More on the Threatened Mermaid

One of the problems with ecological studies showing that all kinds of animals and plants are endangered is that they are commonly funded by governments, or by NGOs with a mandate to protect the environment. Government is by far the largest source of funding for research of all kinds.

For a balanced view, there are two better sources: business, and think tanks.
Most of what think tanks do is funded by government or by business, but they also do studies on their own as a means of advertising their services and their abilities.

Corporations have a lot of good reasons for looking into the effect of their actions on the environment—the need to conform to government regulations, PR, and the need for sustainability of their profitable activities. The best thing about corporate research, though, is that it is often the only counterbalance to government-funded research, which tends to dominate the field.

There are any number of examples of hype in the ecology/environmentalism field. It’s hard to figure out what is not hype. According to Dr. Patrick Moore, the founder of Greenpeace, for example, the fastest way to increase biodiversity in a rainforest is to clearcut it. Mature growth forest is far from the ideal habitat for all species. The tall trees tend to muscle out a lot of other species. (Dr. Moore is no longer a fan of Greenpeace.)

But more than that—and this is me talking again--the best habitat on land for biomass as well as biodiversity is probably a wildlife park or a zoo; next to that someone’s urban garden; next to that, a farm.

Qatar used to have almost no resident bird species. Now there are many—and all have appeared since the 1980s. Why? With greater population and greater wealth, there is a lot more greenery in the city streets.

Among themselves, the eco-types have a conscious strategy of targeting “charismatic species” for PR purposes. That is, animals that people find good-looking, cute, fuzzy. They look for that stuffed animal quality.

This is obviously clever in propaganda terms. But is it honest? And does it give us a clear view of the situation? If nothing else, this should be a red flag warning us that such organizations indeed have vested interests, and are skewing what they tell us to promote those interests. This sort of thing is advertising, and should be approached with the same caution that we approach all advertising. Except that, unlike business advertisers, NGOs and government agencies are not liable to fraud charges.

Let’s look more closely at the “threatened” polar bear, current poster child for the ecologists:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0503/p13s01-wogi.html?page=1

Here is a study (I think it is from the WWF) that relies, like most such studies, on computer projections. Broken down by separate population groups, it seems to indicate that most are facing no real threat:

http://assets.panda.org/downloads/statusofthepolarbear_14thworkingmtg_iucn_pbsg.pdf

We do not know if such computer projections are accurate, mind; they have no history of being so.

Note that the polar regions share the advantage of the oceans for alarmists’ purposes: it is the one part of the earth’s land area on which we have the least data. Therefore, the worst can be imagined.

The one group that knows best, in terms of actual observation in the field, is the Eskimos (aka Inuit). They have been insisting for years that polar bear populations have been growing rapidly. Of course, they, like government and NGOs, have a vested interest: they want to be free to hunt them. But they also, as hunters, will probably want to be sure their hunt is sustainable.

http://www.propertyrightsresearch.org/2007/articles01/davis.htm

And this looks like an example of the most reliable sort of research, something done by a think tank purely to demonstrate their research abilities:

http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba/ba551/

Meanwhile, the real story is not that species are disappearing—so far as we can tell, they are not. It is that new species keep being discovered. Not just tiny microorganisms, either. A large creature may be easy to see, if one is around, but by their nature, large creatures, especially large predators, are more likely to be rare throughout their range.

Here’s one specific example that is, literally, close to home. When I was a kid, I was interested in monsters, as many kids are, and I read a few books about such things. One of the monsters I kept coming across, along with Sasquatch, the Loch Ness monster, The Abominable Snowman, and so on, was the celebrated “Eastern cougar.” The claim was that a few people in New Brunswick, in the Canadian Maritimes, kept spotting large wild cats. But there are no big cats in Eastern Canada: the nearest big cat is the cougar or mountain lion, supposedly ranging no further east than the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains. And there are no mountains in New Brunswick, 3000 kilometers away.

Then, believe it or not, my own parents one summer insisted they say a big cat bound across a country road in front of them.

Then, a few years later, someone actually shot a specimen, and dragged it in to the nearest qualified scientist.

In Quebec.

It is no longer a mythical monster. The textbooks now all suddenly say the cougar or mountain lion ranges as far east as the Canadian Maritimes.

Just today, in the local Qatar paper, it was announced that the local natural history group had discovered a previously unknown species of sea slug on one of their weekend hikes.

Sea slugs are not that small.

We know what large species are present in densely populated, scientifically-oriented Europe. It gets iffier and iffier as one moves away from Europe. Amateurs out on weekend strolls are still “finding” new species in much of the world.

Meanwhile, actual, documented extinctions of species—as opposed to computer models and projections—are not common. Most known species seem to stubbornly keep surviving. And formerly “extinct” species are even rediscovered.
Consider this Wikipedia page, a list of extinct animals of Europe:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinct_animals_of_Europe

It lists 72 extinctions in all of Europe since the Pleistocene era.
Seventy-two in the world’s most densely-populated continent since the Pleistocene.
Only a small minority of these extinctions would be recent. Only 26 of the 72 are noted to have occurred since 1600.

And two extinct species have been rediscovered in the last few years.

And how quickly are new species being discovered? An MSNBC story reports scientists finding new fish species at a clip of two a week, 106 a year. All would automatically go on the “endangered species list,” of course. Indeed, all new species discovered in, say, the last fifty years or so are probably rare enough to qualify as endangered. That’s five thousand, isn’t it? And that’s fish alone, never mind insects or protozoa—except that the rate of new discoveries is probably accelerating over time.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6565772/

Another paper lists 57 new neotropical mammals discovered in the eight years between 1992 and 2000. That’s mammals alone, and that’s neotropics alone. Say six a year, 3,000 over fifty years, all presumably on the endangered list.

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/pdf/10.1046/j.1472-4642.2000.00080.x?cookieSet=1

The IUCN currently reports “16,119 species of animals and plants” “threatened with extinction.” You do the math. Subtract the above figures, and it does not leave a lot of room for anything _but_ newly discovered species, does it?

Next point: compare that figure, of 16,119 species “threatened with extinction,” with the number of those actually documented as extinct in all of Europe since the Pleistocene: 72. Seems as though in the wild, few species take this “threat of extinction” very seriously.