Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach, title from a Paula Abdul quote
The backstory for today’s adventure is that this is the first scientific question I seriously researched. It is also the reason I don’t trust the “experts” or the “consensus”. In 1988, E. O. Wilson, an ant expert with little knowledge of extinction, made a startling claim that extinction rates were through the roof. He claimed there was a “Sixth Wave” of extinctions going on, and that we were losing a huge amount, 2.7% of all the species per year. This claim quickly went viral and soon was believed by everyone. So back in 2003, a decade ago now, I researched the question, found that Wilson was wrong by orders of magnitude, wrote it up, sent it around to the journals to see if they would publish it, and … well, let me just say that I was not received kindly. I was a voice crying in the wilderness. They didn’t give me a look-in, I was challenging the consensus. As far as I know, I was the only one saying that Emperor Wilson had no clothes … and as a result, I was not encouraged to continue publicizing my views.
But the world goes on, and three years ago I simplified and streamlined my work and published it as a post on WUWT entitled “Where Are The Corpses“. In it, I argued that there was no “Sixth Wave” of extinctions, that Wilson’s numbers were wildly exaggerated, and that current extinction rates (except in isolated islands and Australia) are not unusual in any way. Dr. Craig Loehle rewrote and developed the ideas, and he got it peer-reviewed and published in Diversity and Distributions, available here. Craig wrote about it in a post entitled “New paper from Loehle & Eschenbach shows extinction data has been wrongly blamed on climate change due to island species sensitivity“. Title says it all …
Figure 1. Stacked graph of total historical bird and mammal extinctions by year. This charts of the spread of European species (foxes, cats, rabbits, dogs, humans, weeds, diseases, etc.) to Australia and the islands. The earliest extinctions are from the time Europeans arrived in the Caribbean. There is a second wave of exploration and settlement in the 1700s. Finally, the spread of empires in the 1800’s led to the peak rates around the turn of the last century. Since then, the rates have dropped.
Having written so early and so extensively to try to debunk the claims of massive extinction rates and the bogus “sixth wave of extinction” hyped by the alarmists, I was pleased to receive a note from Anthony pointing out the publication of a new study in Science magazine (paywalled, naturally) entitled Can We Name Earth’s Species Before They Go Extinct? It’s gotten lots of media attention, mostly due to the fact that in the Abstract, they say that estimates of extinction rates are way overblown. My emphasis:
Some people despair that most species will go extinct before they are discovered. However, such worries result from overestimates of how many species may exist, beliefs that the expertise to describe species is decreasing, and alarmist estimates of extinction rates.
I must say, seeing that phrase “alarmist estimates of extinction rates” in Science made me smile, it was a huge vindication. However, I fear that they still have not grasped the nettle. I say that because at the end of the paper they say:
Conclusion
The estimates of how many species are on Earth (5 ± 3 million) are now more accurate than the moderate predictions of extinction rates (0.01 to 1% per decade). The latter suggest 500 to 50,000 extinctions per decade if there are 5 million species on Earth.
Why do I think that their conclusion is so badly flawed?
Like many modern scientists, rather than trying to find the most probable, they simply assume the worst. So they give their calculations assuming a 1% decadal extinction rate. Here’s the problem. That’s no more believable than Wilson’s 2.7% per decade rate. There are about 3,300 mammal species living on the continents (excluding Australia). If we assume that one percent of them go extinct per decade, that would mean that we should be seeing about 33 continental mammal extinctions per decade. It’s worse for birds, a 1% extinction rate for birds would be about 80 continental birds per decade. We have seen absolutely nothing even vaguely resembling that. That’s only slightly below Wilson’s estimate of a 2.7% extinction rate, and is still ridiculously high.
Instead of 33 mammals and 80 birds going extinct on the continents per decade, in the last 500 years on the great continental landmasses of the world, we’ve only seen three mammals and six birds go extinct. Only nine continental mammal and bird species are known to have gone extinct in 500 years. Three mammals and six birds in 500 years, that’s less than one continental mammal extinction per century, and these highly scientific folks are claiming that 30 mammals and 80 birds are going extinct per decade? … once again I’m forced to ask, where are the corpses?
