Why Science Journalists Rarely Get Their Stories Right

by Dr. Jay Lehr | Aug 6, 2022 | Media, Politics @ America Out Loud

As I sat down to begin this essay, I turned on the television to see the beginning of Stage 19 of this year’s Tour De France bicycle race. Before I got to the correct station, I passed a morning news program with a reporter stating that today’s headline news was “Scientists discover that humans are now causing the greatest mass species extinction in history.”

It was undoubtedly the inspiration to build on material from Alex Epstein’s new book Fossil Future to support my headline for this article. I am optimistic that most of the public is beginning to ignore these constant scary headlines, which have no basis in fact.

The problems can be placed in the order of efforts that must be applied to all research that generates a near limitless amount of specialized knowledge that only the rare scientists can know close to everything in their own fields. There is no better example than climate science, where specialists may prevail in paleoclimatology, climate physics, oceanography, climate modeling, or others.

The knowledge must be synthesized, disseminated, and evaluated to prepare the research results. This is always performed by other than the researchers. Synthesizing means organizing, refining, and condensing. Disseminators are those who broadcast the synthesized knowledge such as newspapers, radio, and television. Evaluators are those who tell us what should be done with the information, which could be making policies of all kinds.

Along the path from research to public knowledge lies a minefield of obstacles to the ultimate truth of everything. I recognized this in my early work in environmental science, so I contacted 50 different scientists working in the environment and asked if they had experienced similar distortion of their work before it reached wide recognition. One and all had witnessed the same problems and agreed to write an original paper explaining their individual issues. It allowed me to compile the articles into a new book titled Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns. It was published by the company now known as John Wiley & Sons in 1991. I was honored to learn that it played a role in Alex Epstein’s attacks on these problems that I will describe now further.

In climate science, the leading synthesizers are the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United States Government, and other organizations like the American Meteorological Society and the National Academy of Science. The synthesis can and does go badly wrong by virtue of honest mistakes but more often as a result of biases existing within the synthesizers, which are the non-stop targets of influence groups able to gain from how the research is presented.

A good example is that if you wade through thousands of pages of recent IPCC reports, you will not find a single proven statistic of increasing weather-related deaths in recent decades. Yet, the final summary states emphatically that this is the case. The opposite is absolutely the truth based on dozens of studies. 

Once the synthesizers do their jobs, however well or poorly, the essentials of their synthesis must be disseminated. There are all kinds of disseminators, certainly alternative media today. Still, the most important ones remain the mainstream media that we all know spread misinformation daily to a public not well trained to recognize its veracity.

If one has time to read the actual reports made by the synthesizers, the absurdity of conclusions comes clear. A recent IPCC report summary popularized the term ”code red for humanity” with obvious terrifying intent. Yet the report offered more opposite data on decreasing floods and droughts etc., the disseminators grabbed “code red” and ran with it.

It is difficult for any science journalist to grasp the reality of what is going on, and if they have a political bias, all is really lost.

Finally, we have the evaluators of the synthesized and disseminated information. Prominent evaluators are the editorial pages of major newspapers such as The NY Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. They are the institutions and people who help us evaluate what to do about what is disseminated and tell us what is true about the world.

One way to spot when potential bad evaluations are being made is when we are told to “listen to the scientists.” This refrain is almost always used to get us to accept a given policy evaluation without critical thinking, which is what we should never do. Very quickly, one can recognize when an evaluation system is very wrong. The first is when the evaluation has an anti-human basis, and the other is when all sides of an issue, pros and cons, are not considered. If you have long followed the evaluation by nearly all radical environmental groups, and one wonders which are not, they all focus on the terrible things humans do to nature when the reality is that it is mankind that is good and nature destructive.

The moral case for eliminating fossil fuel is a profoundly anti-human argument which Alex Epstein proves brilliantly through his 420-page magnum opus. It is my intent to help you grasp the clarity of his wisdom, allowing you to be a citizen warrior on the side of humanity with your friends, neighbors, and colleagues that one day will turn the corner on the public understanding of the lies they have been exposed to.

A clear indication of the anti-human evaluation is their insistence not just on rapidly eliminating fossil fuels but on replacing them with exclusively green unreliable energy systems. The most substantial evidence by far of their plans going catastrophically wrong is that they oppose things on the basis of side effects ignoring massive benefits. The obvious ones are:

1 – Fossil fuels are a uniquely cost-effective source of energy.

