Species Extinction - A Real Problem?

When searching on the internet for species extinction, you find a lot of articles linking climate change, global warming and human activities to this issue. I will not go into the "Extinction events" that happens regularly over the ages, this is another subject altogether.


Like anything, opinions diverge a lot of the subject.  One thing I urge people to do before jumping to conclusion if to read on the other side of what the "mass media" is pushing down our easily influenced minds.


So here's a couple of nice articles and documents that give a refreshing look into this species extinction debate.

First let look at a PDF from Dona Laframboise. Here's an excerpt:

Extinction Fiction

The claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that 20-30% of all Earth's species are at risk of extinction relies on a research paper that has been demolished by experts in the field. It is highly debatable whether the authors of this chapter of the 2007 IPCC report comprise the 'worlds top experts'. What is not in dispute is that five out of 10 of the lead authors have documented links to the activist World Wildlife Fund. So do three of the chapter's contributing authors.

Then there is this excellent essay by Stephen Budiansky. Here's an excerpt:

The teflon doomsayers

The astonishingly wrong and repercussion-free prediction of imminent doom that first riveted my attention was the claim of the impending mass extinction of the Earth's species. In 1979, the biologist Norman Myers declared that a fifth of all species on the planet would be gone within two decades. This prediction was based upon . . . absolutely no evidence whatsoever. Myers acknowledged that the documented species extinction rate of animals was 1 per year; he then asserted that scientists had "hazarded a guess" that the actual rate was 100 per year; he then speculated that government inaction was "likely to lead" to several thousand or even tens of thousands a year, which would add up to as much as a million species over two decades. (This was when people thought there were 5 million species; the best guess now is at least 10 million.) It swiftly became conventional wisdom.

Then there is the Where Are The Corpses? essay by Willis Eschenbach

Abstract

The record of continental (as opposed to island) bird and mammal extinctions in the last five centuries was analyzed to determine if the “species-area” relationship actually works to predict extinctions. Very few continental birds or mammals are recorded as having gone extinct, and none have gone extinct from habitat reduction alone. No continental forest bird or mammal is recorded as having gone extinct from any cause. Since the species-area relationship predicts that there should have been a very large number of recorded bird and mammal extinctions from habitat reduction over the last half millennium, I show that the species-area relationship gives erroneous answers to the question of extinction rates.

A must read is the "From Genocide to Ecocide: The Rape of Rapa Nui by Benny Peiser".

ABSTRACT

The ‘decline and fall’ of Easter Island and its alleged self-destruction has become the poster child of a new environmentalist historiography, a school of thought that goes hand-in-hand with predictions of environmental disaster. Why did this exceptional civilisation crumble? What drove its population to extinction? These are some of the key questions Jared Diamond endeavours to answer in his new book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. According to Diamond, the people of Easter Island destroyed their forest, degraded the island’s topsoil, wiped out their plants and drove their animals to extinction. As a result of this selfinflicted environmental devastation, its complex society collapsed, descending into civil war, cannibalism and self-destruction. While his theory of ecocide has become almost paradigmatic in environmental circles, a dark and gory secret hangs over the premise of Easter Island’s self-destruction: an actual genocide terminated Rapa Nui’s indigenous populace and its culture. Diamond, however, ignores and fails to address the true reasons behind Rapa Nui’s collapse. Why has he turned the victims of cultural and physical extermination into the perpetrators of their own demise? This paper is a first attempt to address this disquieting quandary. It describes the foundation of Diamond’s environmental revisionism and explains why it does not hold up to scientific scrutiny.

And to finish off... You have all those new discoveries

• Scientists find 200 new species in Papua New Guinea
• Dracula fish, bald bird among strange new species
• El Niño and a Pathogen Killed Costa Rican Toad, Study Finds... Not global warming!

So as you can see, when you dig a little bit, a headline news like this:

Scientists agree world faces mass extinction

Becomes not so clear cut. Always good to be a little skeptical about what we hear and read.