship” claim.
But why does the Red List say those birds are threatened with extinction?
Well … in most instances, because of loss of habitat … which they say leads to the grave threat of extinction because that is what’s predicted by the species/area relationship.
So Dr. Pimm’s logic is perfectly circular. As long as we accept that there is a mathematical relationship (species/area) between habitat reduction and extinctions, we can show that there is a mathematical relationship between habitat reduction and extinctions. We just declare species that have lost habitat as “Threatened With Extinction”, and presto! We now have the evidence to support the “species/area relationship”.
And since in the 21st century there is hardly a bird or mammal species which has not lost habitat, this allows the placing of more and more species onto the “threatened” lists. It also allows the putative cause called “habitat reduction” to be added to virtually any animal on the Red List … but there’s a huge problem.
The dang creatures just refuse to oblige by going extinct as Drs. Wilson and Pimm have been predicting for lo these many years. They won’t die, the cheeky beggars. Rather impolite of the birds and mammals, I’d say.
Finally, let me use this example to encourage people to use their common sense, to consider the “reasonableness” of the numbers that they encounter. The reality of the 21st century is that we need to run with our “bad number detectors” set to maximum gain. When someone claims that 27,000 species are going extinct every year, think about that number. Does it make sense? Does it seem to be a reasonable size? Extrapolate it out, that’s a quarter million species claimed to be going extinct per decade, a half million species since Wilson made the prediction. Is it reasonable that the world lost a half million species … but nobody can come up with any corpses?
Here is the rude truth about bird and mammal extinctions. Life is incredibly resilient. Once it gets started, it’s a bitch to stop. Almost all of the bird and mammal extinctions were the result of one species (specifically including humans) actively and tenaciously hunting another species to extinction. Most of the time this was an introduced species (specifically including Europeans during the waves of conquest and empire). The main extinction threat to mammals and birds around the planet has never been habitat reduction. It is species-on-species predation in its infinite variety. It was introduced brown tree snakes eating native birds in Guam, and humans hunting the Carolina Parakeets for their feathers to supply the millinery trade in New York.
And these days, of course, it is the “bushmeat” trade that is a huge threat to many African bird and mammal species, including rare and endangered primates. The idea that those species are threatened because of “habitat reduction” or “climate change” is a huge misdirection that obscures the real problems, which are the same problems as always … human predation and introduced species.
My regards to all,
w.
NOTES OF NOTE:
• While I strongly advocate checking to see if numbers are reasonable, “reasonableness” is not in itself something to stand on. It is simply one part of the “smell test”. And the smell test can’t falsify anything. But it certainly can indicate where to take a hard mathematical or observational look to find out why the number seems so far out of range.
• I grew up in the forest. I live in the forest now. When I look out from my back deck I see nothing but redwoods and oaks and bay laurel, with a tiny triangle of ocean glimmering in the distance. I believe in protecting and managing and harvesting and preserving the forests. In addition, biodiversity is always of value to an ecosystem, increasing its stability, adaptability, and longevity. This article is about extinctions, not about whether the forest should be properly protected, harvested, and managed.
• I see that my previous comments have made it into the Wall Street Journal.
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Willis>
One slight hole in your reasoning/logic which needs to be plugged: although it seems unlikely, if a sufficiently low proportion of total species are observed, then the numbers of observed extinctions would be low compared to total extinctions. Is there any evidence that observed species only represent a tiny, tiny percentage of the species in question?
Another thing, which is probably my mistake, is that I was under the impression that the massive lost-species claims referred mainly to insects. Is that just spin I shouldn’t have believed?
LearDog
I disagree with you on failed evolution examples. They are all around you. all of these species with rediculously limited habitat requirements are an obvious example. Natural selection would eliminate nearly all of them in geologically short order.
“So if a plant is wiped out by agriculture, is that extinction from habitat loss or death by plow? The problem doesn’t seem to be the lack of suitable habitat for the Bakersfield smallscale. It is that we killed them all.”
From wikipedia: “The plants are endemic to the alkali soils of the local occasionally flooded salt pan. Much of the land in the San Joaquin Valley was claimed and altered for agriculture and the water table dropped, making conditions too dry for reproduction of many species, including this Atriplex.”
