UN Advocacy Group Bad At Math

I've always wondered how those extinction numbers that get breathlessly tossed around are calculated. We have tons of stories written every year about how we keep finding new species, but, sometimes right next to those same articles, we have stories about thousands of species going extinct at the same time. How do we know, when we haven't even catalogued them yet? Again, the specter of computer modeling masquerading as reality appears to give us such fright.

First, allow me to highlight the bad math part, since this "divine doubling" is how the 0.3 degrees Celsius rise in the so-called global mean temperature over the last century has been turned into 0.6 degrees. Ahmed Djoghlaf, head of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, said,"Every hour, three species disappear. Every day, up to 150 species are lost. Every year, between 18,000 and 55,000 species become extinct." Um, okay. If every hour 3 species go extinct, then every day 72 species go poof, and then about 26000 species are gone in a year. But you see, the real numbers from the study are the 18,000 to 55,000 species per year. If you work the 55K number backwards, we get 6 per hour. Why did Ahmed suddenly take the low end of the estimate for the hourly loss? To prevent stupid reporters from catching him take the most extreme number and highlighting the alarmism.

So, why the factor of two between the two deltas? I'd have to say that's a pretty big margin of error. Empirically, we have catalogued "only 784 species driven to extinction since 1500," and the administrator of the "Red List" explains why the reality is so different from the UN study. Craig Hilton-Taylor: "The U.N. figures are based on loss of habitats, estimates of how many species lived there and so will have been lost. Ours are more empirical -- those species we knew were there but cannot find." There you have it, alarmist numbers based on estimates of species occupying habitats, and then just poofing them out of existence when a housing development goes up. Most of those species in the estimates are bacteria, then arthropods. Both of those phyla are highly adaptable, so I don't believe the hype that they just "go away."

None of those habitat loss simulations have been proven or disproven, so, from a scientific perspective, they're just hypotheses for whether the habitat algorithm is correct, not a prediction on actual species extinction. Of course, that doesn't matter to the UN advocates whose causes appear to be threatened only inside computer simulations.