Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
In a recent post here on WattsUpWithThat called The Thirteen Worst Graphs In The World, Geoff Chambers explores the graphs in a new book called “10 Billion”, by Stephen Emmott. The book appears to be Emmott’s first entry in the “Future Failed Serial Doomcaster” competition. I thought I’d take a look at one graph, the graph of extinctions. I know a bit about this subject, with both a detailed blog post called “Where Are The Corpses” and a journal article co-authored with Dr. Craig Loehle on the subject. Figure 1 shows Emmott’s graph in all its primordial glory.
Figure 1. Unlucky number 13 of the “13 Worst Graphs” of Stephen Emmott. SOURCE The citation says “13. Adapted from S. Pimm and P. Raven, Biodiversity: Extinction by numbers, Nature, 403 (2000); A. barnosky [sic] et al. Has the Earth’s sixth mass extinction already arrived?, Nature, 471 (2011).
I’ve located non-paywalled copies of the Pimm and Barnosky papers. I’m sure the alert reader can see a few problems with Figure 1 at first glance, including chartsmanship of the highest order. The things that caught my eye were the use of the logarithmic vertical scale; the lack of units on the vertical scale; the short level section followed by the abrupt jump around 53,000 years BC; the huge increase at the end; and oh, yeah, see the little hash marks ” // ” along the bottom time scale to the right of -50,0000?
As is my practice, I digitized this. Took about five minutes, because on a simple uncluttered graph you can use the automated features of the digitizing software. But before I discuss that, let me make some general comments.
Now, you recall I pointed out the hash marks in the time scale in Figure 1? Usually, that just means they’ve left out a chunk of years, it’s a common and legitimate technique used to show two separate time periods on the same graph. But they usually don’t splice the graph lines for the two periods together as he has done.
In addition, in this case the hash marks don’t mean just that. In this case, it also signifies a change in the time scale itself. So on the left side of the hash marks, the graph shows a span of about ten thousand years. On the right side of the hash marks, on the other hand, it shows a span of only about two hundred and fifteen years(1835-2050). Bizarre. The consequences of this are displayed and discussed later.
Next, regarding units, the extinction rates are usually given in units of extinctions per million species per year, or E/MSY. This makes comparisons awkward because we don’t know how many species there are. We can reduce the inexactness somewhat by noting that the Red List shows 207 extinctions of birds and mammals over the last 500 years. And in total, they list 15,565 species of birds and mammals. That gives us a raw rate of about 25 extinctions per million species per year (E/MSY). And that’s roughly the number that they give for the recent part of the data. So it seems that they are using the standard units, E/MSY.
The problem, as always, is in the interpretation of the data. As usual, humans are to blame, and I say that in all seriousness … just not the way the alarmists claim. For example, I’ve shown that the coral atoll damage ascribed to rising sea levels from human CO2 is actually due to human interference with the reef. Humans were the cause, but not from CO2.
And I’ve shown that the damage ascribed to human-caused warming in the Alaskan “climate refugee” village of Shishmaref is actually a combination of poor site selection (it’s on a barrier island), erosion due to poorly designed shoreline reinforcements, and human-habitation-and-road caused permafrost melting. Again humans are the cause … and again, from something other than CO2.
In the case of extinctions, once again humans are indeed the cause … but again, not through the mechanism they claim, that of habitat reduction. Instead, humans have caused widespread extinctions through the introduction of “alien predators” into new areas which had never before seen them. These alien predators were and are a wide variety of species, humans among them. The list includes dogs, cats, rats, rabbits, foxes, mongoose, gray squirrels, brown tree snakes, and a host of other species including funguses and diseases. Heck, in a wonderfully strange case of environmental recursion, it turns out that for a while the lovely Central American frogs were being helped to extinction by the fungus unknowingly spread by the very biologists studying their extinction … introduced predators.
And those introduced predators have wreaked untold damage, including but not limited to both species extinctions and local extirpations of the native species in Australia and the islands around the planet. The changes are not limited to the extinctions because, for example, when you introduce foxes to an Arctic island, the entire ecosystem changes, all the way down to the very plants covering the landscape.