This looks like an exact fit to my understanding of the term “habitat loss.” If the habitat was still there, the plants would come back from seed. I suspect that the centimation of the salt pans in the upper San Joaquin, and the extinctions that caused, would fit well into Wilson’s predictive model derived from species/area relationships.
Al Gored
June 2, 2011 at 10:16 pm
Thanks 🙂
I’ll see if I can scare up a copy.
mikael pihlström
June 3, 2011 at 2:23 am
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Give it up already, you are out of your league and starting to make an ass out of yourself.
Al Gored says:
June 2, 2011 at 10:20 pm
Sorry, Al, but that presents a number of personal accounts of the passenger pigeon. So you’ll have to be more specific — which of the historical information is correct and which is not? Are you saying that Audubon’s description is a fairy tale, or whose?
w.
mikael pihlström says:
June 3, 2011 at 2:23 am
Oooh, oooh, wait, please, teacher, call on me, I know the answer to this one, call on me please, I have my hand raised …
Because every time they’ve tried to debate the sceptics they lost so badly and looked like such jerks in the process!
Any other questions you have, Mikael, just ask them, we’re happy to answer them here.
And while in their abstract the Nature article authors “explicitly oppose” the idea that a reduction in the claimed threat by a couple orders of magnitude means we should worry less, I think I’ll leave that question up to the vox pop rather than listen to you screaming that you know what the authors actually meant.
Because while it’s kinda cute that you think that scientific authors always tell the plain unvarnished truth for everyone to see and there’s no need to ever dig any deeper, actually that’s a childish fantasy, real science doesn’t work that way. Not everything you read in scientific papers is in there because it’s science. Wake up and smell the coffee, bro’, you are getting suckered — blind belief in the probity of mainstream climate scientists is a very fast way to get bitten in the nether regions.
Mikael, I know that (based on the abstract rather than the text) you think we should not reduce our worry level just because the authors say that the threat is several orders of magnitude smaller than we feared … which makes it a really good thing that you don’t run the zoo.
And if it helps you to sleep, you are welcome to believe the literal words of the abstract, that you should worry more, or just the same, despite the threat being a thousand times smaller than you had previously feared.
The rest of us live in the real world, where when someone says ‘the threat is a thousand times smaller than we thought’ it kinda means, you know, ‘worry less’ … no matter what absurd claims the authors might find it politically correct to put in the abstract to mislead less-than-critical reviewers, and thus to allow their piece to be published.
w.
Matt Skaggs says:
June 3, 2011 at 7:40 am
Perhaps in this particular instance, but you’ve not answered my general question.
If a plant disappears under the plow, if we plow every last one of them under, is that extinction by habitat loss or death by plow?
Finally, I have never denied that when a particular species’ habitat goes to zero the species disappears. That’s the definition of habitat.
But that’s not what Wilson is claiming. He’s claiming that when the water table fell in just one part of the alkaline regions, the number of species in the alkali region also fell … and despite your claim above that this “fits well into Wilson’s predictive model”, it does nothing of the sort until you provide the numbers to back it up, numbers that show a loss of species as the water table started falling.
Because a creature disappearing when its habitat goes to zero is not news in any sense, and says nothing about Wilson’s claim. And it is precisely your kind of handwaving without numbers and your kind of saying that this “would fit well into Wilson’s model” that has kept Wilson’s model alive.
Run the numbers and come back and tell me how well it all fits into Wilson’s model, because I’ve had it up to here with every extinction being shoehorned into the model with no attempt to use actual, you know … facts to see if it does fit.
Thanks for your thoughts on this, Matt. I’m still unclear about the bright line for creatures disappearing under the plow. In some cases it’s clear, because we’ve changed the environment. But in others, we’ve just filled in the whole marsh where some species had its only home. And I hardly put that extinction in the “habitat loss” column.
w.
Willis, you said:
“This is because all of the amazing panoply of species we see out there are the winners of one of the fiercest competitions imaginable—the unending fight to survive. All of them are good at recovering from the hard knocks, or they wouldn’t be here. All of them are adept at making it through the lean times, or they wouldn’t be here. There’s not an amateur or a beginner in the bunch, they’ve been honing their skills against every imaginable disaster since forever.”
