Apocalyptic Fear-mongering: Sometimes Rush Limbaugh is Right!

Guest essay by Jim Steele,director emeritus Sierra Nevada Field Campus, San Francisco State University and author of Landscapes & Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism

Thirty years ago I never would have dreamed I would or could utter the words of my title. As a left-leaning young ecologist, I hated the way Limbaugh painted all environmentalists as “whackos”! I was a strong believer in the Endangered Species Act as a law that would ensure people stopped to consider win-win solutions for humans and all other species. I believed conservation science could guide us toward wise environmental stewardship, and when married to innovative entrepreneurial endeavors, we could build a better world for all. As director of a university environmental field station, I met people of all political persuasions eager to enjoy and protect the environment, and I believed both the left and right would rally around sound environmental science. So why did Rush label us as whackos? I saw Limbaugh’s polarizing polemics as an attack on the environment. But now I must agree with Rush’s recent view that “Apocalyptic, Fear-Mongering Accelerates the Decline of Our Culture”. In his critique of a newly published paper, “Accelerated modern human–induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction” (hereafter Ceballos and Ehrlich 2015), Rush correctly points out that it is just another example of apocalyptic fear mongering that drives some people into hopeless despair, while forcing others to ignore scientists’ steady drone that the end of the world is before us.

As an ecologist I read several papers a week, looking for pearls of wisdom that would make us better stewards of the environment. But Ceballos and Ehrlich 2015 offered absolutely nothing new and absolutely nothing useful. They simply created a framework that would dramatize their numbers stating, “Our analysis emphasizes that our global society has started to destroy species of other organisms at an accelerating rate, initiating a mass extinction episode unparalleled for 65 million years.” Started to destroy…??? What are we now doing to suddenly promote mass extinctions?

Indeed more species have likely gone extinct in the past 500 years due to habitat loss, overhunting and invasive species than are known to have gone extinct over the past 400 thousand years, despite the extreme climate shifts between the ice age glacials and warm interglacials. But the bulk of those extinctions were the result of past human actions that are now being rectified. At this essay’s conclusion, I added a table for the first 100 of the 140 extinct bird species from the same IUCN database that Ceballos and Ehrlich 2015 used for their paper. Unlike Ceballos and Ehrlich 2015, I included extinction dates and the reason the IUCN has justified their extinction status. Notice that most extinct species inhabited islands where organisms are extremely sensitive to all invasive species. That damage has already been done. So in contrast to claims we are “entering” an era of accelerated mass extinctions, it would be more honest to say humans are now reversing what began 500 years ago.

Most island die-offs began shortly after Columbus’ “discovery” of the New World that encouraged worldwide exploration. Of the 100 extinct birds listed below, three species were extinct in the 1500s, 17 in the 1600s, 18 in the 1700s, 32 in the 1800s, and 30 in the 1900s. Overhunting claimed many island species like the Dodo early on, as hungry sailors and settlers struggled to survive. However a large proportion of recent extinctions happened unintentionally due to introduced rats that stowed away on visiting ships, (or more recently the introduced brown tree snake). Without natural predators, rat populations exploded. So islanders intentionally introduced cats, ferrets and mongoose to kill the rats. But island wildlife had evolved without any threat from land predators, so most species were behaviorally ill adapted to survive the onslaught of these new arrivals. Many island birds evolved flightlessness and explorers reported island species as remarkably tame. Most of the other extinct vertebrate species on the IUCN list suffered a similar fate in the wake of introduced species. Many of the most recent extinctions in the 1900s were simply distressed species succumbing to centuries of depredation from introduced species and lost habitat. Oddly enough, when the Christian Science Monitor hyped Ceballos and Ehrlich 2015 with How To Prevent The Sixth Mass Extinction, their only solution was a cure that is much worse than the disease. They resurrected Camille Parmesan’s pitch for widespread introduction of species into new habitats where climate change is predicted to create a more favorable environment. Not only has that remedy always caused disastrous ecological disruptions, but climate models have been notoriously awful about simulating regional climate changes.

