Species 'extinction' fears recycled by U.N., media

Greenpeace co-founder and ecologist Patrick Moore is challenging the latest "species extinction" claim, which is promoted in a new United Nations report.

Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace (Twitter profile)

"The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES, contends nature "is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history — and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating, with grave impacts on people around the world now likely."

The report says a "huge transformation is needed across the economy and society to protect and restore nature, which provides people with food, medicines, and other materials, crop pollination, fresh water, and quality of life."

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The Associated Press quoted a scientist claiming "is really our last chance to address all of that."

Moore, in an interview with Climate Depot, said the U.N. is merely recycling the failed claims of "Population Bomb" author Paul Ehrlich.

"That is so 1970s. Paul Ehrlich is pathetic and has been crying wolf for decades. While he pontificated doom for starving millions in the 1970 from his ivory tower at Stanford," Moore said.

Ehrlich’s 1968 book called on the U.S. government to take "whatever steps are necessary to establish a reasonable population size," including through taxing children, mass sterilization and abortion.

CNN interviewed Ehrlich in a feature on the U.N. report that concluded humanity will need to start "consuming less, polluting less and having fewer children" if it's going to stop mass extinction in the coming decades

Moore dismissed the U.N. report's claims, observing that 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."

"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 said.

'No scientific basis'

In the 2000 documentary "Amazon Rainforest: Clear-Cutting The Myths," Moore 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."

In the 2000 documentary, British scientist Professor Philip Stott, emeritus professor of biogeography at the University of London, argued that the earth "has gone through many periods of major extinctions, some much bigger in size than even being contemplated today."

'Tipping points'

Climate Depot pointed out that as early as 1864, "tipping points" about the "extinction of the species" were issued.

George Perkins Marsh, regarded by some as the father of American ecology, warned more than 150 years ago that the earth was "fast becoming an unfit home for its 'noblest inhabitant'" and that unless men changed their ways it would be reduced "to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the depravation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species."

Nevertheless, Climate Depot said, "despite a massive track record of scientific failure about climate and species 'crises' the UN, the media and the usual suspect scientists like failed overpopulation guru Paul Ehrlich, are at it again."

Climate Depot noted that Al Gore has gone silent on the extinction scare of polar bears. He featured the bears in his 2006 film "An Inconvenient Truth," but they were completely absent in his 2017 sequel.

Polar bears have been thriving since then, with their numbers possibly having quadrupled.

In 1974, Ehrlich told the U.S. Senate he wouldn’t bet a nickel the U.S. would still be around in 1994.

"If we have 20 years — which I wouldn't put a nickel on — but if we have 20 years, we're already 10 years too late in starting to do something about it," he said.

"One of the big problems is how do you generate a feeling of urgency," he said.

Ehrlich said that if bad weather "continues in the Midwest this year, and if the monsoon should fail this year in India, as it might, then I think you’re going to see the age of scarcity and many of the changes I’m talking about coming on next winter."