2 – Cost-effective energy is essential to human flourishing. Get used to this term as it should always guide our decisions.

3 – Billions of people remain suffering and dying for lack of cost-effective energy.

It should be obvious now to most of us that the anti-fossil fuel folks are, in fact, opposed to human beings. They actually believe humans are a cancer on the Earth. Otherwise, would they desire to force mankind to use only the intermittent, uncontrollable sources of energy from the sun and the wind that currently supply only three percent of the world’s energy and even that must have fossil fuel back up to avoid crushing destruction of electric grids that become unbalanced. The obvious answer is no!

Human Flourishing is defined as an effort to achieve self-actualization and fulfillment within the context of a larger community of individuals, each with the right to pursue such efforts.

Portions of this article were excerpted from the book, Summary of Fossil Future By Alex Epstein: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas–Not Less, with permission of the author Alex Epstein and the publisher Portfolio/Penguin.

I strongly recommend this book to everyone fighting for the preservation of life in America, which has been made possible by our abundance of fossil fuels before the leftist, liberal, progressives, and communists attempted to limit humankind’s well-being.

Dr. Jay Lehr

Dr. Jay Lehr is a Senior Policy Analyst with the International Climate Science Coalition and former Science Director of The Heartland Institute. He is an internationally renowned scientist, author, and speaker who has testified before Congress on dozens of occasions on environmental issues and consulted with nearly every agency of the national government and many foreign countries. After graduating from Princeton University at the age of 20 with a degree in Geological Engineering, he received the nation’s first Ph.D. in Groundwater Hydrology from the University of Arizona. He later became executive director of the National Association of Groundwater Scientists and Engineers.

 

‘No change in insect population sizes’: Massive North American study challenges ‘insect apocalypse’ claims

Matthew Moran | August 12, 2020

This article or excerpt is included in the GLP’s daily curated selection of ideologically diverse news, opinion and analysis of biotechnology innovation.  In recent years, the notion of an insect apocalypse has become a hot topic in the conservation science community and has captured the public’s attention. Scientists who warn that this catastrophe is unfolding assert that arthropods – a large category of invertebrates that includes insects – are rapidly declining, perhaps signaling a general collapse of ecosystems across the world.

Starting around the year 2000, and more frequently since 2017, researchers have documented large population declines among moths, beetles, bees, butterflies and many other insect types. If verified, this trend would be of serious concern, especially considering that insects are important animals in almost all terrestrial environments.

But in a newly published study that I co-authored with 11 colleagues, we reviewed over 5,000 sets of data on arthropods across North America, covering thousands of species and dozens of habitats over decades of time. We found, in essence, no change in population sizes.

These results don’t mean that insects are fine. Indeed, I believe there is good evidence that some species of insects are in decline and in danger of extinction. But our findings indicate that overall, the idea of large-scale insect declines remains an open question.......To Read More....

Are we facing an ‘Insect Apocalypse’ caused by ‘intensive, industrial’ farming and agricultural chemicals? The media say yes; Science says ‘no’

Jon Entine  June 16, 2020

The media call it the “Insect Apocalypse”. In the past three years, the phrase has become an accepted truth of the journalism literati, and usually associated with such apocalyptic terms as “ecosystem collapse” and “food crisis”. The culprit: modern agriculture, which is often linked to the Brave Not-So-New World of GMOs and gene-edited crops and the chemicals purportedly used to support it.

As recently as last month, an opinion writer for the New York Times, Margaret Renkl, warned of the dark ages about to be ushered in by pesticides. She makes a case for preserving “weedy” backyards filled with blood-sucking mosquitoes and other human-threatening flying and crawling creatures of various species.

The global insect die-off is so precipitous that, if the trend continues, there will be no insects left a hundred years from now. That’s a problem for more than the bugs themselves: Insects are responsible for pollinating roughly 75 percent of all flowering plants, including one-third of the human world’s food supply.  

Insect Armageddon, another popular phrase, is now one of the most common tropes in science journalism. As I’ve chronicled numerous times in recent years, (including here, here and here), many journalists have echoed claims by environmental activists  advancing a succession of insect- and animal-related environmental apocalypse scenarios over the last decade—first honeybees, then wild bees and more recently birds. In each case they fingered modern, intensive farming, particularly crop biotechnology and pesticides, as the culprit, and warned of the terrible consequences in store for the Earth, including the mass extinction of pollinators and the global famine that would surely follow. In each case, small or poorly executed studies predicting imminent catastrophes were ballyhooed by many in the media; in each case, as more research came to the light, the hyped claims were eventually retracted or dramatically readjusted.............To Read More....