The causes of past extinctions have been noted for decades and centuries. Instead of hammering the public with gloom and doom, Ceballos and Ehrlich 2015 would have served us better by reporting how extensive recent efforts are saving species. Globally people have been diligently working to prevent further island extinctions. For example, the Aleutian Goose was once believed to be extinct until a few individuals were found on a remote island. The goose had disappeared from all its other breeding islands because fur farmers had introduced arctic and red foxes. Recognizing the problem, humans quickly removed the foxes and the species rebounded immediately (as did many other breeding sea birds). The Aleutian Goose is now so abundant it is considered a pest on its wintering grounds. Similarly worldwide efforts to eradicate introduced “pest” species are reporting various levels of success. For a more hopeful outlook, and to appreciate how human efforts are promoting biodiversity, I suggest visiting the websites of organizations like Island Conservation or reading about successful eradications.

Unconscionably, although most past extinctions, as well as presently endangered species, are found on islands, and despite widespread local efforts that are preventing further island extinctions, Ceballos and Ehrlich 2015’s so-called “science” and self-prmoting press releases are only generating horribly despairing and deceptive headlines proclaiming, “Sixth mass extinction is here: Humanity’s existence threatened.”.

Why didn’t Ceballos and Ehrlich 2015 point out productive efforts that are preventing further extinctions? Why not offer real conservation guidance and optimism? It appears they prefer denigrating modern society and promoting apocalyptic fear mongering rather than promoting good conservation and good science. They wrote, “Modern extinction rates have increased sharply over the past 200 years (corresponding to the rise of industrial society) and are considerably higher than background rates”. But suggesting modern industrial society “corresponds” with those extinction is a horrible illusion. A stronger case can be made that industrial society will be wildlife’s savior.

Although the geometric growth of human populations for the past 500 years has undeniably led to increased habitat destruction and overhunting. But population growth may soon plateau and then reverse its growth trend. The “evils” of population growth have been the mainstay of influential apocalyptic predictions from Malthus in the 1700s to Ehrlich in recent decades. In Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb, he warned of the mass starvation in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation. But as Limbaugh noted, Ehrlich’s predictions have failed miserably. So perhaps his “new extinction research” is just an attempt to regain some support for his widely criticized “end of the earth” beliefs. But if Ehrlich is suggesting booming human populations will soon cause the Sixth Mass Extinction, then he has failed to report a more optimistic consensus that our modern industrial society is now reducing population pressures.

Ecologists divide animal reproductive strategies in to 2 broad categories. R-selected species provide little parental care and produce abundant young, anticipating high mortality. In contrast K-selected species produce few young but invest a lot of parental care. Modern industrial societies have encouraged humans to evolve from a R-selected to a K-selected species. Where humans once depended on cheap child labor to operate marginal subsistence farms, there was an economic advantage to having many children. In contrast industrial societies demand greater parental investment and more education, so reproduction is delayed and families are smaller. Furthermore mechanization of agriculture has reduced the demand for abundant cheap labor on marginal farms.

Ecologists calculate that human populations require a fertility rate of 2.1 births per female to offset deaths. A fertility rate below 2.1 causes the population to decline, while a higher fertility rate causes population to grow. In the 1950s, the decade of Baby Boomers, the USA had a fertility rate that averaged 3.7. By 1980 the rate dropped to 1.8. Now due largely to immigration, a slightly higher fertility rate stands at 2.0. Worldwide fertility rates similarly dropped from 2.67 in 1950 to 2.02 in 2000. These lower rates suggest the global human population will soon plateau and then decline. Thus decreasing population pressures will not cause an accelerating extinction rate. These decreasing fertility rates should be a cause for optimism. The graph below color-codes the fertility rates of every nation. Only the non-industrial societies are experiencing the high fertility rates (reds and yellows) that could strain the earth’s carrying capacity and diminish local biodiversity. So why does Ceballos and Ehrlich 2015 denigrate modern society?

