Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
A few years back, some scientists got together and invented something they call the Living Planet Index, or LPI. It’s supposed to measure how well (or poorly) the species that make up the living world are doing. They say it is a “measure of the state of the world’s biological diversity based on population trends of vertebrate species.” So it’s an index based on the decline of some selected species, which is claimed to represent the decline of the species of the “living world”.
Here’s the big news from their latest report.
The Living Planet Index claims an average 70% decline in the populations of species worldwide since 1970.
YIKES! 70% loss since 1970! EVERYONE PANIC!
But is this true?
Over in the Twitterverse where I’m @weschenbach, I said that based solely on my experience, their claim was nonsense. I’ve spent a lot of the last half-century outdoors in the elements, both on land and on and under the sea, around the planet. I said I would have noticed a 70% reduction in species populations.
Of course, folks who spend their lives behind desks in a city thought I was being ridiculous, and they laughed uproariously. How could I be so certain? Plus of course, there were the claims of “But Willis, those are actual scientists! How can you doubt them?”
So I thought I’d take a look at some real data. Let’s get a sense of the number of the species involved.
There are estimated to be around 8.7 million species on earth. Of these, about 65,000 are vertebrates.
How many of these 8.7 million species are studied by the Living Planet Index? Well, not all of them.
First, no plants, no fungi, no chromista. Next, only vertebrates, and only some of those, specifically fish, mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians.
The good news is that the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, which is the official keeper of data on which species are threatened or not, lists data for 62,493 vertebrates, so it covers pretty much all of the vertebrates.
It also allows us to search based on various criteria, including those used by the LPI listed above.
And when we eliminate the vertebrate species the LPI doesn’t include, we end up with 59,866 species fitting the LPI criteria—mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, and amphibians. Of course, they didn’t look at all of them, only 5,230. But I wanted a larger view of the issues.
The Red List also lets us see if the populations of each species are increasing, stable, or decreasing.
Of the populations of the 30,763 of the LPI-studied mammal etc. species for which the Red List has population data, 53% have stable or increasing populations. So we’re left with 14,565 species with decreasing populations. Call it half to be generous.
Here’s the problem. If around half the species for which we have data are stable or increasing, then even if the rest were all totally extinct, the average decline would only be 50% … far from the 70% they claim.
Oooops …
Next, as a sensitivity analysis, let’s assume every one of the 28,714 species for which we don’t have the population trend is decreasing. Clearly, that’s not possible—some will be increasing or stable. And because the Red List is focused on threatened species, the unknown species will likely be weighted towards stable species. But it’s a sensitivity analysis, so we’ll assume every one of the unmeasured species is decreasing.
With that impossible assumption purely for a sensitivity analysis, it would mean only 27% of the species are stable or increasing.
And the problem still remains. With 27% not decreasing, the only way to get to a 70% decrease in population is if almost every one of the 33,861 theoretically decreasing species is already extinct or on the brink of extinction. Only that impossible situation would give us a 70% average decrease.
Conclusions?
Out of 59,866 species fitting the LPI criteria for which we have population data, just over half are stable or increasing.
Of the 59,866 species, only 8,509 are both decreasing and in some trouble (vulnerable or near threatened or endangered or critically endangered). Here’s the Red List Report:
The endangered and decreasing fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals are 0.001% of all species, and there’s no reason to assume that their condition reflects the world situation.
The 70% claim of the LPI is falsified by the Red List data.
As I said, I have investigated this because based solely on my experience, I said I didn’t believe the LPI numbers, and folks laughed at that. And now, having studied the species data, I find that my experience is correct—their claims don’t hold water.
So how did the scientists behind the LPI get it so wrong? Obviously, their selected species are not representative of the whole.
I would suggest that Upton Sinclair had the answer to that. He said:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
The problem is, if the LPI was going up, or just slightly downwards, the scientists behind the LPI would be out of a job. To use George Orwell’s term, that’s doubleplusungood …
And almost inevitably, this leads to an unconscious bias in their choice of species, locations, and studies to include in the LPI. For the LPI, they’ve studied 31,821 populations of 5,230 species. So no overt bias is needed—just picking study A over study B because reasons, choosing population 1 over population 2, selecting species Alpha over species Beta, lather, rinse, repeat, and soon you have a 70% decline since 1970.
