Greenpeace Co-Founder Slams Species Extinction Scare Study as proof of how ‘peer-review process has become corrupted’ – Study ‘greatly underestimate the rate new species can evolve’

Moore: 'I quit my life-long subscription to National Geographic when they published a similar 'sixth mass extinction' article in February 1999"

By: Marc Morano - Climate Depot March 4, 2011

Climate Depot Exclusive

Greenpeace Co-Founder and ecologist Dr. Patrick Moore, slammed a new study claiming a dramatic and irreversible mass species extinction. “This [journal Nature] article should never have made it through the peer-review process,” Moore told Climate Depot in an exclusive interview. “The fact that the study did make it through peer-review indicates that the peer review process has become corrupted,” Moore, the author of the new book “Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout,” added.

“The authors [of the journal Nature study] greatly underestimate the rate new species can evolve, especially when existing species are under stress. The Polar Bear evolved during the glaciation previous to the last one, just 150,000 years ago,” Moore explained.

The new alarming species mass extinction study was described in an article in Yahoo News and AFP on March 4, 2011 titled: ‘World’s sixth mass extinction may be underway: study.’ The AFP article reported: Mankind may have unleashed the sixth known mass extinction in Earth’s history, according to a paper released by the science journal Nature. Over the past 540 million years, five mega-wipeouts of species have occurred through naturally-induced events. But the new threat is man-made, inflicted by habitation loss, over-hunting, over-fishing, the spread of germs and viruses and introduced species, and by climate change caused by fossil-fuel greenhouse gases, says the study. [End article excerpt.]

But Moore, in an interview with Climate Depot, refuted the claims of the species study. “The biggest extinction events in the human era occurred 60,000 years ago when humans arrived in Australia, 10-15,000 years ago when humans arrived in the New World, 800 years ago when humans found New Zealand, and 250 years ago when Europeans brought exotic species to the Pacific Islands such as Hawaii,” Moore explained.

“Since species extinction became a broad social concern, coinciding with the extinction of the passenger pigeon, we have done a pretty good job of preventing species extinctions,” Moore explained.

“I quit my life-long subscription to National Geographic when they published a similar ‘sixth mass extinction’ article in February 1999. This [latest journal] Nature article just re-hashes this theme,” he added. Moore left Greenpeace in 1986 because he felt the organziation had become too radical. Moore also challenges man-made global warming fears. See: Greenpeace Co-Founder Dr. Patrick Moore Questions Man-Made Global Warming, Calls it ‘Obviously a Natural Phenomenon’

This is not the first time Moore has gone to battle over alarming claims of species extinction. In the 2000 documentary “Amazon Rainforest: Clear-Cutting The Myths”, Moore bluntly mocked species extinction claims made by biologist Edward O. Wilson from Harvard University. Wilson estimated that up to 50,000 species go extinct every year based on computer models of the number of potential but as yet undiscovered species in the world.

Moore said in 2000: “There’s no scientific basis for saying that 50,000 species are going extinct. The only place you can find them is in Edward O. Wilson’s computer at Harvard University. They’re actually electrons on a hard drive. I want a list of Latin names of actual species.” Moore was interviewed by reporter Marc Morano (now with Climate Depot) in the 2000 Amazon rainforest documentary:

Environmental activist Tim Keating of Rainforest Relief was asked in the 2000 documentary if he could name any of the alleged 50,000 species that have gone extinct and he was unable.

“No, we can’t [name them], because we don’t know what those species are. But most of the species that we’re talking about in those estimates are things like insects and even microorganisms, like bacteria,” Keating explained.

UK scientist Professor Philip Stott, emeritus professor of Biogeography at the University of London, dismissed current species claims in the 2000 Amazon rainforest documentary.

“The earth has gone through many periods of major extinctions, some much bigger in size than even being contemplated today,” Stott, the author of a book on tropical rainforests, said in the 2000 documentary.

