XDA

There are myriad estimates of the current rate of species extinction, some of which estimates are clearly impossibly high. So what's the truth? First a sampling of the estimates.

This guy says dozens of species are going extinct every day. Call it 36--more than 13,000 a year.

These guys say it's 72 per day (more than 26,00 a year) and another says 50,000 to 100,000 per year.

Now that's just absurd. Name one species that went extinct in 2013. One! Even the science magazine Nature says cool it with the too-high-for-anyone-to-believe estimates.

Now keep in mind this is species, not sub-species or breeds or races. Thus, if you say, for example, Caspian tigers are gone but Sumatran, Bengal and Siberian tigers etc. are not extinct, then tigers are not extinct as a species but only one sub-species of tigers, one local race of tigers is gone. That's not what we're talking about. If you're saying the species we call tigers (Panthera tigris) is extinct, that means there are no tigers at all, anywhere, anymore.

A little more on the rational side is this German site, which says that 263 vertebrate species have gone extinct in the past 513 years or just under two such species a year about 1 species every other year.

Now there is no doubt that the average 'normal' background species eradication has ticked up a bit since mankind started hunting in earnest (Mammoths, Ground Sloths and their their predators Saber Tooth Tigers, Dire Wolves, etc,); and then ticked up again when humans began transporting species which had involved elsewhere onto islands around the world--first with boats and then with airplanes. But that's not global warming as a cause, nor, I would argue, is it a massive extinction as some are alleging. Although I do miss each of the species we hunted to extinction, I realize it probably would have each been impossible to have them in great numbers and still have modern agriculture, which supports Earth's large human population (which is good).

Global Warming Climate change has done nothing to cause even one species to go extinct. Or so the IPCC is apparently prepared to admit, say the Germans, to which admission the alarmists are quick to add "yet!"

It's not warming and that's becoming impossible to deny and not look completely looney (some don't seem to mind seeming completely looney). It's not warming, yet all the pre-1998 climate models said it would so the only so-called evidence the alarmist true believers have (and computer simulations are NOT evidence) are looking ever more worthless. It's not warming and the ever more desperate search for an explanation that doesn't degrade the central alarmist tenet has again and again come up empty. (My favorite was hidden warmth in the deep seas measured not in degrees but in terawatts or gigajoules of energy, which sounds massive until you do the math and realize the temperature equivalent is about .07 degrees C higher which is too small for the Argo buoys' temperature sensors to measure, Oopsie).

As Dennis Miller said, one man's Global Warming is another man's "it's nice out."

But I see I've strayed from the over-hyped subject of species extinction.


UPDATE: Anonymous points out my simple math inability. Thanks. Fixed now.

Labels: Alarmism, Estimates of Rate, Species extinctions

Labels: Species extinctions

I started with this article about a Galapagos tortoise, then I went to bird extinctions and then back to the tortoise. It seems there were 14 different subspecies (or races) of Geochelone nigra. Some are on the same island, some on different islands. Three are extinct and unless there is a breeding female (or a first generation hybrid) out there, when Lonesome George (pictured above left) dies there will only be 10. George is from the Island called Pinta in Spanish (Abingdon in English) and he is a Geochelone nigra abingdoni. The difference between the subspecies is merely a visible but superficial changes in the shape of the carapace. The two two real distinctions are between domedback and saddleback, but there are intermediate types and some called tabletops. George is a saddleback. A domedback one (a Geochelone elephantopus) is pictured below right. If the shape change is extreme enough, perhaps mating between different subspecies will be impossible (and then we have moved from subspecies to species).

The bulk of the bird extinctions were on islands where a new species--rat, mosquito with avian malaria, brown tree snake, etc. was introduced. One of the big exceptions was the Passenger pigeon, here in North America, which went from being among the most numerous birds on the planet to extinct in just a few decades of commercial hunting. Of course, the pigeon was destructive to crops, and it is doubtful we could have co-existed with them in any numbers.

Labels: Species extinctions