Finally, please be clear that I’m not saying that we should ignore population decreases. I’ve been a commercial fisherman for a good deal of my life, and I’d like my grandson to be able to do the same. The only way for that to happen is for us to care for the other life forms with which we share this magical planet. I’m just saying that the LPI is just more unsupported alarmism.
Best to all, and yeah, I’ll continue to trust my experience despite people laughing at it … I’m funny that way.
w.
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Laugh at them.
At whom? I downloaded the Living Planet Report 2022 and could not find the scary graph. Where exactly does it come from? A money quote from the Report: “we are living through the dual crises of biodiversity loss and climate change driven by the unsustainable use of our planet’s resources. Scientists are clear: unless we stop treating these emergencies as two separate issues neither problem will be addressed effectively.” Again, “scientists” have no names.
The graph comes from their website.
https://www.livingplanetindex.org/latest_results
w.
“Inexplicably, they have left out the main cause of extinctions over the past five centuries: invasive species. The introduction by people of predators, parasites and pests, especially to islands, has been and continues to be far and away the greatest cause of local and global extinction of native fauna. In his green encyclical, Pope Francis likewise never once refers to this problem. It is the Cinderella of the environmental movement.”
Lord Matt Ridley (Zoologist)
Sod all to do with the climate.
He goes on:
“Over the past 500 years, we know of 77 mammal species (out of about 5,000) and 140 bird species (out of about 10,000) that have gone totally extinct. There may be a handful more we do not know about, and there are plenty more on the brink. Nonetheless, these are the official total species extinctions for the two groups of animal we know best, as compiled by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.”
https://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/invasive-species-are-the-greatest-cause-of-extinction/
“we are living through the dual crises of biodiversity loss and climate change driven by the unsustainable use of our planet’s resources.”
Corrected version
Some nations are living through the dual crises of growing leftism and growing fascism. Most nations could not care less about CO2. But some nations insist on wasting money on Nut Zero, in spite of the fact that more CO2i improves plant growth and global warming makes most local climates more pleasant.
Why Canada, and similar rather cold places, would worry about a degree or so of warming…
…. is totally beyond any rational thought !
Yet Canada has gone totally manic over this anti-warmth agenda.
It really does defy logic !
Can you imagine someone from say, Siberia, complaining because it was -20C on a warm winter day instead of -30C !!!
“Yet Canada has gone totally manic over this anti-warmth agenda.”
Not all of Canada, but certainly a whole lot of our politicians.
I live in SE Michigan where almost all of Canada is north of us. We love our warmer winters with a lot less snow than in the 1970s and 1980s. We’ll take another 1 or 2 degrees C. of winter warming please. Our summers have not been warmer and last summer had more rain than any summer since the 1970s when I moved here.
Anyone with sense in Cubanada, of course not Justin TrueDope, would want a lot more warming in the next 100 years.
There’s not much warming in the tropics and most warming from greenhouse gases is at night (TMIN) anyway.
What’s not to like about more global warming. Unless you are a ski bum.
It’s not defying their logic, which is WEF globalism and world government wishes. They’re just pulling Trudeau’s strings …
“Some nations are living through the dual crises of growing leftism and growing fascism. ”
Leftism and fascism are not materially different. The goal of leftism is always communism.
In communism, the government owns the means of production. In fascism, private companies are “allowed” to operate as long as they do what the government tells them what to do. If they don’t, then the gavernment “nationalizes” them – a fancy way of saying the government steals them.
“Leftism and fascism are not materially different. The goal of leftism is always communism.”
I have to disagree.
The old leftist goal; was Marxism.
When Marxism failed in Russia and China, a new hybrid economic system replced pure communism in China
The Chinese government owns 60% of the means of production under communism
40% of the means of production is privately owned and the owners keep the profits.
They are tightly regulated by the government so you could say China is 40% fascist. The tight controls seemed to ignore water, air and land pollution for several decades.
Here is the approximate result of the Chinese hybrid economy that is not really surprising
China
60% communist = creates 40% of GDP
40% fascist = creates 60% of GDP
I believe the leftists want Rule by Leftist “Experts” (who really know nothing about everything), which is a polite name for fascism.