This kind of world-blindness astounds me. I’ve heard of living in an ivory tower, but if you were making the claim that it’s raining, wouldn’t you at least look out the ivory windows to see if water were actually falling from the sky? How can you seriously claim that we’re losing dozens and dozens of species per year when there is absolutely no sign of that in the records?
Because the reality is that despite humans cutting down the forests of the world at a rate of knots for hundreds and hundreds of years, despite clearcutting for lumber, despite slash-and-burn, despite conversions to cropland, despite building hundreds of thousands of miles of roads and fences, despite everything … only nine continental mammal and bird species have gone extinct.
That gives us actual, not theoretical but actual, estimates of the historical extinction rates for continental birds and animals. For continental mammals that works out to 3 extinctions per 3,300 continental mammal species per 50 decades equals 0.002% per decade, somewhat below their low estimate of 0.01% per decade. For birds, it’s 6 extinctions per 8000 continental species per 50 decades, which is only slightly lower. If we assume that we’ve missed four out of five of the historical extinctions, very unlikely but I suppose possible, it still works out to only about 0.01%.
So their very lowest estimate, that of an extinction rate of 0.01% per decade, turns out to be a maximum estimate of what we’ve seen on the continents over the last five centuries.
Now, this does not include the islands and Australia. Rates there have historically been quite high. But the high historical rates there, as shown above in Figure 1, are the result of what might be called “First Contact”—the first introduction of numbers of European plants, animals, and diseases to previously isolated areas. But in 2013, there are few islands on the planet that haven’t seen First Contact. As a result, the extinction rates on the islands and in Australia, while still higher than on the continents, are extremely unlikely to have another peak such as they had at First Contact.
Finally, let me say that the low extinction rates should not be any cause for complacency. What my studies have shown is that the real threat to mammal and bird species is not habitat reduction, as incorrectly claimed for the last couple decades. The real extinction threat to birds and mammals is now and always has been predation, either by humans, or by imported “alien” species, particularly on islands. Hunting by humans threatens bonobo chimpanzees and other primates, as well as tigers, rhinoceros, and other mammal and bird species. Hunting is the extinction threat, not habitat destruction, and always has been, whether the hunters were animals or humans.
CODA
People are always giving me grief about how I’m not getting with the picture, I’m not following the herd, I’m not kowtowing to the consensus. I have no problem doing that, particularly given my experience regarding extinctions. For years I was the only person I knew of who was making the claim that E. O. Wilson should have stuck to his ants and left extinctions alone. Wherever I looked scientists disagreed with my findings. I didn’t have one person I knew, or one person I read, who thought I was right. Heck, even now, a decade later, the nettle still hasn’t been grasped, people are just beginning to realize that they were fools to blindly believe Wilson, and to try to manage a graceful climb down from the positions they took.
What I learned in that episode was that my bad number detector works quite well, that I should stick to my guns if I think I’m right, and that I should never, ever, ever place any faith in the opinions of the experts. They were all wrong, every single last swingin’ Richard of them, and I was right. Doesn’t mean I’ll be right next time, I’ve been wrong plenty both before and since … but it has given me the courage to hold on to some extremely minority positions.
It is my strong belief that I will also be vindicated in my claim that the earth’s temperature is regulated, not by CO2, but by a host of interlocking and mutually supportive homeostatic mechanisms that maintain the temperature within a fairly narrow range … time will tell. In my opinion, the experts in the climate field have shown that they don’t know a whole lot more about the real underpinnings of the climate than E. O. Wilson knew about extinctions … but that’s just me, and YMMV.
The very finest of a lovely day to you all,
w.
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Global warmingclimate change is a species killer indeed. Let’s hope the greening biosphere helps our planets critters and vegetation.Yet Al Gore told us that global warming is bad and that Co2 is a toxin.
