Post by rmarks1 on Apr 28, 2019 12:52:51 GMT -5
But the report may be wrong!
Bob
"Half-a-million to a million species are projected to be threatened with extinction, many within decades." So warns the leaked Summary for Policy Makers from a draft of forthcoming report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. The final version, which is scheduled for release on May 6, will be mammoth 1,800-page assessment of scientific literature on the state of nature.
Dire warnings of an imminent global extinction crises are not new. As I reported in my book The End of Doom, S. Dillon Ripley of the Smithsonian Institution predicted in 1970 that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals would be extinct. That is, 75 and 80 percent of all species of animals alive in 1970 would be extinct by 1995.
In 1979, Oxford University biologist Norman Myers stated in his book The Sinking Ark that 40,000 species per year were going extinct and that a million species would be gone by the year 2000. Myers suggested that the world could "lose one-quarter of all species by the year 2000." At a 1979 symposium at Brigham Young University, Thomas Lovejoy—who later served as president of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment—announced that he had made "an estimate of extinctions that will take place between now and the end of the century. Attempting to be conservative wherever possible, I still came up with a reduction of global diversity between one-seventh and one-fifth." In 1994, biologist Peter Raven predicted in Nature Conservancy that "since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next thirty years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it."
Happily, none of these dire extinction predictions came true. Contrary to Raven's prediction, about 47 percent of the world's forests now grow in tropical areas; the World Bank reports that global forest cover declined from 31.8 to 30.8 percent of the world's land area from 1990 to 2015. (Recent satellite data suggest that global forest area has actually been expanding since 1982.) In other words, nine-tenths of the world's tropical forests did not disappear over the past 25 years...
The good news is that however dire the trends with respect to the natural world are, they are unlikely to persist for the remainder of this century. An insightful 2018 BioScience article by some Wildlife Conservation Society researchers identifies the "conservationist's paradox": The "same forces that are destroying nature now are also creating the circumstances for long-term success." As a result of wealth creation, technological progress, and urbanization, humanity will be withdrawing from nature, leaving vast expanses of land and sea for the recovery of wild species.
And that means the dire predictions in the leaked draft are as likely to come true as those made by Dr. S. Dillon Ripley nearly 50 years ago.
reason.com/2019/04/26/leaked-u-n-report-says-a-million-species-are-at-risk-of-extinction/
Dire warnings of an imminent global extinction crises are not new. As I reported in my book The End of Doom, S. Dillon Ripley of the Smithsonian Institution predicted in 1970 that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals would be extinct. That is, 75 and 80 percent of all species of animals alive in 1970 would be extinct by 1995.
In 1979, Oxford University biologist Norman Myers stated in his book The Sinking Ark that 40,000 species per year were going extinct and that a million species would be gone by the year 2000. Myers suggested that the world could "lose one-quarter of all species by the year 2000." At a 1979 symposium at Brigham Young University, Thomas Lovejoy—who later served as president of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment—announced that he had made "an estimate of extinctions that will take place between now and the end of the century. Attempting to be conservative wherever possible, I still came up with a reduction of global diversity between one-seventh and one-fifth." In 1994, biologist Peter Raven predicted in Nature Conservancy that "since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next thirty years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it."
Happily, none of these dire extinction predictions came true. Contrary to Raven's prediction, about 47 percent of the world's forests now grow in tropical areas; the World Bank reports that global forest cover declined from 31.8 to 30.8 percent of the world's land area from 1990 to 2015. (Recent satellite data suggest that global forest area has actually been expanding since 1982.) In other words, nine-tenths of the world's tropical forests did not disappear over the past 25 years...
The good news is that however dire the trends with respect to the natural world are, they are unlikely to persist for the remainder of this century. An insightful 2018 BioScience article by some Wildlife Conservation Society researchers identifies the "conservationist's paradox": The "same forces that are destroying nature now are also creating the circumstances for long-term success." As a result of wealth creation, technological progress, and urbanization, humanity will be withdrawing from nature, leaving vast expanses of land and sea for the recovery of wild species.
And that means the dire predictions in the leaked draft are as likely to come true as those made by Dr. S. Dillon Ripley nearly 50 years ago.
reason.com/2019/04/26/leaked-u-n-report-says-a-million-species-are-at-risk-of-extinction/
Bob