Some of the old timers still want Marxism but leftists are perfectly happy telling everyone else how to live without having to manage businesses, which takes skills. Hitler showed them how fascism works more efficiently than communism. He efficiently used his private sector to build a powerful war machine and about 14 million Germans died as a result. Private sector efficiency, but headed in the wrong direction.
It will require fascism to force Nut Zero on people. With fascism you have corrupt elections, so it’s hard to get rid of the bums (aka leaders).
I think the leftists are now favoring fascism knowing that pure communism failed in Russia, China, Cuba and North Korea
Mary has it pretty much pegged.
If you read Marx closely he covers three phases. Fascism, Socialism, and finally Communism.
Fascism is government CONTROL of business and capital. It facilitates the movement to the next phase, Socialism, where the government *owns* business and capital. Socialism is supposed to facilitate the movement to the final stage, Communism, where the collective owns business and capital.
What has happened historically is that there is generally a stall between the Fascism phase and the Socialism phase. It happens because those in power in government realize that a hybrid of Fascism and Socialism provides them just as much power with far less responsibility for outcome than a complete move to Socialism. Socialism (or more accurately a welfare state) to keep the people happy (bread and circuses?) while using business to implement policy.
“Some of the old timers still want Marxism but leftists are perfectly happy telling everyone else how to live without having to manage businesses, which takes skills.”
This is exactly what happens. A hybrid. They don’t manage the business sector, they just tell the business sector what they want and leave it to the businesses to implement it.
The problem with pretty well all political philosophers such as Marx or Mao, maybe even the lady you vote for PTA chairperson….is their belief that their ideas are GOOD for people and cultures….
Zealots know no shame.
And to think they are paid to publish Baloney! If it is WWF then you know it is FAKE!
Thanks Willis, I always enjoy your expositions. I live in the west central mountains of Colorado and am not impressed by the departments that are concerned for wildlife. We have a concern here for a declining elk offspring rate. Yet another concerned dept. is ‘introducing’ wolves, or so they think. First the wolves won’t help the elk problem. Secondly, there are already wolves here. I’ve seen one and have talked to ranchers who have always seen them here.
How about grizzlies- the one animal that really scares me?
They say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
Except grizzlies. They’ll kill you.
w.
The film, Revenant- freaked me out when the grizzly was ripping into DiCaprio.
Di Caprio survived and became a global warming apostle.
A purely religious experience.
He was a GWA long before that film.
What’s a GWA?
I like his acting- mostly- but he’s not so smart- dropped out of high school.
Revenant grizzlies CGI was state of the art, as he is still walking around whole.
Unfortunately, so is climate CGI. Thank goodness we have Charles to now counter attack.
I very much liked the film- but a buddy of mine who really knows the history of the “mountain men” says the story isn’t the real history. When I went to Yellowstone- I wasn’t going hiking alone or with my companion- only on a walk with a ranger- and a few dozen people. I was determined that if we saw a grizzly, I would be sure that all those hikers and the ranger would be between me and the grizzly.
They’ll only kill you if you are on your own. So long as you have a companion who can’t run as fast as you you’ll be fine.
Good idea- bring along some old timers. 🙂
Like you, me and Willis?
Don’t turn and run, face the grizzly, wave your arms and yell. Jump up and down like you want to fight him. Almost half the time they will turn and walk away cuz they’re not hungry.
Nice work, WE. Well deserved ridicule of the LPI and its ‘scientists’.
Two fun extinction facts.
Both anecdotes featured with illustrations in essay ‘No Bodies’ in ebook Blowing Smoke.
Of course, they’re not really lemurs, but possums. Lemurs live only on Madagascar.
Correct. They have a very different flavour and require a different list of eleven herbs and spices prior to packaging.
Yeah. The correct Australian name is ring tailed lemuroid, indeed technically a species of marsupial opossum. My bad for not checking my book first.
The ring-tailed lemur of southern Madagascar is rated “Endangered”:
Did not know that. Learn something new every day.
Most lemurs are at least endangered, especially from habitat loss.
Possum, not opossum:
https://www.bobvila.com/articles/possum-vs-opossum/
Yes, there is a difference. Please excuse my pedantry, but I’m a mammalian biologist, and a placental mammal, as are we all in this comment section.