Six Reasons Why You Should Ignore the UN’s Species Extinction Report

James Dilingpole, 7 May 2019 @ Breitbart

The United Nations has produced a report warning that a million species are threatened with extinction. Here is why you shouldn’t take it seriously.

It’s politics, not science

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which produced the report, is a political organisation not a scientific one. Just like its sister organisation the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — IPCC — in fact.

As Donna Laframboise notes here, both exist purely to give a fig leaf of scientific credibility to the UN’s ‘sustainability’ agenda.

When the IPBES was established in 2010, we were informed point blank that its purpose was “to spearhead the battle against the destruction of the natural world.” 

In other words, there’s all sorts of deception here. This is no sober scientific body, which examines multiple perspectives, and considers alternative hypotheses. The job of the IPBES is to muster only one kind of evidence, the kind that promotes UN environmental treaties. 

That’s how the United Nations works, folks. Machinations in the shadows. Camouflaging its political aspirations by dressing them up in 1,800 pages of scientific clothing.

This is the usual suspects crying wolf. Again

No one would dispute that habitat loss is a problem for plants and animals. But it’s a big stretch from there to suggest that a million species are ‘threatened’ with actual extinction. The ‘E’ word has long been overplayed by environmentalists because it’s so dramatic and final and because everyone has heard of the dodo. There is no evidence whatsoever, though, that the world is heading for its so-called Sixth Great Extinction. As Willis Eschenbach once pertinently asked at Watts Up With That? – Where Are The Corpses?

Harvard ecologist EO Wilson once estimated that up to 50,000 species go extinct every year. How did he calculate this? Using the same method the IPCC uses for its junk-science prognostications on catastrophic climate change: computer models.
Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore exploded this myth long ago:

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.

R-i-g-h-t. So there are all these species going extinct. But we don’t know what they are because we haven’t yet discovered them. Hmm. Sounds terrible. Let’s cancel Western Industrial Civilisation right now, just in case.
Seriously, these people are like a stuck record

Here – h/t Dennis Ambler at Homewood’s place – is the Independent from 2006:

Life on earth is facing a major crisis with thousands of species threatened with imminent extinction – a global emergency demanding urgent action. This is the view of 19 of the world’s most eminent biodiversity specialists, who have called on governments to establish a political framework to save the planet.
Scientists estimate that the current rate at which species are becoming extinct is between 100 and 1,000 times greater than the normal “background” extinction rate – and say this is all due to human activity.
Anne Larigauderie, executive director of Diversitas, a Paris-based conservation group, said that the situation was now so grave that an international body with direct links with global leaders was essential.
The scientists believe that a body similar to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change could help governments to tackle the continuing loss of species.

They get away with presenting it as “news” every time because the mainstream media is so thoroughly compliant and dutifully bigs up each scare every time it appears.

“Nature is in its worst shape in human history’

This is exactly the kind of scaremongering claim the report was designed to generate. It gives environmental correspondents from on-message outfits like the BBC and CBC the excuse to put in a call to their favourite eco-alarmists, who helpfully respond with hysterical drivel like this:

“Humanity unwittingly is attempting to throttle the living planet and humanity’s own future,” said George Mason University biologist Thomas Lovejoy, who has been called the godfather of biodiversity for his research.

Actually, as Patrick Moore notes, there have been many worse times for species extinction.

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 organization had become too radical.

Polar Bears and Tigers

By curious coincidence perhaps the two most overhyped of all doomed species are now enjoying a remarkable recovery, not least because – contrary to the claims of environmentalists – humans actually do care about flora, fauna and diversity and have made great strides in preserving them.
It has been a century since the last species of any significance – the passenger pigeon – died out. Almost all the species extinctions that have occurred in the last two centuries have been on islands, the result of predation by invasive species such as rats or cats accidentally introduced by sailors.
Polar bear populations have exploded from about 5,000 60 years ago to around 26,000 now – making a mockery of their status as an emblem of man-made environmental catastrophe.
Meanwhile, the number of tigers in India has risen dramatically in the last decade, according to the Irish Times:

The estimated population of the endangered big cat has increased from 1,411 in 2006 to 2,226 in 2014, according to the report published by the Indian government’s National Tiger Conservation Authority.