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Once again, your enthusiasm overreaches your logic. You have just described a static state where all the species that are with us now are sitting at the peak of evolution, like pandas, for example.
I think that Geoff Sherrington’s point about artificial boundaries deserves better attention than waving it away along the lines that it was not the focus of your article. In Australia, we are constantly being told that some bird or other is ‘endangered to the point of extinction’ because it hasn’t been seen in a defined area for a while. The fact that it turns up elsewhere is not regarded as worth reporting.
The point about endless sub-speciation is also relevant, even if it wasn’t the focus of your article. This week, we have been told that not only do we have a new kind of dolphin (snub-nosed), but that although it is apparently identical to others elsewhere, it is our own, rare, and gravely endangered because there are not many of them around here.
I won’t even start about orchids (an interest of mine) and the definitions of species and extinctions, none of which would stand up to even the most basic trade descriptions laws.
Making the argument for the bigger picture doesn’t mean that you have to trash the discussion of specifics along the way.
mikael pihlström says:
“This seems to indicate that climate scepticism is indeed a closed belief system… Still wonder why the scientific community does not engage in dialogue with sceptics?”
mikael, you should give some thought to what Willis pointed out. It is the purveyors of the “carbon” scare who run ‘n’ hide from debate, not scientific skeptics.
And you make an error by saying “climate skeptics.” Skepticism of all claims is required by the scientific method – which says nothing about the climate. Rather, skepticism and open, transparent dialog and examination of scientific work is essential to replicate that work. And of course the only honest kind of scientist is a skeptic. Unfortunately, the alarmists don’t qualify.
You will notice that some scientists refuse to follow the scientific method. They hide out from debate, they connive privately to game the journal peer review system, and they fight tooth and nail against FOI forced disclosure of their data, methods and code. The people you are apologizing for aren’t worth it.
Willis Eschenbach says:
June 3, 2011 at 10:04 am
The rest of us live in the real world, where when someone says ‘the threat is a thousand times smaller than we thought’ it kinda means, you know, ‘worry less’
——
At this point I am just curious whether you misunderstand or has the ‘Great
Game’ come to the stage where Machiavellian methods are pervasive
– nowhere does Hubbell (actually second author, but he is the experienced
one) say that the exaggeration is several magnitudes, let alone 1000 times.
He says (check your own link): “previous estimates should be divided roughly
by 2.5”
– if the current MEA-estimate is 100 sp extinct per 1000 sp in a millenium,
that is at least hundred times the prehistoric average, division by 2.5 would
still yield a tremendous rate of loss, which is not so surprising if you look at
recent global changes in land use.
– to repeat, I quote in verbatim: “There is no doubt whatsoever that the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) has correctly identified habitat loss as the primary threat to conserving the Earth’s biodiversity, and the sixth mass extinction might already be upon us or imminent.
You are of course entitled to your own take on the sixth mass extinction, but
you cannot claim that this Nature article is in agreement with your views.
It is not. I don’t think you have followed S.Hubbell’s production even to the extent
I have – the idea that he would glance to the left and right for approval is
ridiculous, given his status, age and research resources.
Actually I am not so worried about the 6th …
Willis Eschenbach says:
June 3, 2011 at 9:34 am
“Sorry, Al, but that presents a number of personal accounts of the passenger pigeon. So you’ll have to be more specific — which of the historical information is correct and which is not? Are you saying that Audubon’s description is a fairy tale, or whose?”
The fairy tale is the whole context of the story. What those accounts describe was not ‘natural.’ It was the result of the complete disruption of what was once a heavily populated – by mostly farmers as well as hunter-gatherers by smallpox BEFORE any European arrived there to record it, compounded by more epidemics after. First smallpox pandemics in Florida and Mexico (early 1500s), spread via intertribal trade and contacts.
So when looking at these historical accounts you first need to look at the dates, as well as the locations (these mega flocks were seen progressively further west, which is also not clearly explained here).
Thus the statement that “the Indians [n]ever seriously affected the increase of the Pigeons” was true only after Indian populations were deciminated and pigeon pops had already exploded. False in 1491, as confirmed by the archaeological record and ecological common sense. What Kalm states only describes, at most, a very late phenomenon with little or no bearing on the ‘natural’ state. Moreover, any statement about “the Indians of Canada” is as much an overgeneralization as “the food of Canada.” Which particular nation or even subgroup was he describing, when, and where?