But there’s an oddity in that kind of extinctions, those caused by introduced alien predators. It is reported, perhaps apocryphally, that when Alexander the Great saw the extent of his domain he wept because there were no new worlds left to conquer. And the same is true regarding extinctions from introduced predators. Most of those extinctions occurred in several waves. First there were early extinctions in the Caribbean in the 1500s. Then extinctions rose again during the first wave of expansion and exploration in the 1700s, and then again during the age of empires after 1850. Since peaking at the start of the 20th century, they’ve generally declined. Here’s the data from my earlier post .
Figure 2. Bird and mammal extinctions. Note that the units (extinctions per year) are different from the units in Figure 1 (E/MSY). ORIGINAL CAPTION: Stacked graph of the historical extinction rates for birds (grey) and mammals (black). 17 year Gaussian average of the data from Red List (birds) and CREO (mammals). Note the peak rate of 1.6 bird and mammal extinctions per year, and the most recent rate of 0.2 extinctions per year.
But in 2013, as with Alexander, there are few new worlds left for alien predators to conquer—there’s not much of the planet that hasn’t already seen invasive alien predators of many kinds. There’s no Terra Incognita that hasn’t been visited by the European or other explorers. And as a result, the worst of the extinctions from introduced predators are behind us.
Now, if we leave out the extinctions by introduced predators, then out of the 207 bird and mammal extinctions there are only 9 extinctions in 500 years, three mammals and six birds. This means that other than extinctions from introduced predators the extinction rate is only 1.2 extinctions per MSY … very low.
So with that in mind, here is the underlying data from Emmott’s graph in the normal form, showing both the early and late data.
Figure 3. Emmott’s data from his 13th graph, in the normal form, but still with a logarithmic scale.
Pretty hilarious, huh? When the Emmott data is put into its normal form we see the lunacy of the graph that he has spliced together and present. There is some data from 60,000 to 50,000 BC, then a huge gap in the middle followed by a few more years of data at the end. In order to understand it, let me divide it into the ice age record, and the modern and predicted record, and show each one separately.
Figure 3. Ice age extinctions, from 60,000 BCE to 49,500 BCE. This shows the normal presentation without the logarithmic scale
Now that, I have to call hokey. It has a huge jump between 53000 and 52000 years BCE, and while I imagine that it is supposed to reflect the so-called “Late Quaternary Extinctions” of the megafauna, I’ve never seen it represented like that. Nor do I have any idea why it would jump up and not come back down again … and I can’t find any such jump in the two works he cites, Pimm and Barnosky.
Moving on to the modern era and the future, here’s that chart. Since I don’t know what extinctions he’s talking about, I fear I can’t give the proper background of extinct animals. In Figure 4, you can see that the man is truly barking mad:
Figure 4. Modern and future extinctions, as Emmott would have us believe. Note what happens when we use the normal scale instead of the logarithmic scale.
Here’s the looney part. From 1835 up until the present (2013), the extinction rate is claimed to increase slowly from 16 E/MSY at the start to 28 E/MSY in 2013. Over the next 30 years, to 2043, this slow increase is supposed to continue at the same rate, with the 2043 value estimated at 37 extinctions per million species per year. Then, in seven short years, by 2050 it’s supposed to increase more than a hundred fold, to 4,600 in 2050. Does he really believe this pseudoscience?
First off, there’s no indication that the extinction rate has been rising steadily since 1835 as he claims. Compare his claims in Figure 1, to Figure 2 for what the data actually shows about the historical waxing and waning of extinctions over the years.
More to the point, my goodness, what’s supposed to happen in 2043 to drive extinction rates up by a factor of more than a hundred, two full orders of magnitude, up from 37 extinctions to 4,600 extinctions per MSY? A nuclear winter? A meteor strike? Runaway gene-spliced chimeras? The world wonders …
Finally, some of these numbers are supposed to be “after” Barnosky et al. That paper says:
The maximum observed rates since a thousand years ago (E/MSY ≈ 24 in 1,000-year bins to E/MSY ≈ 693 in 1-year bins) are clearly far above the average fossil rate (about E/MSY ≈ 1.8), and even above those of the widely recognized late-Pleistocene megafaunal diversity crash.
However, recall from above that other than extinctions from introduced species, which will never again reach the high values of the past, the current rate of extinctions is only about 1.2 extinctions per million species years … not different from the fossil extinction rates.