Is it incidental, do you think, that there is very little evidence of species extinction during the Medieval Warm Period, but measurably more during the Little Ice Age? Perhaps hard to separate from the ‘Age of Empire’ that Willis cites.
Great post! I think the problem with a lot of sciences is how to make successful assumptions that are illuminating rather than distorting to our pursuit of understanding. Physicists have been very successful, but other sciences, especially social scientists, have failed. Unfortunately, once the paradigm is set up, though, they are very reluctant to let it go because it would mean excepting all the years they spent on the subject were basically wrong.
Anywho, I hope to read more of your posts.
Sincerely,
Julien Haller
Leg: I think it’s hubris. We preach Darwin, survival of the fittest, and how evolution resulted in “the species we have today” and then turn right around and pretend none of this is true by trying to stop any evolution and removal of the non-fit out there. We declared ourselves God and act accordingly. Yes, it is in our best interest to preserve species as much as practicable. It is not in our interest to return to cave dwelling in an effort to do what Darwin clearly stated was impossible–stop evolution. Species die out, with or without us. And the entire biosphere does not collapse if a species goes extinct. (Strangely, we never seem to mind “intrusive new species” that might use resources a current species needs.) Right now, we want to “freeze” everything into a static condition where NOTHING ever goes extinct, changes, etc. This what we call “fantasy”.
As for wolves, they were NOT EXTINCT in Yellowstone. They were NOT LIVING THERE at present. This “location extinction” is just flat out stupid. If everyone moves out of a town and there are no people left, are people EXTINCT in that town? Of course not, and to say so is just stupid. Extinct means gone from the face of the earth EVERYWHERE, not moved to a new location. Only politics uses stupid terms like “extinct in this location”. It’s to trick people into believing a lie. Wolves were not living in Yellowstone anymore. There was no extinction involved in any sense whatsoever. If there were, we could not have moved new ones in.
Tim Groves says:
January 26, 2013 at 5:58 am
“Japanese River Otter…”
Confirms Willis. He mentioned extinctions on islands.
See the range of the European or Eurasian Otter for comparison – goes right across the whole of Eurasia but excludes the Japanese islands.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:European_Otter_area.png
Leg says: “However, losing an occasional species is no big deal if the numbers are low.”
Not only Leg, but all of you really have no sense of time or numbers…or what it means to the generations after us. I am from western NY but I never saw a passenger pigeon. (That was their summer breeding ground, in case you didnt know.) Information about the long dead dinosaurs is not only of interest to to us but to non scientists as well, and new answered questions, even the somewhat speculative ones, end up in the news the day after they are talked about.
It is thought that 10 new species per million species come into existence every year, and 10 go extinct. Thats _all_ creatures, not just the ones we see running around our backyards. Right now, we are seem to be about 100x higher than that on the extinction side, and many estimates are much higher. So let take that 100x number and go with it, boys and girls:
So that means that 1000 per 1000000 are lost and 10 per 1000000 are gained each year, for a net of 990/1000000 lost per year. So that means that a species has a (1000000-990)/1000000 chance of surviving the year, that is, 0.99901 which seems sort of good, right? So in 2 years, that would be 0.99901x 0.0.99901 or 0.998, that is 99.8% still here, not too bad. So let’s do a century, 0.99901^100, we are down to 90% of the species, and after 200 years more, 75% surviving. I guess some people would say not too bad, (those who think the economy is the most important thing in their lives and think Paris is an awful place to visit because they are socialists.)
Up to now there have been 5 major extinctions on earth, and the combination of habitant loss and AGW–caused by one species, us–is certainly leading to the 6th. So be proud, Leg, it’s no big deal.
All the money that’s to be WASTED mitigating “climate disruption” could be used to create corridors, establish sanctuaries, preserve existing habitat. study and remedy actual endangerment. But no, It will be wasted. CAGW alarmism stands out as the greatest threat to environmentalism and Ecology, IMO.
Endangered species are more endangered now than they might be. If only Greenpeace, The Sierra Club and WWF didn’t exist, if only.