It goes on: “The aborigines never could have reduced appreciably the number of the species. Wherever the great roost were established, Indians always gathered in great numbers. This, according to their traditions, had been the custom among them from time immemorial. They always had slaughtered these birds, young and old, in great quantities, but there was no market among the Indians,and the only way they could preserve the meat for future use was by drying or smoking the breasts.They cured large numbers in this way. Also, they were accustomed to kill great quantities of the squabs in order to take out the fat, which was used as butter is used by the whites. Lawson writes (1709): “You may find several Indian towns of not above seventeen houses that have more than 100 gallons pigeons oil or fat.”
Again, note the date. By then very low Indian pops and exploding pigeon pops. Note the contradictions, including versus the “Indians of Canada” story. Moreover, these second hand recollections of “time immemorial” are not supported by any other evidence. Most significantly, this suggests that even though they “cured large numbers in this way” their killing was limited because “there was no market among the Indians.” That is completely false. Intertribal trading was the norm and in the eastern US (like the SW and Mandans and others on the Missouri), much of that trade was between hunter-gatherers, who were likely the main pigeon hunters, and corn (etc.) farmers. This trading symbiosis elevated pops of both. Some vast trade networks. Familiar with the mound builders and other elaborate maize-based civilizations in the eastern US?
Key point: “The Plymouth colony was threatened with famine in 1643, when great flocks of Pigeons swept down upon the ripened corn and beat down and ate “a very great quantity of all sorts of English grain”. But Winthrop says that in 1648 they came again after the harvest was gathered, and proved a great blessing…”
So in 1491, how or why would the Indian farmers cope with this kind of competition. They couldn’t and wouldn’t, which explains why pigeon remains are so RARE in the archaeological record. Basic competion.
Next part of the fairy tale: “This was due in part to the destruction of the forests, particularly the beechwoods which once covered vast tracts, and which furnished the birds with a chief supply of food. Later, the primeval pine and hemlock forests of the northern States largely were cut away. This deprived the birds of another source of food–the seed of these trees… while the reduction of the forest area in the East was a large factor in the diminution of the Pigeons, we cannot attribute their extermination to the destruction of the forest. Forest fires undoubtedly had something to do with reducing the number of these birds, for many were destroyed by these fires, and in some cases large areas of forest were ruined absolutely by fire, thus for many years depriving the birds of a portion of their food supply. Nevertheless, the fires were local and restricted, and had comparatively little effect on the vast numbers of the species.”
In 1491 those forests were already largely cleared for farming and/or burned regularly by Indians. This whole premise of this ‘pristine forest’ is false. (And conifers were not a significant food source for these birds as suggested.) The same foods sought by the pigeons later were eaten by the Indians, and they managed their lands – mostly with regular burning – to produce and maintain those food trees (same for the oaks in CA which you are probably more familiar with – until smallpox and the Spanish arrived to TOTALLY disrupt that whole ecosystem).
So, to oversimplify, that ‘primeval’ forest was already heavily populated, burned, cleared, with crops, in 1491, with the people doing that also harvesting most of the ‘pigeon food’ and eating any available pigeons; then smallpox eliminated most of those people – the super keystone species of that ecosystem – leaving all those regrowing habitats and old farmlands and foods for the pigeons.
The whole fairy tale versions depends on the false belief that Indians were ‘rare and primitive’ and is based on observations after Euro influences destroyed their original ‘civilization.’
Pardon me if this is a little disjointed and rambling with possible typos. In a hurry. Can answer any fine points here later. But you really ought to read that paper and/or book noted earlier, which put the whole story into context. It is basic ecology. All those people could not and did not tolerate that kind of ‘pest’ competition, particularly when it was edible and so easy to kill. And those people had been there for thousands of years before 1492. It was NOT a primeval ‘wilderness.’ It was a human dominated landscape, modified for their needs.