Yes. I embarrassed myself some years ago here for not knowing the difference.
“Opossum” is an Algonquin word for the largest order of Western Hemisphere marsupials.
British colonists borrowed its derivative “possum” for the Australian marsupials superficially similar.
The diminutive “opossum” monito del monte (“little mountain monkey”) is a marsupial native to Chile and Argentina, but of Australian/Antarctic ancestry. Recognition of its relationship to Australian rather than Western Hemisphere groups was early evidence of “continental drift”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monito_del_monte
Thanks, Rud, your comments are always interesting and welcome.
Best to that good lady,
w.
Best back to you and your former fiancé.
Of course, per your final sentence, they are the SAME animal, just the recessive white comes out in the one area where that trait is more beneficial.
SO, give it time and it will eventually repopulate that area and again white will become more prevalent.
IMO.
Naturally, lower population of the white variant has been blamed on heat caused by man-made “climate change”.
When I hear about an animal “type” being endangered or extinct, I think of dog breeds.
I read that the original Irish Wolfhound had gone “extinct” but someone brought it back by breeding mastiffs with other dog types to bring our current Irish Wolfhounds back from “extinction”.
Man breeds dogs to produce a desired result.
Nature breeds “types” to get a survivable result. Man freaks out if the “survivable result” doesn’t survive in a particular local when lots of other “results” do survive elsewhere.
Similar thing happened with Saint Bernards. They were re-populated with Newfoundlands, or so I’ve heard.
Re golden toad. I understand it was later found that the fungal infection was introduced by an herpetologist who had been on a worldwide search for the best species of frog for use in human pregnancy tests. He was studying the golden road with a kit that was soiled with the the fungal agent from a South African toad.
“I’ve spent a lot of the last half-century outdoors in the elements, both on land and on and under the sea, around the planet.”
And I’ve been a field forester for exactly 50 years in Wokeachusetts- and have hiked many American National Parks and National Forests across the nation. IMHO, biodiversity is doing just fine. Here in this state many once lost species have recovered. The best example is turkeys. They had been wiped out. The state fish and wildlife agency got some from up state NY and reintroduced them here and now they’re abundant. Many large birds have also recovered like white egrets, great blue herons, eagles and hawks. We also now have coyotes back, wolverines, probably cougars and many small bird species. Also, grey fox are now more common- black squirrels- and many others. We also have quite a few invasive species- but most got here- not from climate change but on boats with cargo or purposefully introduced as landscape plants that “got away”. There is a problem with bees but I don’t think the cause has been definitely determined- and I doubt it has much to do with climate change.
Thanks, Joseph. It’s amazing how city folks are often on about their “lived experience” and how important it is.
But when outdoorsmen like you and I talk about our experiences, suddenly it’s just “anecdotes” …
w.
Here, forest policy is made by people with very few hours in the forests. Really ticks me off. I could write a book about it. It’s not as if I’ve just been out there with a chainsaw and dropping trees. I’ve read a great deal in those years- far more than most people with Phds. Both science non science.
Maybe it’s just that I dislike them so much- that when I post comments to them I use a fair amount of satire and sarcasm- actually, a great deal. It’s just that if I tried being nice, they’d ignore me even more. Instead, they’ve tried to take away my freedom of speech- twice- and both times I got the ACLU of Bah-stin involved.
We used to have a number of wild honey bee hives on my Wisconsin dairy farm. They would nest in old hollow burr oaks. About 10 years ago, they all disappeared in the course of just a couple of years. I suspect the problem was varroa mite infestations. #1 cause of loss of commercial hives.
Do you think it’s climate related or just something that happens in nature? Stuff happens!
Climate on my dairy farm hasn’t changed at all. We have snowy winters and not so snowy winters. We have wet summers and dry summers.
For the wild bees, it sure wasn’t the pesticides we use, because those go only on the row crops that are not good bee food sources. Pretty sure we picked up varroa mite infestation, as there are a number of commercial hives down the valley a bit that could have been the source.
No, the varroa mite has been imported from Asia, thanks to the oh so beneficial globalization.
Thanks Rud.
I now know everything Wiki can tell me about the varroa mite!
It’s amazing what farmers, even part timers like me, have to learn to manage a farm and be successful.