(Take note Marxists: The greatest pollution I have heard of in my lifetime is the pollution generated accomplishing the USSR’s “5 year Plans”)
Scientific consensus may not be right on target every time, but it’s the best we’ve got. A few examples of errors and miscalculations does not invalidate the whole system.
Here in the Post-Normal world, species shall not go extinct and the climate shall not change.
trafamadore says:
January 26, 2013 at 8:18 am
“It is thought that 10 new species per million species come into existence every year, and 10 go extinct. Thats _all_ creatures, not just the ones we see running around our backyards. Right now, we are seem to be about 100x higher than that on the extinction side, and many estimates are much higher.”
Well, read Willis’ post. He mentions exactly those estimates you use, namely Wilson’s assumptions. Wilson’s argument is like yours: Let’s estimate so and so much species go extinct each year, then that and that will happen after so and so many years. Wilson NEVER gives a factual basis for his assumptions.
See also Bjorn Lomborg’s Skeptical Environmentalist where this is discussed in length.
Assuming that the temperature of the Earth rises by one centigrade a year the oceans will start cooking in 90 years! That proves that we must do something NOW! See how this works?
trafamadore says:
January 26, 2013 at 8:18 am
Leg says: “However, losing an occasional species is no big deal if the numbers are low.”
Not only Leg, but all of you really have no sense of time or numbers…or what it means to the generations after us. etc.
Pot, kettle, black — stir words well, arrange in sentences…
It looks to me like you are making things up. This is the point at which I — and hopefully all others — tune you out and go on with life.
Cheers.
trafamadore: Please explain the horror of not having seen a passenger pigeon.
If there were 5 previous great extinctions, caused by something other than one species, why is the possibility of another so horrifying? Do we vilify nature for having the unmitigated gall to have caused 5 previous mass extinctions? Nature did not choose this, you say? It’s value neutral? Sure, you keep telling yourself that.
If evolution is correct, then our causing a mass extinction is just part of the evolution. If we are space aliens or God made us, then maybe we could be held partially culpable, IF we can prove definitively that our causing an extinction is a bad thing. Again, it happened 5 other times and we had nothing to do with it.
Why is the extinction of a species, or even many, a crisis? It’s part of nature and that’s obvious from past extinctions. Maybe we can slow the process, but I seriously doubt we can stop it. We are not that powerful, contrary to environmentalists beliefs.
trafamadore has failed to answer my question about her and the tigers. Why?
This post has been worth 3 bags of popcorn! Hell, I’ll make it a four bagger!
Once again the massive numbers (relatively speaking) of supposedly knowledgeable people who fail to do their homework is astonishing. We see Appeal to Authority, Ad Hominum, Appeal to Trust, etc. not to mention, failure to read.
If one wished to see the end result of much of our progressive schooling, one only has to take a seat a watch the proceedings when Willis posts his observations. He may not always be correct – he has corrected himself in the past – but assuming he doesn’t know what he’s talking about is generally a fools errand and leads to public embarrassment.
It’s always a pleasure to read your thoughts Willis. Long may you live and prosper.
JamesNV says:
”John West – that’s an offensive and idiotic comparison.”
Luckily, I live in a country where it’s not a crime to offend you, yet.
Yea, you’re right it’s idiotic to compare NASA’s decision to launch while under considerable political pressure to launch and generally perceiving the risk of launching small and the risk of not launching unknown and sometime in the future to the current decision of launching “carbon controls” while under considerable political pressure to do so and generally perceiving the risk of such legislation small and the risk of not controlling “carbon” unknown and sometime in the future. /sarc
trafamadore asserts:
“…all of you really have no sense…”
If I was trafamadore’s friend, I would advise him to pick a battle that he can possibly win. But here, he is channeling Custer: he is surrounded by folks who are using facts to slaughter him.
What trafamadore proposes is that there should never be a species extinction under any circumstances. Once a species appears, trafamidor believes that it must be given the universal right to exist indefinitely.
But the universe doesn’t work that way. It is actually pretty amazing that so few species go extinct. And when there is a mass extinction, it is always followed by a flood of new species that take advantage of the abandoned niches. Creative destruction leads to more biodiversity, not less.