Aargh! Posted it and already see a dang glitch:
Where I said “It was the result of the complete disruption of what was once a heavily populated – by mostly farmers as well as hunter-gatherers by smallpox BEFORE any European arrived there to record it…”
Should read: “It was the result of the complete disruption of what was once a heavily populated – by mostly farmers as well as hunter-gatherers- WHO WERE DECIMATED by smallpox BEFORE any European arrived there to record it…”
Best not to write so fast… hope there aren’t too many more glitches like that. Will check back later for another look.
The self-correction is way, way too slow. The claim of extraordinary extinctions was made by E. O. Wilson in 1992. It’s 20 years later, and the process of throwing out the garbage is just begun.
All sounds a little familiar doesn’t it?.
It isn’t just a problem for “science”. Once such a claim has been processed by the chattering classes (10:10 et al ) it quickly becomes a fact or “corporate disinformation” depending on your POV. Even if you could quickly provide absolutely incontrovertible scientific evidence to the contrary, it doesn’t matter. Endless repetition by the environmental industry has already secured its [the factoid] place in the “good book” – forever.
The people targeted by this kind of “knowledge” don’t want “science” they want bullet points. The Earth receives X W/M^2 therefore we can run a steel plant directly from the Sun if only we had the political will and could get rid of those corporate interests opposing reality. Laugh all you like – this was a real conversation with a young green (a sprout?) not too long ago.
Willis, while I love reading your posts and they always provide much “food for thought”, I think you are missing an essential point. Like many of us you are left fighting yesterdays enviro propaganda. The “sustainers”, like bank robbers
head down high street throwing cash out the back of the getaway car to frustrate their capture. They are always one step ahead because they don’t care about the “truth” of a study – it’s all about spin. Cold is the new warm, – do you really have the time to prove that it isn’t?
The idea of the “neutral scientist” is where the problem arises. No such animal – hmm… let’s see now… spent my working life studying Amazon Army Ants. Are you really suggesting that, having spent my working life studying Ants (or string theory or whatever) I’m still some kind of dispassionate observer of the world. I’m an advocate. I hate humans who kill Amazon Ants and I write papers (at taxpayer expense) defending the wonderful world of Ants. I come up with some numbers (from my model) that “prove” that there were more Ants in 1950 than there are currently and that becomes an “envirofact”. I get more funding to study Ants and so on. You now have to spend X amount of time and effort to “scientifically” prove that the guy is full of shit. lets be clear – he’s spent most of his adult life counting Ants – it’s an institution of the cuckoo nest variety.
Watching a recent British Envirodoc, I laughed my socks off. The problem was that some (UK) sea birds… Gannets.. had grown their population by (apparently) eating all the “EU discard”. The EU is thinking of introducing new law to prevent “discard”.
The gannet scientists are horrified that these new laws will destroy the new Gannet populations – go figure! There were even people in the EnviroDoc fighting to preserve ship wrecks! Let’s get this straight – wrecks (WWI/II) are now apparently a natural world in need of protection from horrible human beings. Plot – lost.
Willis Eschenbach says:
June 3, 2011 at 10:20 am
If a plant disappears under the plow, if we plow every last one of them under, is that extinction by habitat loss or death by plow?
—
I am not sure what your quandary is? Are you asking whether destroying
the habitat or killing the species is worse?
Both your examples concern local patches of habitat A or B. No patch is
an island until uniform habitat loss over the landscape makes it an
island. The landscape is the important context and you should not
abstract away the processes of migration, dissemination and colonisation.
Therefore if the habitat is very threatened at landscape level (fragmented)
it does not matter whether you kill the current individuals or destroy the habitat
since processes M-D-C will not be available to relaunch the species.
In a less fragmented landscape killing the current individuals is less harmful
since colonisation will follow with time, unless the killing (plough) also destroys
the habitat in the sense that colonisation fails totally, despite
dissemination/migration, or fails over time (e.g. initial establishment, but gradual decline due to competition).
But in the arable land case, formerly, e.g natural grassland, the seed bank will
of course be decisive. If there is a seed bank, but ploughing has removed the conditions for regrowth (either changing abiotic factors such as soil texture or
through biotic competition from new species) there is factual habitat loss – so the answer to your question in most cases is that is more appropriate to use the term habitat loss.