And my definition of success is pretty low—make more money than pay WI obscene out of state residence property taxes plus hunting and fishing fees plus unavoidable maintenance to keep it all going.
Do corporate farming operations pay out of state taxes?
Incorporate and rent the house from the corporation while you are there.
I am sure you have already looked at all that.
My cabin has 50% higher property taxes since I am not a resident. SO I feel your pain.
Far too many of these indoor persons don’t understand the variances of populations in the wild. 10 years ago we had lots of rabbits around my rural home. Then we saw the population of hawks soar. Now there are hardly and rabbits and the hawk population is on the wane – but the buzzard and squirrel populations are soaring. Predator and prey *always* have a sinusoidal population variance – unless something from outside is introduced. A look at populations TODAY, without considering the past 10 years, would lead one of these zealots that climate change is killing both rabbits and hawks – all the while forgetting about the growing population of buzzards and squirrels (and probably field mice, etc).
How about black squirrels? I never heard of them until I saw some after moving from the far west of Wokeachusetts to the north central part where they’re fairly common. I then looked in my old wildlife textbooks and saw that they’ve been around a long time- a native population. Strange to see them. Black squirrels matter! 🙂
“Black squirrels matter!”
So do White squirrels
When I lived in the SF Bay area, grey squirrels were abundant and found everywhere. However, Palo Alto and Stanford were unique because it appeared that the dominant phase was black.
Never saw a black squirrel in southeast Michigan until just a few years ago. Also, my brother lives 30 miles from me and and has no gray squirrels, just brown. I have brown, gray and black squirrels plus the red squirrel, which is much smaller. Climate change works in mysterious ways.
Here in the UK the North Hertfordshire district has a lot of black squirrels. I’m told the colour is simply a genetic mutation in grey squirrels.
Those paying the bills for the LPI are not getting their money’s worth.
If you look on the site, you can find a list of “Collaborators, funders and data providers “. Still, you won’t learn where the money comes from.
A side note: I keep wandering around the Cascade Mountains of Washington State looking for the bones of a Sasquatch. No luck. Rumor is that the living ones carry the deceased to a hiding place; that is, they move them.
If I can find that place, I can become famous and rich.
If you want to find bones of the Sasquatch, I guess you’ll have to expand your search area towards Canada. Try Sasquatchewan.
Good job Willis. Simple but devastating take down.
Willis, I share your approach to assessing the credibility of numbers presented as “the bottom line’.
Like you, my experiences and knowledge gained first-hand throughout ~ 58 years of my working adult life have taught me to always “look behind the curtain”.
My early 3 years of auditing the production metrics for a large foodstuffs processor placed me in good stead to ask the searching questions about “how was this number arrived at?”
Keep up your brilliant work Wills.
What I find risible is that so many people think that scientists or doctors wouldn’t lie. As if they’re not made of the same corruptible material as other humans. Scientists and doctors lie for the same reasons other people lie. They’re not saints; just fallible people like the rest of us.
Expert: A person that knows MORE and MORE about LESS and LESS until he/she knows absolutely EVERYTHING about absolutely NOTHING.
Why I prefer “specialist”.
Anyone who has worked with University academics will know just how venal and dishonest they can be.
One pitfall of the reduction of environmental discourse to climates in politics, media, and education is that there is a spillover into ignorance and the associated net harm to all other essential aspects of environment, and its stewardship. While the climate gas reductionists think forest habitats are sticks for storing carbon, that soils are mere dirt, and that ocean biomes are to be quantified by measures of PH, climate gas dissenters must be cautious not to reject all environmental concerns. For this represents (at some level) a reaction to the phony climate gas environmentalists, not one which demonstrates genuine wisdom.
You would think the LPI would mention a reduction in Raptors around wind ‘farms’, if they were serious people. Or a large reduction in the number of Humpback whales washing up on east coast beaches where wind turbine bases are being surveyed or constructed on the ocean floor.
Humpback Wales are still protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which aims to protect marine animal populations from decline. How does the offshore wind industry get a pass on the Marine Mammal Protection Act? When one scientist was asked why Humpback whales were dying, he said he didn’t think it had anything to do with electromagnetic fields generated by the wind turbines.