Habitat loss has indeed been a major cause of local extinctions as burgeoning human populations converted more landscape for agricultural purposes. But better intensive agricultural practices, like mechanization, genetic engineering and other modern techniques, have allowed the world to feed more people on fewer acres. For example according to the USDA since 1950, “the average yield of corn rose from 39 bushels to 153 bushels per acre, and each farmer in 2000 produced on average 12 times as much farm output per hour worked as a farmer did in 1950. Again such improvements should be a cause for pride and optimism, as modern society has increasingly sacrificed less natural habitat for agriculture.

As more marginal farms are abandoned and land is returned to the wild, we would expect to see the return of more natural habitat and indeed this was the case for Vermont. In 1900, Vermont was 80% deforested. As marginal farms were abandoned, Vermont became 80% reforested supporting natural biodiversity. Similar patterns have been observed throughout New England. As marginal farmland became reforested moose migrated southward to warmer regions where they had been extirpated by the 1800s in contrast to global warming theory. Similar reversions to natural habitat were observed throughout the Great Plains. Furthermore land managers and private hunting groups like Ducks Unlimited have been improving species prime breeding habitat in the Prairie Potholes, so that in 2014 North American duck populations had increased to record highs, 43% above the 1950-80 average. But that landscape success story is now being threatened. As politicians become increasingly mesmerized by another apocalyptic story regards climate change, governments are subsidizing biofuels that are increasingly destroying habitat and stress groundwater supplies.

A 2013 paper from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science reported, “High corn and soybean prices, prompted largely by demand for biofuel feedstocks, are driving one of the most important land cover/land use change (LCLUC) events in recent US history; the accelerated conversion of grassland to cropland in the US Corn Belt.” Due to government biofuel subsidies, the rate of grassland conversion has accelerated land conversion rates that have not been seen since the Dust Bowl when wheat subsidies similarly encouraged the plowing under of grasslands the size of the state of Ohio. These researchers noted the landscape conversion is “comparable to deforestation rates in Brazil, Malaysia, and Indonesia, countries in which tropical forests were the principal sources of new agricultural land.”

Similarly, tropical deforestation and lost biodiversity has been accelerated by government subsidies for other biofuels. Although palm oil had been chiefly used in foods and cosmetics, the EU began subsidizing palm oil for biofuels in a misguided fight against climate change. European Union subsidies for palm oil raised prices and increased its demand as reported in 2013 in The EU Biofuel Policy And Palm Oil: Cutting Subsidies Or Cutting Rainforest? (see table below). This resulted in widespread deforestation throughout Indonesia that now threatens tropical species like the Orangutans and has been wreaking widespread ecological havoc. Similar subsidies for sugar cane are accelerating deforestation in Brazil.

Apocalyptic fear mongering about climate change has similarly convinced politicians that burning trees (again eliminating more habitat) is better than burning coal under the guise of “sustainable fuel production”. Early settlers had decimated Great Britain’s forest thousands of years ago to create grazing land for their sheep. But recent conservation efforts were now making this one of the few nations with increasing forests. Unfortunately government subsidies are not only promoting cutting local forests, but those subsidies were creating a demand to import more trees from America and thus destroying distant habitat. Likewise, Haiti has denuded its landscape as it relies on wood burning. While due to its reliance on a fossil fuel economy, the Dominican Republic has preserved more forest. The difference is readily observed below in NASA’s satellite photo of the Haiti (left) and Dominican (right) border.

Whales, walrus and other marine mammals were nearly hunted to extinction during the Little Ice Age for their blubber. But the advent of the oil industry and modern industrial society provided an alternative energy source that reduced that hunting pressure, and likely prevented the extinction of most marine mammals. Although the disruption of industrial economies by two world wars caused a temporary spike in whaling, the recovery of industrial economies once again has alleviated hunting pressures. Gray Whales are now believed to have returned to their historic numbers (see graph below), Humpback Whales are increasing by about 13% a year, and most other species are steadily recovering but at a lower pace.