The habitat is the home or local environment of the species. It can be described
by e.g. physiognomic traits (e.g. forest ) or from a resource viewpoint (calcareous soil
or specific host plant for a butterfly species). If the species of interest are resp.
brown bear, orchid and butterfly you can destroy the resp. habitats through
land use, but normally killing the species locally would happen only in the case of
the brown bear, maybe also the orchid if it a sought after collection item.
In the case of the brown bear killing it would obviously not be filed as habitat loss
but as overhunting or poaching. So yes, there is this case. An interesting question
is if the brown bear is very local and behaviorally confined to a rare larger patch of forest in a rather populated open landscape – if in the surrounding landscape all
elk & moose are hunted to nearly extinct, is there habitat loss for the bear
although the forest looks intact? Yes I would say so – in metapopulation models
the decisive factor is not so much habitat distribution, but quality habitat
distribution.
Mikael Pihlström says:
June 3, 2011 at 1:22 pm
“An interesting question
is if the brown bear is very local and behaviorally confined to a rare larger patch of forest in a rather populated open landscape – if in the surrounding landscape all
elk & moose are hunted to nearly extinct, is there habitat loss for the bear
although the forest looks intact? Yes I would say so – in metapopulation models
the decisive factor is not so much habitat distribution, but quality habitat
distribution.”
Habitat quality includes food availability so to the extent these bears were preying on elk and moose (mostly calves is typical) their disappearance would reduce their habitat quality and possibly the carrying capacity of that habitat depending on their alternative foods. Some brown (grizzly) bear pops are almost entirely vegetarian. Being omnivorous has great advantages. Their low reproductive rates is their Achilles heel. Thus predation not habitat loss per se – because they can adapt to a huge range of habitats as revealed by their vast and diverse range – is what does their populations in. That said, total habitat loss, e.g., conversion to farmlands or cities is another story.
I see in Sweden a remarkable recovery in brown bears with reduced hunting. Same story everywhere in their current North American range.
johanna says:
June 3, 2011 at 10:25 am
“Once again” I’ve done something wrong? That’s how you choose to enter the conversation, by accusing me of doing something “once again”?
I love it when people start out a post with a vague nasty insult with no specifics in the first sentence.
I’m not kidding. I love it because it makes my job much easier. They’ve stated right off that they’re willing to accuse me of being a jerk (although like johanna they somehow always forget to provide specifics to back up their ugly rumor-mongering.) This self-identification on their part keeps me from wasting my time on unpleasant fools.
Go away, johanna, and come back when you are in a better mood. If you start off without insulting me in a completely uncited and unverifiable way in the first sentence, I promise I’ll read further than that same first sentence. You might have something interesting to say above. I didn’t make it past the opening insult.
w.
Mikael Pihlström says:
June 3, 2011 at 1:22 pm
Sorry for the lack of clarity, Mikael. I was trying to get at some kind of “bright line” to distinguish extinction from the direct killing of the individuals that make up a species on the one hand, from extinction resulting from the complete destruction of a species’ habitat on the other hand.
This issue doesn’t come up much with mobile species. But with immobile species it is an issue.
Suppose we have a wetlands that contains every last specimen of some plant, I’ll call it the “Least Mugwort”. It’s called the least mugwort because since time immemorial it has only grown in one small wetlands.
Now suppose we fill the wetlands and build a shopping centre over the top.
Did the Least Mugwort go extinct from habitat loss?
I’d say no. It didn’t go extinct because it was pining for the fjords, or because it was on of the species “squeezed out” by a shrinking habitat as Wilson hypothesizes.
It went extinct because humans killed every living specimen.
But you can bet that the Red Book will list “loss of habitat” prominently among the reasons that it is threatened.
This brings up another gripe of mine. Nowhere among the list of reasons why a particular species might go extinct have I ever seen that the species “made it to the finals, but couldn’t compete with the best”. If a particular species is only found in one location in the entire globe, obviously they didn’t get the message of “go forth and multiply”.
Are these species at high risk of extinction? Sure. Are these among the last species to be identified? Yes, because there’s so few of them. Does this inflate the “endangered species” count? Sure.
Anyhow, Mikael, thanks for asking, hope that clarified it.
w.