So keep arguing your untenable position, trafamadore. We’re enjoying the spectacle of seeing your okole being handed to you. ☺
davidmhoffer says: “trafamadore has failed to answer my question about her and the tigers. Why?”
Because you only had two choices and I dont like multiple guess Qs. Oh, and it’s irrelevant.
Gareth Phillips says:
January 26, 2013 at 2:11 am
Calm down Willis, what I was trying to say is that some bird species have crashed in the UK, it’s not being a catastrophist, it’s just facts.
Well, Gareth, perhaps that is what you were trying to say. If so, you were totally unsuccessful. Instead of saying that they had “crashed”, which means the population had dropped to half or something, you made a very different claim.
You claimed that “for the first time on record, Mistle thrushes are completely absent from UK gardens (emphasis mine).
If you had said that the population had crashed you’d be spot on. But claiming that for the first time in history there’s not one single Mistle Thrush in any garden in the UK?
I’m sorry, my friend, but that makes you a catastrophist, not simply someone reporting the facts.
w.
Robbie says:
January 26, 2013 at 5:28 am
Oh, excellent, another random anonymous internet popup who believes he can read my mind and tell me what I am thinking.
Sure. Does that count as one question? Will there be a quiz at the end? Will this affect my grade?
Nobody knows.
No. Why, do you?
Very little.
Sure.
Depends on what you call “many”. However, the point you seem to be missing is this:
There was NEVER, ever a time in the history of the planet when “many species of vertebrates” were NOT “on the edge of becoming extinct”. Never. That’s how nature works. As Carl Sagan said, “Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception”. You appear to think it’s the other way around.
w.
@ur momisugly RobRoy
“RobRoy says:
January 26, 2013 at 8:21 am
All the money that’s to be WASTED mitigating “climate disruption” could be used to create corridors, establish sanctuaries, preserve existing habitat. study and remedy actual endangerment. But no, It will be wasted. CAGW alarmism stands out as the greatest threat to environmentalism and Ecology, IMO.”
Well said! I could not agree more.
I would also agree with many others who have pointed out that we cannot and should not even try to preserve every single species. That would be a fool’s errand. Nature is in a constant state of flux, and I think our desire to keep things as they are comes directly from our fear and awareness of our own death. The loss of a species is also not a tragedy just because that particular species is cuddly or beautiful.
The real problem, in my view, is, as Willis pointed out, the loss of diversity. If we lose too many species too quickly, we will have impoverished ourselves. In that regard I think we need to take a close look at the situation, without hysteria or a political agenda. There are things we can and should do now. One proposal I read about is to establish DNA banks for future use.
http://www.enotes.com/dna-banks-endangered-animals-reference/dna-banks-endangered-animals
Reality check says: “If evolution is correct, then our causing a mass extinction is just part of the evolution. If we are space aliens or God made us, then maybe we could be held partially culpable, IF we can prove definitively that our causing an extinction is a bad thing. Again, it happened 5 other times and we had nothing to do with it.”
Again, you seem to have no sense of time. What happens if in a 1000 years, a blink of time, we are down to some low percentage of species, perhaps including us, perhaps not. Do you have an ideal of how long it takes to recover? You measure it in 10’s of millions of years. A time most of us really cant get our heads around. You are right that the earth might survive and recover. But it is not a sure thing that we will be here to witness it.
Steve P says:
”The Native American bison or buffalo, is a good example of a creature that was almost extirpated by methodical slaughter, but which lumbers on today in greatly reduced numbers.”
__________________________________________________
Well, that’s the narrative, but I’m not so sure it’s true.
“Approximately 60 million Bison roamed North America when Europeans discovered it.” http://www.conservenature.org/learn_about_wildlife/prairie/bison.htm
“In August 1963, 18 bison were transported from the holding facility and released approximately 25 km north of Fort Providence. Two animals died soon after. The 16 survivors founded the Mackenzie bison population, which increased to 2,400 animals by 1989.”
http://www.enr.gov.nt.ca/_live/documents/content/wood_bison_management_strategy.pdf
So, that’s about a 20% growth rate.