Talk about gaslighting, as most of the proposed wind farms aren’t even built yet. They are still doing sonar on the ocean floor or driving piles for the foundations. And then he further added that global warming was to blame. And the fishery industry.
Where is Green Peace when it comes to these Humpback Whales? Or the dead raptors around land based wind farms?
As far as I’ve seen, practically all of the natural conservation NGOs have been entirely captured by the CAGW movement, almost to the exclusion of their original missions.
Good work, Willis! Looks like you demonstrated that “actual scientists” are unstable or decreasing, or both. Keep on keeping on!
Is LPI improved by millions of bats and raptors killed by windmills?
I’m sorry, but anybody, scientist or Joe-blogs, who thinks they – and they alone – can determine and proscribe what the Earth should be like satisfies all of Freud’s conditions for the God Complex.
The hubris of those people is off the scale = that Life on Earth is defined as something with a bit more than a ‘a passing resemblance’ to us.
Attention seeking children.
>>The book ‘1984’ is oft mentioned…
Another book of vastly greater significance would be ‘War of the Worlds‘
We all know what went wrong there – those Martians were as equally hubristic as we are, and their failed existence on Earth will be identical to ours.
We ignored the ‘little things’
We are actually doing vastly worse than ignoring them, we are slaughtering them in simply unimaginable numbers and is the main reason why atmospheric CO₂ is rising.
Life on Earth starts, exists and ends under all our feet. (There’s some in the water also)
Oddly enough, that’s where the much vaunted ‘Greenhouse’ actually exists.
yes! 90-99% of wilderness occurs down there, beneath our feet, only detectable to a man through macro indicators like texture, color, and moisture. That is: biological mass and diversity = 10-100x that which exists above the surface. The beloved ecologies exist only to foster that; it all feeds down. The soils feed on the tree, as do the giraffe; but ultimately the giraffe is consumed down too, into the soils, like everything else. That is the difference. That is nature, a consequence of thermodynamic laws. Ecology feeding down, so energy can filter out. An additional degree of freedom only realized since 500 million years ago.
I know I am repeating myself but these @ssh@ts need to be subpoenaed to testify before a committee of the US House held in a predominantly Republican county and sworn under oath both to congress and a local Grand Jury seated to investigate NGO manipulation of “science” and the MSM.
Then let them repeat these lies. Unless they are incredibly stupid, which cannot be ruled out, they will not repeat their claims or will just refuse to answer the questions as asked. We have seen the ability of leftist to obfuscate and change the subject, but yes or no questions will make their lives difficult.
Man is responsible for great increases in animals too…take Oz….lotsa wabbits and camels and birds were introduced….South Florida has Burmese pythons and Iguanas and parrots and almost the entire USA has lotsa wild pigs but the deep oceans are being looted by China and N. Korea and others.
Wabbits, camels, birds….What about the brumbies?
And Hephalumps! And Woozles!
If you go to the “Teal” seats of the eastern suburbs of Sydney, you will find lots of cougars.
Story tip:
Tony Heller has developed software that compares the raw data from any reporting station on earth to the adjusted “data” that NASA reports. Short video that shows a very elucidating example.
https://realclimatescience.com/2024/01/what-did-they-do-wrong/#gsc.tab=0
That link doesn’t work for me. I keep getting a “security check” page.
Try this
https://youtu.be/JN_Qs4Z0mIc
NICE! Thanks for the link!
This needs to get a LOT of publicity!
Tankyou Willis. I hope 2024 has been a good year for you so far …it doesn’t seem you are declining at all
What does the phrase Eppur si muove mean?
What does the phrase Eppur si muove mean?
And yet it moves
Galileo uttered the landmark phrase “Eppur si muove” meaning “And yet it moves,” after being forced to recant in 1633 before the inquisition of his book and of his belief that the Earth moved around the Sun.
Speak English
This is America
Red White and Blue
Don’t talk like
dem illegal aliens
from Yugoslavia !
Americans speak “American”.. as sort of brutalised English 😉
And Australians speak English too. I recognize the words they used, but the meaning of their statements often escapes me. As they say: divided by a common language.
I had a Boeing colleague who was Australian. One Friday he was excited because some friends from Australia were staying over the weekend. The following Monday I asked him about his reunion. He said he couldn’t understand much of what they said. I guess he was Americanized from many years living in the US.