Al Gored says:
June 3, 2011 at 12:41 pm
Oh, OK. Sorry, thought you were talking about something else. Yeah, I knew that. The entire ecological balance of the North American continent was heavily disrupted by the removal of a very large percentage of the population of the apex predator in the 1500’s.
The apex predator, of course, was the Early Asian Immigrant population (sometimes mistakenly called either “Indians” or “Native Americans”). Once the population of the Asian Immigrants was cut to a fraction of its size by the rampages of smallpox, the predictable rebalancing of the remaining species began. Among other things, the numbers of buffalo and passenger pigeons went through the roof. (I have long suspected that the explosion of the passenger pigeon was only partly because of the drop in predation. I think competition by the Asian Immigrants for pigeon food, nuts and seeds and the like, was also a factor.)
So yes, that explains the huge numbers. It doesn’t explain the extinction. I say it was from hunting, hunting, and more hunting, combined with Newcastle Disease, the gathering of pigeon eggs (duh), and the destruction of their social structure. They were social birds, and wherever they’d flock someone would come and bust up the party with nets and shooting. They didn’t fare well in ones and twos.
Still an amazing cautionary tale. One imported disease, Smallpox, brought the pigeon to prominence. And another introduced disease, Newcastle, helped finish them off.
w.
Willis Eschenbach says:
June 3, 2011 at 4:08 pm
Think your words on the cause of their extinction are right on.
I cannot recommend that Kay and Simmons book enough, or that particular paper that goes into this pigeon story. Tons of stuff in there which I am sure you would find very interesting.
I’m old and book oriented. You can also get the short story by googling ‘Aboriginal Overkill’ or many other things by ‘Charles E. Kay.’ He’s a hero who has suffered incredible slings and arrows from the gang for his pioneering work.
Your description of ‘Indians’ as ‘Asian’ immigrants is inconvenient, of course, because it reveals how stupid popular mythology about ‘pristine’ North American really is. According to those fairy tales, NA people lived in harmony with nature and all that – supposedly completely different than those evil Eurasians, particularly the super-evil Euros who ruined the perfect Garden of Eden. Humans as a species, like any other species, do some very predictable things to survive no matter where they are.
Willis Eschenbach
June 3, 2011 at 3:53 pm
“But you can bet that the Red Book will list “loss of habitat” prominently among the reasons that it is threatened.”
###
According to Red Book, a species can be listed as threatened (and endangered) because its NATURAL distribution is below a threshold, regardless of any other criteria. In 1996, a whole boat load (arc load) of species were added based on restricted ranges. The Delta Smelt is one of them! The term “threatened” is really a meaningless weasel word in the common vernacular, though the “Red Book” is pretty rigorous in defining it, it still is overloaded with the idea that something is wrong that needs to be corrected.
I wish more people were familiar with what is actually in the “Red Book” so that they are not fooled by the greenies misrepresentations. Terms have pretty specific and useful meanings, after all some real scientist have been involved and their work has not been totally obscured by all the moonbats that are also involved.
http://www.iucnredlist.org/technical-documents/categories-and-criteria/2001-categories-criteria
DesertYote says:
June 3, 2011 at 7:07 pm
On the same tangent as your passenger pigeon question, as a fish guy, do you think that Delta Smelt is a real species? Always wondered but never looked. Seems some fish species are so plastic and evolve so rapidly to adapt to certain habitats that it is rather hard to say sometimes… and I know of some very dubious calls for apparently convenient purposes.
Al Gored
June 3, 2011 at 9:01 pm
###
The Delta Smelt, Hypomesus transpacificus, is indead a valid species. It is closely related to Hypomesus nipponensis (the Japanese Smelt) once thought to be a subspecies of H. transpacificus, Hypomesus japanicus, and Hypomesus pretiosus (the Serf Smelt). I think that one time at least some of these these were are considered a single species, but the genus was revised in the early 60s by McAllister. H. transpacifcus and H. nipponensis are both brackish estuary specialists, the other two are mostly marine coastal. The Delta Smelt is “trapped” in the bay, unable to transit the golden gate.
As for endangerment:
The main constraint on population is predation from species such as the introduces (!) Striped Bass (Morone saxitilis). It has a mean population doubling time of 15 months. It is tolerant of a wide range of water chemistry and temperatures. It real population fluctuates greatly, as do all forage species. Its population is also very hard to determine. Anyone who claims the population is in decline is a liar. The only reason it is Red Book listed (B1+2cd) is because of its restriction to the San Fransisco Bay and bogus computer modeling!
