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Mass extinction occuring!!

AtlantaAdonis said:
Vanishing: The Earth's 6th mass extinction - CNN.com

CNN has a large feature today about the mass extinction. This is almost too depressing to even read. Do any of you science-deniers even care about this?

Thanks Republicans. :doh :(
Click to expand...

"Species are vanishing at 100 times the normal rate..."

Really now, how do we know?

Maybe it's true, but should I watch the rest when we know species have been going extinct for even before we dominated the earth?

Is this worth watching, or just another piece of propaganda?
 
LOL...

"What are we doing to cause this."

LOL...

Always our fault.

LOL...
 
Simple, adapt or die....
The creature most adaptable, so far, has been man. He can adapt to changing environment easier than the rest of the animal kingdom.

Asian countries tend to need seafood more than most, so there may be some horrible situations in their near future. China, Russia, some others in the same part of the world have had some bad droughts and associated mass starvation.
Some countries already have to import a large percentage of their food due to inadequate arable land. And the USA cannot feed the entire world with the arable land that we have.

Vacationing in Scandinavian countries last year I noticed that they have a lot fewer fat people that we Americans, might be time to require mass dieting?
 
UtahBill said:
Simple, adapt or die....
The creature most adaptable, so far, has been man. He can adapt to changing environment easier than the rest of the animal kingdom.

Asian countries tend to need seafood more than most, so there may be some horrible situations in their near future. China, Russia, some others in the same part of the world have had some bad droughts and associated mass starvation.
Some countries already have to import a large percentage of their food due to inadequate arable land. And the USA cannot feed the entire world with the arable land that we have.

Vacationing in Scandinavian countries last year I noticed that they have a lot fewer fat people that we Americans, might be time to require mass dieting?
Click to expand...

Yes. Obesity is differently progressed around the world. The US is furthest and mist Europeans are following more or less closely behind. But most are going in the same direction. The WHO speaks of a global epidemic.
 
AtlantaAdonis said:
Vanishing: The Earth's 6th mass extinction - CNN.com

CNN has a large feature today about the mass extinction. This is almost too depressing to even read. Do any of you science-deniers even care about this?

Thanks Republicans. :doh :(
Click to expand...

Species have come and gone throughout the earth's existence. Humans wouldn't be here if it were for the mass extinction of the dinosaurs and other huge animals. Mammals survived 65 million years ago, 90% of the earth's species also went extinct. Mankind won't last forever on the earth just like the dinosaurs didn't.

The problem is the earth is becoming overpopulated. Habitat is being eaten up via urban sprawl. Even farm land is disappearing due to the housing divisions and shopping malls, centers etc. going up all over. I used to live in Clayton county south of Atlanta, I can remember when it was mostly farmland and a few small towns. Real small towns.

Today all the farms have disappeared and Clayton county due to urban sprawl might as well be part of Atlanta itself. If one didn't know the towns, they all abut each other for the most part now. One wouldn't know you left Forest Park into Lake City into Morrow into Jonesboro. They all look like one big city. instead of four or five towns.

Cut the world population in half, better yet by three quarters, bring it down to two or three billion and these mass extinctions of other species will cease.
 
Yet another leftist invented problem who's only solution is massive taxes on those other than themselves to salve their guilty conscious.

This is really getting repetitive and ridiculous.
 
RetiredNSmilin said:
It has seemed to get along fine for the 200 years or so BEFORE we became a notion and had the entire fate of the earth in our hands, as some seem to think.
Click to expand...

Humans have believed that for a lot longer than 200 years and that mindset is the root of the problem.
 
I am not a denier, far from it. But I am getting sick and tired of all the misinformation that is being spread. By people from both sides of the fence that is by the way.

One of the most important lessons I have had during high school was what we called 'Objective Reading'. This will teach you to filter what is and what is not true when you read an newspaper article. Or at the very least it will give you a level of confidence in the words being reported. In addition to this we have internet and google and more often than not these tools will help you to quickly guide you in the right direction. Are these lessons not given at school anymore?

This CNN article is of a lousy quality that I would consider typical for CNN. Lets take a closer look at some facts for a sec. And that is where the problems starts; lack of facts.

The estimated number of animals ranges from 2-50 million, with 8.7 million a regularly quoted average. Please note that this is an estimate and that the min. and max. value lay apart by a factor of 50. (FIFTY!!!!). This, by the way, stands against a current count of about 1.5 million know species. Actually the known number of animals also ranges from 1.4 to 1.9 million. Showing that we do not even know what we know.

75% (The claimed number of species under thread of extinction) of 2 million (The lower end of the total estimated species on earth) is 1.5 million (The presently known number of species). So far so good. Something tells me already that when using slightly different numbers I'm going to get some odd results. Let's see now.

75% of 8.7 million is 6.5 million and 75% of 50 million is 37.5 million.

So this can really go any direction you would want it to go, but it does show that the numbers are flawed. The range is too big and have therefore lost any significant meaning. In addition, if we do not know how many animals there are on the planet, you can also not predict how many are getting extinct, and we will not know an animal is getting extinct if we do not even know that it existed in the first place.

We know of several hundred extinct species in the last several 100 years. (BBC -> 801 extinct species in the past 500 years) But at the now stated extinction rates we (as a species) would nearly be extinct already. These numbers too are very inaccurate though. In this is on top of the inaccuracy that we have regarding the total number of animals of which we know that they exist. And that too is a funny inaccuracy. We don't know how many animals we know. 800 Animals gone in 500 years (that we know of anyway) seems rather low considering that we are now talking about an extinction rate that is 100 - 10.000 times higher than the average (also referred to as background extinction rate) extinction rate. And the average extinction rate we also do not know with great accuracy! With the predicted extinction rates in a worth case scenario we would all (all species) be extinct in a little less than 30 years. And that too will not happen.

And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that it is going to be even harder to figure out how many animals got extinct in the past. At present we allow for a 50 time spread in the number of existing animals. And since it is a magnitude harder to count the number of animals that have ever existed, we should not expect reliable results here either.

It has also been shown that the environmental impact in terms of animal extinction rates has been greatly exaggerated in the past and, fortunately, it turns out that many animals can still live in rougher and/or tougher conditions than they previously used to do or simply live in much smaller habitats.

In addition, CNN does not give any references in this report (Video) whatsoever that can be verified.

Conclusion: The claim CNN makes can not be substantiated at all because of the large margin of error in all the available numbers. Now, that by itself does of course not mean that there is no truth in this article, but it is exaggerated big time. And it is this kind of exaggerated news reporting that have helped the NGOs lose their credibility and gave a lot of ammo to the no-believers of climate change. The bottom line is of course that it can not possibly be good what we do right now to our environment, but please ignore and dismiss reports like this. Like always, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

For next time keep in mind: CNN is good to read headlines, so you will have a rough idea of what is happening in the world. For factual information you then move to more respectable and accurate news sources. The BBC, as a rule of thumb, typically does a fairly good job in this respect. Little political influence, little bias and a whole bunch of really arrogant reporters that go for nothing less than the truth (their truth of course).

Reports like this are a joke and can not possibly be taken seriously.

Joey
 
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