We're All Going To Die

"Although the study is largely theoretical[.]"

6 comments:

E Hines said...

I don't know whether the study itself does (and given the climate mendacity of NASA, I don't really care), but McKay keeps conflating society with civilization.

And the quotes he ghosts into his piece never seem to get around to defining such niceties as "fair."

Eric Hines

MikeD said...

Took me a while to find it, but this reminded me of something I posted YEARS ago (May 2007 to be exact) about this:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/05/22/us-climate-extinctions-idUSL2253331920070522

In 2007, the head of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity claimed that 3 species were going extinct every hour:

"Extinction rates are rising by a factor of up to 1,000 above natural rates. Every hour, three species disappear. Every day, up to 150 species are lost. Every year, between 18,000 and 55,000 species become extinct," he said.

"The cause: human activities."


Now, at the time, I did some quick math, and here's what I came up with:

"Really? Cause that would mean that in 40 years every animal species we currently know about would be dead. But to make it a little clearer, in two years, every vertibrate species would be dead. Or how about this. In 36 days, every mammal on the planet is dead."

Now, that was 7 years ago. By the most conservative estimate that guy provided, that means that since that article was written over 125,000 species have gone extinct. To put that number in perspective, that's more species than the total of all vertabrates, lichens, mushrooms, and algae combined. In total, it is estimated that there are about 1.7 million species on the planent (and 1 million of those are insects).

But by my last estimation, we've not heard of 10% of all lifeforms we knew about seven years ago being extinct. You'd THINK we'd notice something like that. Unless the argument is, "well all that died in that period were life forms we DIDN'T know about!"

...

If that's the case, then how do we know they were ever there? If we didn't know they existed, how do we know WE made them extinct? That's like saying we've killed 10% of all hobgoblins and faeries in the world over the past 7 years.

At the time, my major objection was with the title of that "report":
"U.N. urges world to slow extinctions: 3 each hour"

I'd love to see an actual reporter do a follow up to this article, but odds are, that will never happen. Can't go contradicting the doom sayers... we might start to doubt they have any idea what they're talking about!

E Hines said...

That's like saying we've killed 10% of all hobgoblins and faeries in the world over the past 7 years.

But we didn't--we killed 100% of them. Every last one.

See any around? That proves it.

Eric Hines

Texan99 said...

Yup. Income inequality brought down the Roman Empire. And maybe the Mayans, although that one may have been attributable to the collapse in funding for Gender Studies. Atlantis sank beneath the waves when it failed to bend down the cost curve for medical expenses, a crisis that was exacerbated by the shortage of quality, affordable daycare.

Grim said...

Running for office, Mr. Hines?

Eric Blair said...

Mike D makes a very good point, and I first came across it in college in the first bloom of AIDS hysteria--I forget the number, but there was supposedly some number of people getting aids every 11 seconds or something like that, and if you did the math, Everybody on the planet would have it by next Tuesday.

I saw an aquaintance point to this article on Facebook today, and after reading the first paragraph, it is so obviously propaganda, one wonders how anyone can read it with a straight face.