Even more from the ‘false, but peer-reviewed’ category. The journal Nature recently published a study purporting to show that humans may have unleashed the sixth known mass extinction in Earth’s history.
The study lays the blame for this alleged mass extinction on a variety of manmade causes: habitation loss, over-hunting, over-fishing, the spread of germs and viruses and introduced species, and climate change caused by fossil-fuel greenhouse gases.
But this ‘mass extinction’ wave exists mostly (or only?) in the computer models of government-funded research scientists. The mass-extinction claim is similar to a claim made a decade ago by eminent Harvard ecologist Edward O. Wilson that 50,000 species were going extinct every year due to human mistreatment of the planet.
When these scientists are asked to name any of the alleged 50,000 species that are going extinct every year, they are unable.
Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace, has said that the ‘mass extinction’ calculations are produced as follows:
We have named about 1.7million species, half of which are insects. Wilson says there are probably 50 million so he puts that number in his computer model. Then, using the theory of Island Biogeography, which states that if an island in the sea is reduced to 10% of its area then 50% of its species will die off (simple food chain energetics) he assumes that our fragmentation of the landscape is the same as islands in the sea. When he runs his model it spits out 50,000 extinctions per year.”