Australians speak “Orstralyan”.. as sort of very brutalised English. 🙂
I thought it was Strine.
There is a book called “Lets talk Srine” which translates the language spoken in Australia into English.
I think it’s “Let Stalk Strine”.
It’s by Afferbeck Lauder, like all good dictionaries.
Strine is more of a Big Smoke accent.
Always in a rush in The Smoke.
Americans speak 17th century English. Posh Brits speak an affected 18th century upper class dialect.
Americans speak with many dialects. I bet they didn’t speak Southern drawl in 17th century England.
Yes, they did. Upper class English affected just that accent then, aped by the planter class. The loss of final rhotic R persists to this day not just in the poshest but Received Pronunciation accent.
The Carolinas are named for Charles II, who after his Restoration, gave land grants to eight supporters there. Georgia came later, under the German George I, as a penal colony.
The loss of roticity among the idle, gambling, drinking, whoring upper class buddies of debauched traitor Charles II developed in this period.
That would be George II and not asa penal colony.
Right about George II, grandfather of George III, who at least spoke a little bit of heavily accented English.
The Oglethorpe Plan didn’t work, and soon convicts were sent to the border colony. When the Crown lost it in 1783, Australia was colonized as its replacement, ie Britain’s Siberia.
It was New South Wales at the time, which covered all of the current eastern states.
Oddly enough, when many of the convicts had served their time here, they not only stayed but encouraged their families to join them.
I doubt it, y’all.
Why? It’s a fact.
The languid Southern drawl came from upper class affectation in late 17th and early 18th century English. You could look it up.
Whence do you imagine Southern loss of final R and the drawl came?
So our upper class Southerners spoke upper class 18th century English? MORITVRI TE SALVTEMVS!
Whose 17th-century dialect did North-Easterners speak–say Boston?
Good question. The Separatists, not technically Puritans, who first settled Plymouth Plantations and Massachusetts Bay colonies came from different parts of southern England, but had spent time in the Netherlands.
What became the classic New England (Boston) accent had various roots. Strangely, perhaps under Irish influence, it became non-rhotic: “I can pahk my cah anywheah on Hahvahd Yahd.” But that’s not how the Pilgrims talked.
Interesting.
I illustrate aspects of American, RP and fringe British English accents with the word “water”.
Standard American, the most common English accent, is rhotic, but flaps the T almost to D, hence “wadder”. Shakespeare was rhotic but didn’t flap, hence “water”. RP doesn’t flap but has lost rhoticity, hence “watuh”. Fringe British English accents, such as Scots and West Country, still say forms of “water”, without flapping, but retaining final rhoticity.
Southern accents adopted the upper class loss of rhoticity developing in the period in which they were colonized, plus the slow drawl of the aristocacy then.
PS: Southern accents have the American flap, but have adopted the English non-rhotic upper class final R, hence “wadduh”.
Shakespeare screwed up standard English by having Ophelia say, “Woe is me.” It should be, “Woe is I.” Linking verbs take a predicate noun in the subjective case.
One of my favorite obfuscation of the pronunciation of a word is “victuals.” It should be spelled “vittles,” because that’s the way it’s pronounced. Your 18th century eggheads thought words should reflect their origins. So “vittles” was changed to “victuals” but is pronounced “vittles.” Look it up.
That wasn’t an 18th century egghead thing, but from during the Renaissance, when words entering English from French were sometimes Latinized. “Vittles” was originally spelled something between that and “victualles”. Adopted from Old French, the original Middle English or Early Modern English spelling was “vitaylles”.
Shakespeare, like writers today, was less interested in grammar than how people actually spoke, and how the language worked for his rhyme and rhythm needs. Today, it’s still more common to hear, “It’s me” than “it’s I”. The latter, while gramatically correct, is considered an affectation.
In one of the Thin Man movies, Nora Charles says, “It is I.” It sounds wrong, but it’s grammatically correct.
All y’all go back to munching on goober peas.
Bless your little hearts.
Great! I love it!
You left out the “pea-pickin'” before “hearts”.
“I long to be in the land of cotton
Flickin’ peas up a nannygoat’s bottom,
With a straw, with a straw.”