“Change is necessary to keep up with change in nature itself. In other words, change is the essence. And the idea that we can keep all species that now exist would be anti-evolutionary, anti-nature and anti the very nature of the earth in which we live,” Stott said.

Bye Bye Global Warming Movement — Welcome to the Next Eco-Scare — Species?!

Many critics of the environmental movement believe that as man-made global warming fears continue to fade scientifically and politically, species extinction will be touted as the next environmental scare. See:

Bye Bye Climate Fears? Media Says Hello to Next Eco-Scare! BBC touts report claiming ‘1/5 of world’s plants at risk of extinction’ ahead of UN Biodiversity Conference

Flashback Jan. 2010: Time for next eco-scare already?! As Global Warming Movement Collapses, Activists Already ‘Test-Marketing’ the Next Eco-Fear!

Flashback: Demoted: UN officially throws global warming under the bus: UN now says case for saving species ‘more powerful than climate change’

Flashback: Different Eco-Scare, Same Solution! UN species report ‘will advocate massive changes to the way the global economy is run’

Flashback: It really is ‘IPCC like!’: UN Biodiversity report ‘has multiple errors in first chapter alone’

Flashback: UN Species Scares Debunked: ‘Persistence of Species’: ‘Earth’s plant & animal species are not slip-sliding away – even slowly – into netherworld of extinction’

Flashback: UN Biodiversity Report pushes fear & new taxes: ‘It isn’t a scientific body, it exists to influence policymakers, it is being presented by fear-mongering amateurs’

Species: ‘Seal was declared extinct in 1892. So what is it doing alive and well today? Why are there thousands of Guadalupe fur seals swimming off the coast of Mexico now?’ — ‘As naturalists gladly admit, reports of the species’ demise at the end of the 19th century were premature’

Flashback: Paper: Global Warming Improves Biodiversity: ‘World likely far less diverse today than it was tens of millions of years ago, when Earth’ was like the modern tropics

More on the ‘science’ behind the extinction claims:

Flashback: U.S. Senate Report Debunks Polar Bear Extinction Fears — Canadian Inuit declare polar bears not at climate risk: ‘Polar bear population is very very healthy’ For more on Polar Bears go here.

New fish species found deep below ocean surface: ‘Creatures had never before been observed at such depths…Our findings, which revealed diverse and abundant species at depths previously thought to be void of fish’ – October 2010

False prophet Paul Ehrlich still at it: This extinction—the sixth in the 4-billion-year history of the Earth—’could be much more catastrophic than previous ones’ – Shouldn’t Ehrlich & Holdren be Happy? ‘Anything in the vicinity of the previous mass extinctions would wreck civilization’ – October 2010

‘Green’ red tape said to hinder Border Patrol; ‘takes a back seat to protecting endangered species’ – October 2010

Claim: ‘Species just can’t evolve fast enough to deal with rate of human induced change’ – Reality: ‘This isn’t exactly true’ – ‘Documented evidence of evolutionary adaptation to climate change that must have taken place very rapidly, on the order of just a few thousand years, or in a few instances in just a few decades’

Dracula fish, bald bird among strange new species- October 2010

Scientists find 200 new species in Papua New Guinea – October 2010

Study identifies more than 1 million ocean species ‘of which less than a quarter are described in the scientific literature’

‘Greenies, including global warmists, always speak with utmost certainty about their predictions of doom. However, when it comes to ‘endangered’ species (as with global warming predictions of doom), they often don’t know what they are talking about’

UN trying to promote diminishing biodiversity as the NEXT BIG CRISIS – 2010: Excerpt: ‘It is hard to make definitive statements regarding loss of diversity when science can not even tell us how many different creatures there are on the planet. Nevertheless, the UN has launched the International Year of Biodiversity, warning that the ongoing loss of species around the world is affecting human well-being…The words of Henry Louis Mencken we quoted in The Resilient Earth put it best: “The fundamental aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamoring to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” This is a tactic that the UN has turned into an art form. Having succeeded with turning global warming into a “crisis” they are now giving biodiversity a go. Lack of proper science, contradictory claims by activists and experts, conflicts with the needs of average people just trying to live their lives—yes, this sounds like a UN generated, politically motivated “crisis.” After all, the bureaucrats and parasites at the UN rode the global warming gravy train for more than a quarter century. Now, with the panic over global warming all but vanished, they have started pushing a new biodiversity crisis.