So in summary, Emmott took three different datasets. One was a bogus dataset regarding the middle of the last ice age. The second was a bogus estimate of modern extinction rates. The third was a colossally ridiculous estimate of the future changes in extinction rates. He spliced them all together and voila! The famous extinction hockeystick is born, the 13th unlucky bastard step-child of one Stephen Emmott.
Sometimes, these guys are beyond parody.
w.
Spreadsheet containing the digitized data and graphs is here.
PS—Yes, I know there are many other factors to consider in figuring historical extinction rates, it’s in the journal article. These are rough, raw, “order-of-magnitude” estimates. However, when everything is considered, the modern extinction rates (absent introduced predators) is not statistically any different from the historical rates. In other words …
The claimed “Sixth Wave of Extinctions” is a total fabrication.
Extinction rates are little changed from fossil rates, except for the historical wave of introduced predator extinctions, which are now safely in the past since there are no more empires left for Alexander the Alien Predator to conquer.
PPS—There’s a good discussion of the Emmott graphs over at Donna Laframboise’s excellent blog NoFrakkingConsensus. Geoff Chambers has much more information on Emmott at his blog. And at ClimateResistance there’s a very readable fisking of the individual claims.
PPPS—For an example of the “Sixth Wave of Extinctions” pseudoscience coming from a major environmental NGO, see the WWF … sad.
My apologies for repeating an earlier post on WUWT, but it is relevant to Willis’ extinctions story:
“Remember the infamous prediction in 1988 by E. O. Wilson that the number of bird and animal species on the planet would half by 2013, well as usual it has failed to eventuate. But it did succeed in gaining Wilson his 5-minutes of fame.
Now for my own experience of dealing with the religious Greenfools
A couple of years ago our local school hosted a presentation by a couple of 17-year old senior school students on “Global Warming and the New Wave of Extinctions”. As it was a cold, wet night with nothing on TV I went along. Amazingly, about 100 people attended.
The students rolled out every cliche and bad climate catastrophe statistic ever heard of and correlated cause and effect between totally unrelated facts, statistics, etc. The audience was appreciative and wept uncontrollably when told that 10,000 species had been ‘extincted’ (sic) by the 1 degree Centigrade increase already experienced. “We are doomed!” they wailed and the audience gnashed their teeth.
During question time I asked:
1. Can you name two species declared extinct in the past 2-years? and
2. How many new species are being created each year, as opposed to being found?
One gentleman near the front cried ‘Shame!” and people started stamping their feet. The Moderator, a city councillor said “I think we can ignore that. Next question?”
Yes, we are doomed, but not for the reasons they think … but because a new Dark Age of Unreason and Ignorance is upon us”
The next extinction needs to be the whole Department of Climate Change in Australia.”
Willis, quite probably you’ve read this book, but I just mention it as background, and for others who might be interested: ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’, by Jared Diamond. I think it’s the best account of the last 13,000 years of human history (since the last Ice Age), and nothing flattering.
@- Kaboom
“I find it quite ridiculous that he doesn’t attribute a considerable jump in extinctions to such global events like .. let’s say .. the most recent ice age that considerably disrupted ecosystems, required mass migration and vastly reduced accessible living space for about every non-tropical species on the planet.”
It may be less ridiculous than you think.
Most of the megafauna that went extinct during the Holocene after the end of the last ice-age {mammoths, aurochs etc} had survived through several other glacial cycles. The one big difference this time was massively increased hunting and competition for territory from the expanding numbers of a mammal that had recently developed a new form of social cooperation which was highly successful and leading to a population explosion.
I think it is premature as well to assume that all extinctions due to the introduction of alien predators across continental regions has reach an end because all possible harmful introductions have already happened. It is not just predators that can disrupt a species to the point of extinction. A plant that is more efficient in a niche from one continent might eliminate a plant occupying the same niche on another continent which did not gain the same advantages in it evolution.
Or a plant or animal controlled by predators in one ecology can expand to the point of eradicating others because it lacks the predator controls in a new ecology.
Then there is the removal of top predators by man, most notably in the oceans which is simplifying the food chain down to plankton and jellyfish.