Not only pronunciation of words differs and evolves; so do ways to pass the time.
“Nola had a wristlet watch.
She swallowed it one day.
She took a dose of Epsom salts
To pass the time away.”
Geoff S
What? No Tom Lehrer?
When I first went to Millington Central High School, in Millington, Tennessee, I heard a girl with a thick Southern accent. After a few months, her accent disappeared. I mentioned her accent to her, and she said: I go to relatives in Alabama and their accents are thicker.
There’s a Kingston Trio song about goober peas.
Goober peas are peanuts.
Kingston Trio kinfolk were naval aviators.
Huh!
Well, the real deal is — after a meal at a family gathering — for the men-folk to stand around a washtub of goober peas (boiled peanuts), smoke, drink, and talk.
Meanwhile, the women-folk clean-up the mess of food and put the edible parts in a fridge.
The “sitting by the roadside eating goober peas” lyrics probably means they came in a plastic bag from a country store.
“Peas, peas, peas, peas, eatin’ goober peas.” –from Goober Peas by the Kingston Trio.
Nah. It’s a Civil War song about soldiers. That’s why the verse goes:
Sittin’ by the roadside on a summers day
Chattin’ with my messmates, passing time away
Messmates.
w.
The “hillbillies of the Appalachian Mountains of VA, KY, TN and WV are of Scottish and Irish decent, thus their strong dialect. And the famous Hatfield and McCoy Clan violence.
Being from the tidewater area of Virginia I grew up speaking some Hick. I left at 21 so now speak TV American English. My brother who never left Virginia speaks fluent Hick.
It is also difficult to get a CEO understand something, if his or her salary and XMas bonus depend on the not understanding it.
Any change in anything is bad and it must be Mankind’s fault.
Therefore Mankind must be controlled and we know just the right people to do it!
(“Hi! I’m from the Government and I’m here to help you.”)
Very nice Willis. The big problem is that these characters are not alone. Much of what is considered research these days seems to be done like this. It is so bad I don’t believe anything until I see comments from people like those at WUWT. It is bad.
Unfortunately, the masses will only see the LPI as reported, not the deconstruction. We are not winning.
Biology has been politically corrupted and therefore badly taught for at least ¾ of a century (possibly corrupted ideas from the Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko in the 1930s may have opened the door to activism in western Biology).
Biologist Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb in 1968 and and the Club of Rome – Limits to Growth , adopted debunked Malthusian concepts in the thoroughly juvenile analyses of resourse availability and population growth in their useless books, should have been an end to these excursions into intellectual territory miles outside their knowledge set and training. The Polar Bear Expert Group was cloned from the same misanthropic strain, as were the frog-toad, coral and butterfly worriers.
Thank God for Susan Crockford, Jim Steele Patrick Moore and Jennifer Morohasy. There has to be more honest biologists out there, but I truly don’t know of any others! You can’t be silent and claim you are honest.
Even National Geographic is a bit skeptical about the LPI, the article at https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/living-planet-index-world-lose-two-thirds-animals-2020-conservation-science is worth a read.
Interesting. They called it way back in 2016.
w.
I was just thinking today that despite Eisenhower’s warning about the Military Industrial Complex, academia, and science in general, has been corrupted. Perhaps we should push to have the post-WWII era named the “Corruptocene.”
You’d have my signature! Actually campaigners for the Anthropocene would have had a better chance had they chosen the Miraculous Greening of the planet as the rationale. Probably the fossil record would show increased habitat, more plentiful animal fossils, cocolithaspore limestone formations… However they are only interested in underlining their hatred of humankind.
It was Patrick Moore who discovered the source of 70,000 to 100,000 species disappearing every year nonsense. It’s from a computer program run on the desktop computer of Harvard Professor E.O. Wilson. Apparently he used a program that deals with island species counts and extrapolated it to the entire planet. The claim of species loss doesn’t include any actual surveys or tabulations–just made-up numbers on a computer.
True. I dealt with that at length in my post below.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/04/where-are-the-corpses/
w.
That was back when Mr. Watts didn’t allow nested comments. You didn’t really know who was responding to whom. I’m glad he relaxed on that restriction. I noticed that I did make a single comment in that 2010 thread of yours.