Claim: ‘Control the human population to save wildlife’: ‘Called on world leaders to limit population growth in order to stop the mass extinction of species’ – ‘The human population is sowing the seeds of a mass extinction event…The fact is there is not enough space’

‘Ten years’ to solve nature crisis, UN meeting hears – 2011: ‘The UN biodiversity convention meeting has opened with warnings that the ongoing loss of nature is hurting human societies as well as the natural world… ‘We are now close to a ‘tipping point’ – that is, we are about to reach a threshold beyond which biodiversity loss will become irreversible, and may cross that threshold in the next 10 years if we do not make proactive efforts for conserving biodiversity’

‘We Are Destroying Life on Earth,’ UN Conference Claims: ‘Scientists over the past decade have identified new species at an unprecedented rate. The 2008 World Wildlife Fund (WWF) study First Contact in the Greater Mekong reported that 1,068 species were discovered or newly identified by science between 1997 and 2007 — averaging two new species a week. And the Census of Marine Life — an ambitious, 10-year project to catalog the diversity of the world’s oceans — recently concluded, having identified more than 6,000 potentially new ocean-going species.

My viral climate video was smeared as fake news. Here are the facts

August 23, 2018 by Marc Morano, 228 Comments @ CFACT

An environmental scientist who writes a column for The Guardian has claimed that my video on climate change “spreads climate denial misinformation” to millions of viewers on Facebook. Not so.

Here is my point-by-point rebuttal to Dana Nuccitelli’s claims in the British newspaper based on my video, which has attracted more than 8 million views and 139,000 shares on Facebook. The video has so alarmed climate activists that they’re using it to pressure Facebook to ban “climate deniers.”

Claim: “Basically, [Marc Morano’s] critique is that the study sample size was too small to make a conclusive determination about the level of expert consensus. That’s a valid point … ”

Response: So Nuccitelli admits my point about “77 anonymous” scientists making up the alleged 97 percent consensus is “a valid point.” Good. Let’s move on.

Claim: “In fact, the authors of seven separate [climate] consensus studies using a variety of approaches (some with very large sample sizes) teamed up in 2016 to publish a paper concluding that the expert consensus on human-caused global warming is between 90 and 100 percent. So, this critique is invalid when considering all the available consensus research.”

Response: Climate Depot, the website I founded, has covered and debunked the claims of these so-called “consensus” studies, which were a rehash of the same claims but packaged together to appear comprehensive. Chapter 3 of my book, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change,” is devoted to debunking the 97 percent claims.

As I have detailed before: These claims “really confirm that it is easier to get papers published if they support the narrative of man-made global warming.”

Responding to these “consensus” surveys, I told the Media Research Center: “These types of ‘consensus’ surveys are meant to provide talking points to politicians and the media in order to crush dissenting voices and ban skeptics from the mainstream media. It frees the climate crisis promoter from having to research any scientific points and instead allows them to say, ‘90 percent of scientists agree. Case closed!’”

Nuccitelli, as seen here and here, has a history of skewing climate science to fit his political narrative.

Claim: “Morano also critiques the consensus study that my colleagues (including John Cook) and I published in 2013. He does so simply by quoting economist Richard Tol saying our 97 percent figure ‘was pulled from thin air.’ Tol argued that the methodology in our study was flawed, but when we applied his critiques in a follow-up paper published in 2014, we found that the consensus was still 97 [percent, plus or minus 1 percent].”