In contrast to apocalyptic headlines of climate change disruption, observations of large numbers of walruses hauling out on Alaskan beaches are evidence of conservation success as Pacific walruses have rebounded to equal historic numbers as discussed in Hijacking Successful Walrus Conservation. Indeed modern societies have reduced the extinction threats to most marine mammals that were decimated by overhunting for food and fuel. Again modern industrial society should engender optimism about our environment’s future, not elicit catastrophic predictions of mass extinctions.

Ceballos and Ehrlich 2015 suggest we can avoid a sixth mass extinction by alleviating pressures on stressed populations, caused notably by “habitat loss, over-exploitation for economic gain and climate change”. Yet modern society has been increasingly addressing those first 2 problems and there is no evidence that climate change has caused any extinctions. Contrary to climate change fears, since the Little Ice Age, whether or not warming was caused by rising CO2 or natural climate change, that warming has contributed to longer growing seasons which has only benefited the entire food web for all species including humans. Phytoplankton that form the base of the Arctic food web has increased 3 fold. It is beyond all reason that proponents of a CO2 driven apocalypse would suggest that the 1-degree colder temperatures of the Little Ice Age should be revered as the benchmark against which we evaluate our “optimal” climate. During the Little Ice Age upwelling was reduced lowering ocean productivity, glaciers threatened European villages, tree line dropped, and no new trees grew in several montane regions, and there was widespread starvation that the pope blamed on witches.

In his critique of Ceballos and Ehrlich’s 6^th mass extinction madness, Limbaugh’s warns that apocalyptic fear mongering is engendering a lack of faith, and lack of hope in our children, and in our society. In a similar vein, science writer Matt Ridley recently wrote in “Climate Wars’ Damage to Science.” that climate fear mongering is even more damaging, denigrating the very scientific process itself. Most striking to me is the lost trustworthiness of the peer review process regards climate science. It seems as if all one has to do is suggest apocalyptic climate change to get published no matter how much contradictory evidence is known.

A blatant example of such damage to science, was the American Meteorological Society’s publication of Parmesan’s half-truths about climate-caused population extinctions, If she had honestly reported the whole story that only butterflies that had recently and opportunistically colonized a logged area had been extirpated, while just ten feet away in natural communities the same species was thriving, her apocalyptic climate interpretation would have been shunned (details here). Instead her story of half-truths was repeated by our top climate scientists in scientific journals as an example of deadly climate change, and the BAMS editors refused to retract her bogus paper. But this is not an isolated incidence. There is a long list of other apocryphal climate catastrophe publications in peer reviewed science.

Camille Parmesan was also one of the earliest authors to suggest climate change was extirpating populations in Climate and Species Range. However after careful perusal of her claims, I documented several fallacies (here) and then learned that many of her purported extirpated populations have now returned (according to her own research). Yet she has never published those more uplifting observations of natural resiliency. Later in an IPCC publication, she misdiagnosed a species’ range expansion in England due to successful conservation efforts in order to blame climate change (details here). Yet despite all of Parmesan’s bad science, she was honored at the White House and became one of a select few biologists invited to join the IPCC. While promoters of apocalyptic climate change have elevated Parmesan to hero status, the only person that publicly challenged her bad science was Rush Limbaugh.

Similarly J.A. Pounds joined the IPCC after publishing in Nature that climate change was causing extreme heat and dryness, which was killing Costa Rica’s amphibians. But other scientists provided overwhelming evidence that the inadvertent introduction of a chytrid fungus by researchers and the pet trade had caused the recent amphibian extinctions. Intensive laboratory studies then revealed that the deadly fungus could not tolerate extreme warmth or dryness, which contradicted all of Pounds’ earlier interpretations. So Pounds simply reversed his position to maintain his apocalyptic climate story, and he now argued global warming was causing cooler maximum temperatures and a wetter environment and therefore climate change was still the killer by enabling the deadly fungus. The editors at Nature never demanded that Pounds explain his contrary interpretations. As long as apocalyptic climate change was suggested, it got published (details here). While other scientists rallied to save threatened amphibians, Pounds attacked them for not blaming apocalyptic climate change.