Emmott is obviously one of those narrow thinking ‘experts’ anxious to join the many ‘Great’ scientists that have tried to scare the world with their ridiculous predictions over recent years.. You know; 50,000 dead through Bird Flue; The end of humanity through Mad Cow Disease; Aids to devastate the hetrosexual world as well as homosexuals; Arctic ice melt to raise the sea level by X metres: Polar bears doomed; etc. etc.
If it wasn’t for the fact that gullible, modern day governments, listen to these people who do not have a lateral thought in their heads, and take unbelievably ridiculous actions, like those taken by the British government which has resulted, amongst other things, in bringing our energy supply into crisis, we could treat them all as mad professors whose stupid prognostications should be ignored completely.
I like to listen to the old hometown talk guy up in Illinois (vying with California to become the first state to go extinct) on IHeart radio. During commercial breaks they play (over and over) a p.s. spot featuring Jeff Corwin, whom I assume is a Marlin Perkins type, talking about how he almost got extincted by an elephant, and also about what bad shape things are in now. He expounds on how we have one species go extinct every 20 minutes, which should run about 27 kilospecies per year. With that many going, I’d really like to ask him to name one that went extinct this year. Or this century, for that matter. Without going to the Red List, I can think of only a couple that snuffed it last century – Golden toad, ivory billed woodpecker (maybe).
It’s disconcerting to have to pin all our hopes on wind-turbinated whooping cranes.
Dudley Horscroft says:
July 8, 2013 at 12:26 am
Consider what happens when mankind actually tries to kill off a species. It has taken anywhere from 10 to 100 years (depending on where you start counting) to kill off just one species – smallpox.
But surely, this has infringed the human rights of the smallpox virus.
/sarc
Has the book been allocated a DDC (Dewey Decimal Classification) yet?
From the look of it, it ought to be 293.something
Hilary (July 8, 2013 at 1:28 am)
Your comments aren’t off-topic at all. They take the discussion forward from the point that Willis has brought it to with his magnificent demolition job.
There’s no point in correcting a lot of false information unless you go on to ask the questions you raise: “What were they thinking of?” (“They” being Penguin/Vintage Books, but also top publishing firms in Germany, Holland and Italy, the Royal Court Theatre, the European Union, which financed Emmott’s show at the Royal Court, Microsoft, etc).
We know that Mann, Marcott, Lewandowsky and co are practially impervious to criticism behind their peer-reviewed, tenured fortifications. Publishers, newspaper editors, and book reviewers are a bit different. John Gray, who passes for an eminent thinker, has given Emmott a favourable review in the Guardian. No doubt other serious papers have handed out “Ten Billion” for review to other eminent professors. If these professors google “Ten Billion” they’ll find articles by Donna Laframboise, Jo Nova, Willis, Alex Cull and me. It might just make them think. And it might just stir things up a bit in the offices of Penguin / Vintage
.
Penguin must have quite juicy contracts with Suhrkamp/Insel and Feltrinelli, who were planning to bring out German and Italian translations simultaneously with the British/American publication, which was originally scheduled for September. Two of Europe’s biggest publishing houses might be seriously unhappy to learn what a pile of unsavoury lasagna they’ve been landed with. I think a visit to their websites is in order.
Jeff Norman says quoting E O Wilson:
“It follows that both the per-species rate and absolute loss in number of species due to the current destruction of rain forests (setting aside for the moment extinction due to the disturbance of other habitats) would be about 1,000 to 10,000 times that before human intervention.”””
It’s a pity Mr Wilson hasn’t done much study in palaeoclimates and rainforest distribution. He simply assumes the rainforests are always there. During ice ages, it is estimated that the Amazon rainforest for example, was less than half its present size, under a climate about 6 C degrees cooler. This would mean most of the species there now should have gone extinct, based on his above calculations of species -area relationships. Same goes for other rainforests during the ice ages over the last several million years. So how come there are so many species still in these rainforests??? Did they re-evolve in the last ~13,000 years when the world warmed up again, and the Amazon expanded?.
Even if he is right that humans are eradicating species in rainforests at a high rate due to rainforest destruction (which destruction rate is actually quite low), nature would have done a much worse job during the ice ages, based on the very same species-area assumptions.
Suhrkamp (and it’s subsidiary Insel) is on the brink of financial collapse after internal strife and the departure of leading luminaries on their publishing roster. They will take anything that looks like it is bringing some black ink to the ledger.