Response: Here are Tol’s own words on Cook’s claim of 97 percent consensus, and readers can judge whether I accurately quoted him:

The 97 percent estimate is bandied about by basically everybody. I had a close look at what this study really did. As far as I can see, the estimate just crumbles when you touch it. None of the statements in the papers [is] supported by the data that’s in the paper. The 97 percent is essentially pulled from thin air, it is not based on any credible research whatsoever.

Tol continued to be unimpressed with Cook’s claims even after his follow-up paper published in 2014. In 2015, Tol again ripped Cook’s continued claims of a 97 percent consensus. “Cook’s analysis is a load of old bollocks,” he wrote.

(I debated Cook in 2015 at the U.N. Paris climate summit. Listen here.)

Claim: “In short, Morano’s only evidence to dispute the expert consensus on human-caused global warming is to quote an economist who agrees the consensus is 90 to 100 percent, and that the experts are correct that humans are responsible for global warming.”

Response: Tol has pushed back on claims that he cited a consensus of 91 percent.
PolitiFact to Tol in 2015: “The 91 percent endorsement rate is a direct quote from your paper: ‘The headline endorsement rate would be 91 percent in that case.’ (Cook cites it multiple times in his reply to your paper.)”

Tol rebuffed this, writing back to PolitiFact: “Do check the grammar: ‘would […] in that case’ does in no way indicate my agreement with the number. In fact, I make it very clear that any number based on Cook’s data is unreliable.”

Listen or Read: The Politically Incorrect Book That Debunks Climate Change Myths

In addition, Nuccitelli’s claim in The Guardian that my “only evidence” is Tol is not correct. In the 2-minute Facebook video, I alluded to Tol’s comment and to the other key “consensus” study. But in my book, I devote a whole chapter to debunking all of the various 97 percent consensus claims.
Also see this and this. And past climate “consensuses” have changed dramatically, as seen here and here.

Claim: “Morano claims that we’re not actually in the midst of the hottest period on record, and that ‘hottest year’ claims are ‘merely political statements’ because for example, he claims, scientists can’t say with 100 percent certainty that 2016 was hotter than 2015 due to the margin of uncertainty in the data. This claim is similar to one made on Fox News that earned a ‘Pants on Fire’ rating from PolitiFact based on consultation with climate scientists. The years 2014 through 2017 are indeed the four hottest years on record, outside the range of uncertainty.”

Response: First off, citing PolitiFact as a climate science authority is beyond the pale, even for The Guardian. Second, the media has been forced to admit that “hottest year” claims are statistical noise.
In 2015, the Associated Press issued a “clarification,” stating in part:

The story also reported that 2014 was the hottest year on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA, but did not include the caveat that other recent years had average temperatures that were almost as high—and they all fall within a margin of error that lessens the certainty that any one of the years was the hottest.

“Hottest year” claims are purely political statements designed to persuade the public that the government needs to take action on man-made climate change.

In Chapter 7, my book deals with “hottest year” claims and their statistical significance.

Claim: “Morano argues that the experts are wrong because there are hundreds of factors influencing Earth’s climate, and that carbon dioxide ‘is one of these factors that gets essentially drowned out, and you can’t distinguish its effect from natural variability.’ That claim is entirely false, as elegantly illustrated in this graphic created by Bloomberg.”

Response: The claim here is that carbon dioxide can have a warming impact on the atmosphere, but this does not mean CO2 is the control knob of the climate.

Philip Stott, University of London’s professor emeritus of biogeography, rebuts the notion that carbon dioxide is the main climate change driver, writing:

As I have said, over and over again, the fundamental point has always been this: Climate change is governed by hundreds of factors, or variables, and the very idea that we can manage climate change predictably by understanding and manipulating at the margins one politically selected factor (CO2), is as misguided as it gets. 

Climate is the most complex coupled nonlinear chaotic system known to man. Of course, there are human influences in it, nobody denies that. But what outcome will they get by fiddling with one variable (CO2) at the margins? I’m sorry, it’s scientific nonsense.