Nature published other apocalyptic papers suggesting the imminent extinction of Emperor Penguins. Researchers blamed global warming despite the fact that there had been no warming trend at the site where the population of Emperors had declined. The most likely culprit causing lower Penguin numbers was researcher disturbance during brutal winter conditions (details here), but recent papers continue to suggest global warming was the cause to infer mass extinctions will happen by the turn of the century.

Despite the Inuit insistence that it is the time of the most polar bears, or the fact that researchers have documented increasing populations, polar bears have been elevated to icons of apocalyptic climate change. In another blatant example of editors “looking the other way” and defiling the scientific process, researchers first published that cycles of heavy sea ice in the Beaufort Sea had caused significant drops in ringed seals and polar bears. Then to support the apocalyptic meme, the same researchers published that those same populations declines were due to global warming and less ice (details here).

Pika are rabbit like creatures living in the mountainous western USA. Erik Beever published that pika were experiencing accelerated upslope dispersal and extinction due to climate change. But Beever admittedly eliminated all observations of pika moving to lower elevations. Although his statistical tinkering guaranteed “upslope movement” no matter how the climate changed, the editors considered this “good science.” In contrast more extensive surveys by other researchers have shown that 19% of all pika detections have been at lower elevations than first reported in the early 1900s. Nonetheless several papers and websites only report Dr. Beever’s interpretation of climate change, apocalyptically driving pika upwards and into extinction. (more details here)

When Limbaugh argues that apocalyptic fear mongering is the liberal rage, I thought Rush was overreacting via his political ideology. But after reading the conclusions of Ceballos and Ehrlich 2015, I realized Ehrlich’s paper was not about biology or good conservation, but just a vehicle to promote their politics. Ehrlich concluded, “Avoiding a true sixth mass extinction will require rapid, greatly intensified efforts to conserve already threatened species and to alleviate pressures on their populations…. All of these are related to human population size and growth, which increases consumption (especially among the rich), and economic inequity (6). [emphasis added] However, the window of opportunity is rapidly closing.”

That gave me a better understanding of Limbaugh’s perspective. Although I have yet to see Rush take a pro-environmental stance, his arguments are not anti-environment. He is railing against the political corruption of environmental science, something I have sadly observed (see above). He is fighting against those who misuse the Endangered Species Act to promote their politics. He is ranting against apocalyptic fear mongering that robs science of its objectivity and integrity, and robs people of hope in order to promote an agenda.

Yet apocalyptic fear mongering is powerfully persuasive. It has empowered a diverse menagerie of cult leaders through out the ages as those who preach about the apocalypse are eerily seen as humanity’s saviors. Mesmerized followers relinquish there critical thinking powers and anoint their leader as the bearer of all truth. Anyone who thinks for themselves, rejects an inevitable apocalypse, or exposes the bad science of fear mongering, are called deniers by a legion of ignorant but rabid internet stalkers (as exemplified here). I am reminded of the Heaven’s Gate cult that believed the world was coming to an end, and would soon be “recycled”. Several highly intelligent high tech workers embraced their leader’s apocalyptic vision, believing the path to salvation was to castrate themselves and drink the “kool-ade”, so they could be transported by an alien spaceship hiding behind the approaching Hale-Bopp comet and swept away to a “higher level.”

Once you believe the world is coming to an end, once you lose faith in humanity and nature’s resilience, once you lose hope, then like the Heaven’s Gate victims, you become easy prey for the charlatans that inhabit all walks of life, left or right, scientist or layperson. Indeed “Apocalyptic, Fear-Mongering Accelerates the Decline of Our Culture”.

Jim Steele is director emeritus Sierra Nevada Field Campus, San Francisco State University and author of Landscapes & Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism