Letter to the Editor
As the global warming bubble deflates, another scare is being inflated – species extinction. Naturally the professional alarmists present this as a brand new threat, caused by man’s industry.
However, species extinction, like climate change, is the way of the world.
It was not carbon dioxide that entombed millions of mammoths and other animals in mucky ice from Iceland to Alaska. It was not steam engines that wiped out the dinosaurs and 75% of other species who had dominated the Earth for 180 million years. There were no humans to blame for the Great Permian Extinction when over 90% of all life on Earth was destroyed – animals, plants, trees, fish, plankton even algae disappeared suddenly.
Sadly, history shows that it is the destiny of most species to be destroyed by periodic natural calamities or competition from other species. Earth’s history is a moving picture, not a still life. No species has an assured place on Earth. Some species can adapt and survive – those unable to adapt are removed from the gene pool.
Earth’s periodic species extinctions are usually associated with widespread glaciation, volcanism, earth movements and solar disruptions. Most geological eras have closed with such calamitous events. Random and more localised species extinctions are caused by rogue comets. But global warming and abundant carbon dioxide have never featured as causes of mass extinctions.
Because of Earth’s long turbulent history, most species surviving today are not “fragile”. Every one of them, including humans, is descended from a long line of survivors going back to the beginnings of life on Earth.
Man has thrived because of his adaptability, resourcefulness and more recently, his use of science and technology. We cannot now return to a cave-man existence. Without the freedom to explore, develop and utilise our resources, most humans would not survive.
Species extinction events are not new, are not caused by burning carbon fuels, and will probably occur again. We will need all of our freedom, ingenuity and technology to survive.
Let us not hasten our own species extinction by starving ourselves of food and energy with foolish demonization of carbon, the building block of all life forms.
Viv Forbes,
Rosewood Qld Australia
I am happy for my email address to be published.
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If we want to stave-off species extinction, we need to shut-down windmills because they are slaughtering thousands of birds daily.
Quite so. Thimbles, peas, moving targets and goalposts.
Heads up Folks!
Not to forget, more “new’ species are found every year compared to the number of extinct ones.
(Greenpeace, let go of the Great Panda …)
meanwhile, the British summer is not working out too well:
4 June: UK Daily Mail: Freezing June! It’ll rain all week, feel chilly and we might even see snow on Britain’s highest peaks
Up to an inch of rain fell across large parts of the country yesterday
Unsettled weather expected to continue until next weekend
Highest temperatures during the day forecast to drop to the mid-teens
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2154340/Freezing-June-Itll-rain-week-snow.html
Stupidity and corruption will be our downfall. Ignorance and arrogance also combine to a lethal brew.
The struggle for species to survive is the very driver of the process known as evolution. There are many who have a pathological fear of the concept that anything should fail rather than succeed, so we must bail out companies, and in just that manner we must bail out failing species. But to do so requires that we take away the force which drives change and improvement over time. Species and companies stagnate, allowed to repeat mistakes that would ordinarily threaten them with extinction. Out of compassion we leave the environment and the economy filled with feeble, dependent inhabitants that cannot survive without us, whereas in nature every failure is replaced something more robust to the challenge those that failed could not overcome.
A large part of the letter of Viv Forbes is quite correct. With that said, though, the fact that mass species extinctions have occurred naturally is not really an argument against wanting to prevent them. At least, it is not unless one follows the fallacy of some environmentalists (incorrectly believing anything natural is good) to an ultimate conclusion. For instance, naturally all life on Earth would end within a billion years or so due to increase in the sun’s output, but, if mankind’s intellectual descendants exist then, I would hope they would have disregarded what is natural and would have artificially spread life into space.
There are only moderate number of thousands of vertebrate species: mammals, fish, lizards, birds, etc. And only a fraction of those are endangered. The widely hyped media figures of millions of species come from counting all sorts of invertebrates, mainly bugs. Under a properly managed program, few if any endangered species would cost more than a few million dollars each at most to, if necessary, capture some individuals and maintain a breedable population of them, as well as to preserve samples for future cloning or other restoration if needed as a backup. So preventing species extinction is not hard in financial terms, not taking even 1/1000th of GDP, nor does it require massive restructuring of civilization as some environmentalists imply.
Some would object about ecosystems, but actually those are best preserved through encouraging and advancing high-yield mechanized agriculture; for instance, if mankind instead went back to more primitive organic farming, with lower yields, we would not able to spare as much land for nature as we do now.
A good page:
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/
and, most specifically:
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/nature/nature.html
Obviously the Dodo’s extinction is based on its failure to reproduce, due to being a lousy dancer.
[snip]
New species are being ‘discovered’ at a much faster rate than that at which they are being lost, but as invariably only a few specimens are found they go straight onto the ‘critically endangered’ list. Thus the alarmists can truthfully say that ‘ever more species are now indeed ‘critically endangered’.
There is also the problem of dubious sub-species. If Joe Bloggs ‘discovers’ a new toad he may well be tempted to insist that it is Bufo Bufo Bloggsii.
When specimens cannot be found in that location some years later we can always put that one down to ‘global warming’ !
WWF’s alarmism over ‘endangered’ Tigers is as suspect as the furore over the ‘disappearing’ Polar Bear, but that’s a much longer story.
I’ve observed a propensity on the part of greens and environmentalists to want to “freeze” what they see as the “natural” environment, indicating a complete lack of understanding of ecology.
“We will need all of our freedom, ingenuity and technology to survive.”
Yes, and of these freedom is the most important. Ingenuity and technology, like capitalism, are just some of the positive emergent characteristics of individual freedom.
Mass human-induced species extinction threat is not new. It’s just been temporarily taken over by more sound buzzwords such as global warming but it’s been there all the time and it was even on the global warming background (coral bleaching, concerns about species being unable to adapt to CAGW, …).