This is what I remember off the top of my head. I will see if I can find the article/rant that I wrote a few years ago because of all the misinformation that was being spread. I wanted something handy that I could post.
BTW, many ichthyologists working with taxonomy, are stating to abandon sub species designations except in cases where sub-species status is pretty obvious. Its silly that every tributary would have its own sub-species. Type designations make a lot more sense.
Great work Willis. Amazing what is revealed by asking some basic questions.
You say first recorded cases of extinction. But I understand that in many areas the only records prior to European types showing up were memories repeated to younger generations, which I consider imprecise. I also ask if those people cared enough about what was gone to pass the knowledge on – I suggest they had to focus on what was available today, in their meagre existence most had.
There are fossils of course, my impression is they often are just tantalizing glimpses of the past.
As for Pimm’s 5% “logic”, even that would be variable. Land clearing for farming usually leaves very hilly or wet terrain alone, I suggest most species live there, or in the “interface” between forest and meadow, because it provides better shelter and food than the dense forest on flat land. (Aboriginals near Port Angeles WA used fire to remove trees to create clearings so as to increase the amount of interface (and meadow plants like camus).)
A key factor will be how much food is left. Cougars may do well because deer will thrive. Small birds of prey will like the rodents that thrive in grain fields where harvesting methods leave kernels on the ground.
And note that Pimm’s thesis must inherently depend on one of:
– a species only living in a particular area, thus only one remaining “island” of habitat
– a predator favouring the population in islands or able to operate more efficiently in a small area
Otherwise how small must a population be to not be sustainable? One factor is disease, but a population spread across small islands would be less susceptible. Another is in-breeding, my impression is that opinions vary as to how bad a factor that is. Have any serious wildlife biologists examined Pimm’s thesis?
And so what if some species go extinct? I don’t have sympathy for grey whales as a species, because they are too selective in where they eat (only in summer in the Bering area near AK). (But hark! what do I read about some feeding on the BC coast, and some junking the commute notion and staying on the OR coast? Must be a different “species”. 😉
As for adaptability, I’ve recently read of cases of piebald eagles starting to eat different small animals, and taking food from seagulls at a garbage dump miles away from where they live (the latter when their traditional food source was scarce one season).
Just my “educated guessing”.
But BTW, the history of debate over a supposedly unique marmot, on Vancouver Island in BC Canada, is instructive. Numbers were very small, and alarmists spouted various theories – especially that clear-cutting of forested valleys either inhibited migration thus increased in-breeding, or that the lack of ground cover made it easier for predators to capture the marmots. But common sense examination showed that open condition only exists for a couple of years on the wet coast, and tagging/tracking shows the little critters are mobile (one young male moved 30 km, across rivers, mountains, etc.). It is now recognized that the main cause of mortality is predators (see above re eagles), especially as marmots like to come out of their burrow and sun themselves (which is best done on a log or rock – exposed).
Also beware of the definition of a species. On the Pacific coast of North America some environmentalists claim that each river has a different species of salmon (aside from the normal distinctions like Coho versus Sockeye, which are not unique to a river) and that smelts are different south of the Canada-US border (as if smelts know where that big artificial line on the map is). It gets amusing – what happens if some of those fish get confused and go up the wrong river to spawn, which wildlife experts say happens, or humans introduce them to a creek or river as is now a popular thing to do? Gosh, humans are creating species? (Like the domestic dog or cat? Like the potato we know (created by Peruvian natives through selective breeding)? 😉
Oh, and there’s the matter of forests growing back, apparently a big trend in the tropics due to the challenges of farming and rapid growth of vegetation. That’s been covered on CA/WUWT, IIRC, but alarmists claim species distribution is somehow different in regrowth – never mind the evidence that the Amazon once had much clearing by natives who built up islands for crops and raised fish in the channels.
A brother once said “common sense isn’t”.
(He later proved that by becoming a true believer of an emotional con job whose purpose was to control someone else’s life, attacking her defender with a smear campaign.)
The big question in both cases is “why are people so gullible?”