Read the small print

When you get to the bottom of the scaremongering report, the authors show their true colours.
Here is the BBC’s summary:

The study doesn’t tell governments what to do, but gives them some pretty strong hints.
One big idea is to steer the world away from the “limited paradigm of economic growth”.
They suggest moving away from GDP as a key measure of economic wealth and instead adopting more holistic approaches that would capture quality of life and long-term effects.
They argue that our traditional notion of a “good quality of life” has involved increasing consumption on every level. This has to change.

Yes, we’re back to our old friends – Agenda 21 and sustainability – the UN’s code phrases for a new world order in which technocrats of the international elite impose their globalist agenda of wealth redistribution, regulation, enforced renewables, higher taxes and enforced rationing on sovereign nations in the name of ‘saving the planet.’

If the UN really cared about species extinction, of course, it would be doing the exact opposite.
As Jo Nova points out:

1. The worst pollution is in countries with a low income per capita — when people are hungry they raze forests. The most polluted cities are in places like Ghana, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Zambia, Argentina, and Nigeria.  The most deforestation occurs in Brazil, Indonesia, Russia, and Mexico. The worst air is in India and China.
2. Only rich nations have the resources to save the environment.
3. Countries that produce more CO2 are richer.

Ignore everything the UN tells you about the environment. It’s drivel – and dangerous drivel at that.

More Below:

• One million species at risk of extinction, UN report warns
• How humans create as well as destroy species
• Biodiversity threat won’t be tackled by alarmist biologist hype and dismantling capitalism
• A million species face extinction? Time to burn fossil fuels to save them
• The UN’s Extinction Warning Doesn’t Add Up
• Global Extinction Rates: Why Do Estimates Vary So Wildly?
• The Extinction Rebellion’s hysteria vs. climate science
• The UN is making up claims about extinctions
• New predictions of animal population doom are likely exaggerated
• UN hysteria regarding species extinction mindlessly parroted

The UN is making up claims about extinctions

May 10, 2019 By Jack Hellner

In early May, the United Nations put out another dire report saying humans will cause one million species to go extinct.  Here's what they were up to:

According to the new Report, entitled Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), more than one million species of plants and animals are at risk of extinction (Figure 3A) — many of which are predicted to be pushed into extinction within just a few decades — thanks to decades of rampant poisoning, looting, vandalism and wholesale destruction of the planet's forests, oceans, soils, watersheds, and air.

As with most stories on climate change caused by humans, most of the news media are just feeding these predictions to the public without any questions.

Faunalytics, a group that helps save endangered animals, has only 3,000 animals on its endangered species list, so there's reason to ask questions. Start with this: where does the one million number come from?

The public has repeatedly been told that humans are causing thousands of animals to go extinct each year, yet a study by National Autonomous University of Mexico in 2015 found only 477 identified species that have gone extinct since 1900, or around four per year............ Isn't it time for journalists to do their job by doing some investigation and telling the public the truth instead of just repeating what they are told when previous predictions have been completely wrong? .............Read more

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.

Is the Insect Apocalypse Really Upon Us?

Claims that insects will disappear within a century are absurd, but the reality isn’t reassuring either.

Ed Yong

In 1828, a teenager named Charles Darwin opened a letter to his cousin with “I am dying by inches, from not having anybody to talk to about insects.” Almost two centuries on, Darwin would probably be thrilled and horrified: People are abuzz about insects, but their discussions are flecked with words such as apocalypse and Armageddon.

The drumbeats of doom began in late 2017, after a German study showed that the total mass of local flying insects had fallen by 80 percent in three decades. The alarms intensified after The New York Times Magazine published a masterful feature on the decline of insect life late last year. And panic truly set in this month when the researchers Francisco Sánchez-Bayo and Kris Wyckhuys, having reviewed dozens of studies, claimed that “insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades.” The Guardian, in covering the duo’s review, wrote that “insects could vanish within a century”—a crisis that Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys believe could lead to a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems.”  

I spoke with several entomologists about whether these claims are valid, and what I found was complicated. The data on insect declines are too patchy, unrepresentative, and piecemeal to justify some of the more hyperbolic alarms...........First, some good news: The claim that insects will all be annihilated within the century is absurd. Almost everyone I spoke with says that it’s not even plausible, let alone probable. “Not going to happen,” says Elsa Youngsteadt from North Carolina State University........To Read More....