“In 1871 several thousand hunters were in the field and it is estimated that from 3,000 to 4,000 buffaloes were killed daily.” http://skyways.lib.ks.us/genweb/archives/1912/b/buffalo.html
Kills at around peak were about 4000/day = 1.5 million/year.
@ur momisugly About 60,000,000 bison w/ 20% growth rate = about 12,000,000 bison born each year above natural deaths.
For 4000 kills/day to keep up with new calves, the growth rate would have had to be a mere 2.5% or so.
“Joel Berger and Steven L. Cain wrote about the disease Brucellosis and how bison spread it. Bison carry the disease and if released from reserves, will be exposing it to livestock. Brucellosis is a disease that causes abortion in livestock and is often transmitted through bison’s expelled fetuses or birth fluids:
Included in this research is a chart to visually explain the number of infected cattle both exposed to buffalo regions and separate from them. For instance, in Texas, away from roaming bison, the number of successful pregnancies and births of cattle is nearly double that of most public park regions, where bison are abundant. Still, the number in most public park regions is near double those that are near Jackson Hole and Yellowstone National Park.”
– Reproductive Synchrony in Brucellosis-Exposed Bison in the Southern Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and in Noninfected Populations
”Transmission occurred between cattle and bison, and bison and bison.”
Foot-and-mouth disease in North American bison (Bison bison) and elk (Cervus elaphus nelsoni): susceptibility, intra- and interspecies transmission, clinical signs, and lesions.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18436660
Brucellosis is found in modern Bison populations.
Brucellosis reduces a populations overall birthrate.
FMD has a 5-50% mortality rate in domestic herds.
FMD reduces milk output & pregnancy rates.
FMD survivors are weakened, a precarious state in the wild.
IMHO: Without FMD, Brucellosis, and probably other diseases drastically reducing both the number of Bison and their ability to reproduce, hunters would have had difficulty denting the Bison herd let alone all but decimating it.
My gut tells me we would have had a hard time manufacturing enough ammo to dent the bison population without the diseases doing the heavy lifting.
Thanks Willis, I stand condemned as a catastrophist, I rendeth mine garments. I should have said they are rapidly disappearing from gardens, the headline I saw and quoted was not supported by the other reports which said it would be gone from our leafy gardens in the very near future. Here’s a few links you may wish to follow which details the situation for the ‘staggering ‘rate of decline of Mistle thrushes http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2268080/Wildlife-experts-sound-warning-disappearing-mistle-thrush-urge-public-help-survey-UK-garden-birds.html, and http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/21143664 . It appears the annoying beast has halved it’s numbers since the early 70s This is confirmed by that other bunch of catastrophists, the BTO and RSPB. Am I an alarmist (or Catastrophist ) for suggesting other species are on the increase? or does it only work in one direction? Always great to debate with you Willis, the words ‘herding’ and ‘cats’ springs to mind on such occasions. Cheers G
D.B. Stealey says:”What trafamadore proposes is that there should never be a species extinction under any circumstances.”
Um. Ms. or Mr. Facts, could you pls document what you foolishly say?
trafamadore says:
January 26, 2013 at 8:18 am
Dang … I guess that means the dance is off, Leg…
You’re so cute when you “forget” to cite your claims, tralfie. Since that “100x” number has no support except for your propensity to make wild statement, I’m sorry, but I won’t “take that number and go with it.” Anyone who believes numbers based on your unsupported word is … well, let me just call them unaware of your history and headed for disappointment.
10 species going extinct per year should mean about 11 bird and mammal extinctions on all of the continents of the planet. We’ve seen 9 … so for the continents of the planet, which cover about 95% of the land area, sadly, your “100x” claim is 100x wrong. Current extinction rates (except on the islands and Australia) are indistinguishable from geological extinction rates.
Wasn’t someone just talking about lacking a sense of numbers? Who was that, anyhow?
w.