Atmospheric scientist Hendrik Tennekes, a pioneer in development of numerical weather prediction and former director of research at the Netherlands’ Royal National Meteorological Institute, has declared (as quoted in my book): “I protest vigorously the idea that the climate reacts like a home heating system to a changed setting of the thermostat: just turn the dial, and the desired temperature will soon be reached.”

Claim: “Human-caused global warming now [is] far outside the range of natural variability. In fact, we’re now warming global temperatures more than 20 times faster than Earth’s fastest natural climate changes.”

Response: Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever points out that “.8 degrees is what we’re discussing in global warming. [Just] .8 degrees. If you ask people in general what it is, they think—it’s 4 or 5 degrees. They don’t know it is so little.”

Climatologist Pat Michaels explained that in any case the world’s temperature “should be near the top of the record given the record only begins in the late 19th century when the surface temperature was still reverberating from the Little Ice Age.”

“We are creating great anxiety without it being justified … there are no indications that the warming is so severe that we need to panic,” award-winning climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”
As climatologist Roy Spencer wrote in 2016:

Global warming and climate change, even if it is 100 percent caused by humans, is so slow that it cannot be observed by anyone in their lifetime. Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts and other natural disasters have yet to show any obvious long-term change. This means that in order for politicians to advance policy goals (such as forcing expensive solar energy on the masses or creating a carbon tax), they have to turn normal weather disasters into ‘evidence’ of climate change.

And even if we actually faced a man-made climate catastrophe, we would all be doomed!
University of Pennsylvania geologist Robert Giegengack, as I write in my book, noted in 2014:  “None of the strategies that have been offered by the U.S. government or by the EPA or by anybody else has the remotest chance of altering climate if in fact climate is controlled by carbon dioxide.”

Claim: “And of course, climate scientists have observed human fingerprints all over climate change. … ”
Response: As Spencer wrote, “There is no fingerprint of human-caused versus naturally-caused climate change … To claim the changes are ‘unprecedented’ cannot be demonstrated with reliable data, and are contradicted by some published paleoclimate data which suggests most centuries experience substantial warming or cooling.”

Richard Lindzen, an MIT climate scientist, said that believing CO2 controls the climate “is pretty close to believing in magic.” Climate Depot revealed the real way they find the “fingerprint” of CO2.
Nuccitelli’s “fingerprint” argument in The Guardian echoes claims by the Associated Press from 2017, when AP science reporter Seth Borenstein wrote: “There’s a scientifically accepted method for determining if some wild weather event has the fingerprints of man-made climate change, and it involves intricate calculations. Those could take weeks or months to complete, and then even longer to be checked by other scientists.”

I responded to Borenstein’s claims by writing that he seems to believe “there is some kind of arcane black box that finds the fingerprint of man-made global warming” and it is available only to a select few.

Claim: “It would be absurd to take Marc Morano’s word over the evidence published in peer-reviewed studies by climate scientists at NASA and other scientific institutions around the world.”

Response: I wholeheartedly agree. There is no reason to take the word of either The Guardian’s Nuccitelli or me. We have science, data, and the geologic history of the Earth to handle that.
Current NASA climate claims (under Gavin Schmidt and formerly James Hansen) are steeped in politics and funding. Former NASA scientists have criticized the agency (see here and here).
Other prominent scientists reject carbon dioxide fears.

Ivy League geologist Robert Giegengack, former chairman of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, spoke out against fears of rising CO2 impacts promoted by Al Gore and others. Giegengack noted that “for most of Earth’s history, the globe has been warmer than it has been for the last 200 years. It has rarely been cooler.”
He explained:

[Gore] claims that temperature increases solely because more CO2 in the atmosphere traps the sun’s heat. That’s just wrong … It’s a natural interplay. As temperature rises, CO2 rises, and vice versa. … It’s hard for us to say that CO2 drives temperature. It’s easier to say temperature drives CO2.

In 2014, Giegengack told Climate Depot: “The Earth has experienced very few periods when CO2 was lower than it is today.”

This article originally appeared in The Daily Signal