Feltrinelli has been founded by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, a former communist who had also founded an extremist group called GAP that liked to bomb electric transmission towers. He has been found dead at the foot of one in 1972. Don’t expect these guys to publish Ayn Rand anytime soon.
Edward R. Tufte wrote The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (2nd ed.), Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press 2001, ISBN 0-9613921-4-2. Climate graphics are a frequent topic.
His website is lively and informative http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/index
Sometimes, these guys are beyond parody.
Unfortunately this will not prevent all the usual suspects from seizing on it as Gospel truth, and frantically waving it as further evidence that we are a really Bad Bad Bad species that should revert to cave dwelling.
Thank you for the analysis. Interesting, insightful, and entertaining.
The thing is, when I was a kid I used to believe fear-mongering graphs like these, I believed them completely. When you don’t know any better you assume the data is correct and that they did real science, you assume that they are experts and the resulting graphs are accurate. But later you grow up and realize that these graphs are created and sold to the public just to make a buck. And people still believe them completely, just like I used to.
Emmott’s book should poll well in the Science Fiction Awards this year.
I suspect that the Craig must have started with a base assumption that there are no species in the world today that were not around 60,000 years ago. Then he uses available estimates to calculate the cumulative total of how many species went extinct before man could be blamed for all extinctions. Then he estimates the total number of species that went extinct at the dawn of careful biological record keeping, tracks that, and then predicts the ultimate collapse of all species in the world. I mean, uses the best available data to extrapolate future trends. Thus what he shows is some sort of cumulative distribution with best guesses for the interim.
Not 2042 and not 2044. Nope, 2043 is when it all kicks off.
The only explanation is that Emmott is actually an astronomy who has detected a planet killing meteorite on its way and he is trying to place a few ‘win but never collect’ bets.
The extinction rate graph is fun because I doubt we have a good idea of the extinction rate while we were in the middle of the last glaciation. From my reading, it appears that these predictions or claims of extinctions usually come form computer models and one, in particular, was a program for predicting species list probabilities as the survey area is reduced; they took this programs and tortured it by running it backwards and sideways, concluding huge extinction rates.
Real world observations have shown that, as the climate warms, extinction rates decrease as cool kills by preventing plant growth, while warmth is a good time for everybody. In the Swiss Alps, the observation was that, as the climate warmed, plants and animal species moved to higher altitudes but also did not abandon where they had been. The result was an increase in biodiversity with more species in a larger area and a lower risk of extinction for all species. It’s a win-win for life.
The graph is total garbage in relation to the real world. It’s purely speculation, day-dreaming, opinion, and alarmism.
I did a bit of sleuthing awhile back and found that, in effect 6 mammal and bird species had gone extinct in the last 100 years, mostly to overhunting and none to habitat loss; island species are particularly in danger of extinction. BUT, in the meantime we have found 15 species that we thought were extinct, so we are up 9 species. In other words, their claims of high extinction rates happening today are really hard to take seriously.
I still have my copy of The Limits to Growth. Back in 1972, our impending doom was foretold by exponential curves. Modern soothsayers seem to prefer hockey sticks.
dp says: @ur momisugly July 7, 2013 at 11:43 pm
….. is anyone in the pro-alarmist camp even the tiniest bit honest? It seems not.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
See Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals
izen says:
July 8, 2013 at 3:03 am
It may be less ridiculous than you think.
Most of the megafauna that went extinct during the Holocene after the end of the last ice-age {mammoths, aurochs etc} had survived through several other glacial cycles. The one big difference this time…
Really? The one. I think that is most unlikely.
Mike McMillan says: July 8, 2013 at 3:19 am
… featuring Jeff Corwin, whom I assume is a Marlin Perkins type,
Who, who, who.
Must have been late at night, begging forgiveness from the gods of grammar, blame it on George Bush, global warming, locusts, the ‘m’ is really close to the space bar.
dp says: @ur momisugly July 7, 2013 at 11:43 pm
….. is anyone in the pro-alarmist camp even the tiniest bit honest? It seems not.
Once you’ve decided that the “saving the planet” justies any and all means necessary pretty much all bets are off.
hockey stick fever… 🙂