And there is actually a lot to talk about, because there is no doubt humans are creating evolutionary pressure on their environment. Any domestic animals wouldn’t exist without human influence, but many ‘unwanted’ ones wouldn’t exist as well (such as house mouse or bugs specialized at living with humans).
There’s whole spectrum of opinions on how much is the right amount, starting with ‘anything is okay’ and ending with ‘there should be no influence at all’. The task for the future is not to deny any problems about it – it is about finding the right position in between these two.
Everything makes sense except the evolution or species. Evolutionists are still looking for the missing link which they have claimed several times only to find it is not.
The study of species deserves no more of a pass on speculation and predictions than any other area of science.
Actually, lets have some accuracy about the facts here, please. Human beings ARE causing and HAVE caused major species extinctions, but it isn’t through climate change. Its through introduction of new invasive organisms to places where they did not evolve and thus the native biota have no resistance to them, its through direction predation, and its though habitat destruction, among other things. I am climate change sceptic, but I also believe passionately in species preservation, and to say that we have not/ are not contributing to extinctions is just factually not correct. The Great Auk and the Dodo and The Passenger Pigeon all went extinct simply because human beings hunted them to extinction – none of them were in trouble before they became hunted, and there are many more examples. Some bird species on Australia’s Lord Howe Island were exterminated by rats that escaped from a ship in the early twentieth century. The Philip Island Glory Pea flower (near Australia’s Norfolk Isalnd) was exterminated by rabbits that we brought there. Many Hawaiian bird species have been exterminated by Avian Malaria and Avian Pox that were brought there by humans and/or are spread by mosquitoes that were brought there by humans – the list goes on and on. Please lets all work hard to protect those species that are seriously endangered, even while pointing out that the Polar Bear does not happen to be one of them.
– John Game.
JC says:
June 4, 2012 at 3:51 pm
Obviously the Dodo’s extinction is based on its failure to reproduce, due to being a lousy dancer.
=========
Maybe from a lack of mercury rising. 😉
timg56 says:
June 4, 2012 at 4:03 pm
I wholeheartedly agree! I find it absolutely preposterous that conservationists, environmentalists and greens in general want to preserve the status quo. It ain’t gonna happen; might as well stop trying. If they’d been around 70 million years ago we’d now be trying to keep dinosaurs out of our gardens.
Andrew says:
June 4, 2012 at 3:37 pm
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Slightly OT response, but maybe industry is failing partly because the HR (Human Relations dept) now controls the composition of employees and mgmt. of any particular industry. HR mgrs. are the product of the new academia.. Product of academics promoting academia. US industry is going the way of the Dodo bird. It may be analogized as a mutation of sorts, not natural selection. It may be all over but for the final collapse in the US and EU as well. Sad.
An earlier article by Mr. Eschenbach pointed out that the official “Red List” showed no real anthropogenic extinctions, save for predation. I suspect that a great deal of alarm is communicated by those monitoring species at the edge of their natural habitat, with said alarm being used to stop or stall any human activity. Or worse, chase humans from their lands. “Ooooh, look, I just found a sharp-tailed snake! No more building / logging / gardening or other activity should be allowed within 50 miles!” Meanwhile, said snakes are thriving 100 miles to the South, just like always.
If its a rare species with a highly restricted habitat then it is not very important biological. If it is not important, then its loss has little if any impact. Most likely it is on its way out anyways. So no one should really care if it goes extinct. That this is not the common opinion. just goes to show how successful the Socialist have been in brainwashing everyone for the last 100+ years.
BTW, I am sure I don’t really need to point this out, but the definition of a species only known from the fossil record, is very different from the definition of extant species, so any blabbering about the rate of extinction increasing is just a load of coprolite!
timg56
June 4, 2012 at 4:03 pm
🙂 🙂 🙂
It its range is shrinking, it it endangered and its mans fault.
If its range is expanding, it is a weedy species, and its mans fault. *
If its range is moving, it is being driven out of its homeland by climate change, and its mans fault.
If its range is stable, it is threatened, and its mans fault.
* In a surreal moment, I heard someone claim in all seriousness, that mankind was FORCING coyotes to greatly expand their range and population!!!
Mark F
June 4, 2012 at 5:17 pm
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Look at endangerment criteria. Most organisms are list just because of the size and fragmentation of their natural range. In other words, being threatened is natural.
Well Mother Nature’s law of survival of the fittest, has worked wonderfully for around 4.5 billion years or so. In his(er) view, wasting precious resources on the unfit, simply drives the whole system in the direction of non-survival. So perhaps humans are endangering the whole system by insisting on the continued survival of species clearly unfit to occupy the niche they currently inhabit.
The Giant Panda, and the Koala, are two (not so cuddlies) that are just too picky eaters for their own good. Humans are amongst the fittest, in that some of us are prepared to eat damn near anything. Californians struggle endlessly to try and prevent the extinction of trout and salmon in their local waters; yet virtually every species that California anglers fish for, is a non native species, clearly better at utilizing the California waters. Perhaps if Californians would get all their trash trout out of the rivers and lakes in New Zealand, it would be easier to catch a nice New Zealand eel, in those waters.
But humans risk their very own extinction; simply by being human.
Actually most of the so-called mass extinctions occurring “now” are just made up statistics – probably there is a computer model that proves its so.
I am for protecting natural environments, but you can’t halt all progress because it might impact 20 lizards in a desert. If something is really that rare its going to be extinct soon anyway.
Better to spend time, attention, and money on large preserves where lots of species have a shot at survival.
As for climate change, if the species can’t survive a 1 degree Celsius change in climate over 100 years it isn’t going to make it – period. Man has no say in the matter (unless we move them into a Zoo).