Greenpeace Co-Founder Slams Species Extinction Scare Study as proof of how ‘peer-review process has become corrupted’ – Study ‘greatly underestimate the rate new species can evolve’

By: Marc Morano - Climate DepotMarch 4, 2011 11:15 AM

 

Climate Depot Exclusive

Greenpeace Co-Founder and ecologist Dr. Patrick Moore, slammed a new study claiming a dramatic and irreversible mass species extinction. “This [journal Nature] article should never have made it through the peer-review process,” Moore told Climate Depot in an exclusive interview. “The fact that the study did make it through peer-review indicates that the peer review process has become corrupted,” Moore, the author of the new book “Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout,” added.

“The authors [of the journal Nature study] greatly underestimate the rate new species can evolve, especially when existing species are under stress. The Polar Bear evolved during the glaciation previous to the last one, just 150,000 years ago,” Moore explained.

The new alarming species mass extinction study was described in an article in Yahoo News and AFP on March 4, 2011 titled: ‘World’s sixth mass extinction may be underway: study.’ The AFP article reported: Mankind may have unleashed the sixth known mass extinction in Earth’s history, according to a paper released by the science journal Nature. Over the past 540 million years, five mega-wipeouts of species have occurred through naturally-induced events. But the new threat is man-made, inflicted by habitation loss, over-hunting, over-fishing, the spread of germs and viruses and introduced species, and by climate change caused by fossil-fuel greenhouse gases, says the study. [End article excerpt.]

But Moore, in an interview with Climate Depot, refuted the claims of the species study. “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 explained.

“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,” Moore explained.

“I quit my life-long subscription to National Geographic when they published a similar ‘sixth mass extinction’ article in February 1999. This [latest journal] Nature article just re-hashes this theme,” he added. Moore left Greenpeace in 1986 because he felt the organziation had become too radical. Moore also challenges man-made global warming fears. See: Greenpeace Co-Founder Dr. Patrick Moore Questions Man-Made Global Warming, Calls it ‘Obviously a Natural Phenomenon’

This is not the first time Moore has gone to battle over alarming claims of species extinction. In the 2000 documentary “Amazon Rainforest: Clear-Cutting The Myths”, Moore bluntly 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. They’re actually electrons on a hard drive. I want a list of Latin names of actual species.” Moore was interviewed by reporter Marc Morano (now with Climate Depot) in the 2000 Amazon rainforest documentary:

Environmental activist Tim Keating of Rainforest Relief was asked in the 2000 documentary if he could name any of the alleged 50,000 species that have gone extinct and he was unable.

“No, we can’t [name them], because we don’t know what those species are. But most of the species that we’re talking about in those estimates are things like insects and even microorganisms, like bacteria,” Keating explained.

UK scientist Professor Philip Stott, emeritus professor of Biogeography at the University of London, dismissed current species claims in the 2000 Amazon rainforest documentary.

“The earth has gone through many periods of major extinctions, some much bigger in size than even being contemplated today,” Stott, the author of a book on tropical rainforests, said in the 2000 documentary.

“Change is necessary to keep up with change in nature itself. In other words, change is the essence. And the idea that we can keep all species that now exist would be anti-evolutionary, anti-nature and anti the very nature of the earth in which we live,” Stott said.

Bye Bye Global Warming Movement — Welcome to the Next Eco-Scare — Species?!

Many critics of the environmental movement believe that as man-made global warming fears continue to fade scientifically and politically, species extinction will be touted as the next environmental scare. See:

Bye Bye Climate Fears? Media Says Hello to Next Eco-Scare! BBC touts report claiming ‘1/5 of world’s plants at risk of extinction’ ahead of UN Biodiversity Conference

Flashback Jan. 2010: Time for next eco-scare already?! As Global Warming Movement Collapses, Activists Already ‘Test-Marketing’ the Next Eco-Fear!

Flashback: Demoted: UN officially throws global warming under the bus: UN now says case for saving species ‘more powerful than climate change’

Flashback: Different Eco-Scare, Same Solution! UN species report ‘will advocate massive changes to the way the global economy is run’

Flashback: It really is ‘IPCC like!’: UN Biodiversity report ‘has multiple errors in first chapter alone’

Flashback: UN Species Scares Debunked: ‘Persistence of Species’: ‘Earth’s plant & animal species are not slip-sliding away – even slowly – into netherworld of extinction’

Flashback: UN Biodiversity Report pushes fear & new taxes: ‘It isn’t a scientific body, it exists to influence policymakers, it is being presented by fear-mongering amateurs’

Species: ‘Seal was declared extinct in 1892. So what is it doing alive and well today? Why are there thousands of Guadalupe fur seals swimming off the coast of Mexico now?’ — ‘As naturalists gladly admit, reports of the species’ demise at the end of the 19th century were premature’

Flashback: Paper: Global Warming Improves Biodiversity: ‘World likely far less diverse today than it was tens of millions of years ago, when Earth’ was like the modern tropics

More on the ‘science’ behind the extinction claims:

Flashback: U.S. Senate Report Debunks Polar Bear Extinction Fears — Canadian Inuit declare polar bears not at climate risk: ‘Polar bear population is very very healthy’ For more on Polar Bears go here.

New fish species found deep below ocean surface: ‘Creatures had never before been observed at such depths…Our findings, which revealed diverse and abundant species at depths previously thought to be void of fish’ – October 2010

False prophet Paul Ehrlich still at it: This extinction—the sixth in the 4-billion-year history of the Earth—’could be much more catastrophic than previous ones’ – Shouldn’t Ehrlich & Holdren be Happy? ‘Anything in the vicinity of the previous mass extinctions would wreck civilization’ – October 2010

‘Green’ red tape said to hinder Border Patrol; ‘takes a back seat to protecting endangered species’ – October 2010

Claim: ‘Species just can’t evolve fast enough to deal with rate of human induced change’ – Reality: ‘This isn’t exactly true’ – ‘Documented evidence of evolutionary adaptation to climate change that must have taken place very rapidly, on the order of just a few thousand years, or in a few instances in just a few decades’

Dracula fish, bald bird among strange new species- October 2010

Scientists find 200 new species in Papua New Guinea – October 2010

Study identifies more than 1 million ocean species ‘of which less than a quarter are described in the scientific literature’

‘Greenies, including global warmists, always speak with utmost certainty about their predictions of doom. However, when it comes to ‘endangered’ species (as with global warming predictions of doom), they often don’t know what they are talking about’

UN trying to promote diminishing biodiversity as the NEXT BIG CRISIS – 2010: Excerpt: ‘It is hard to make definitive statements regarding loss of diversity when science can not even tell us how many different creatures there are on the planet. Nevertheless, the UN has launched the International Year of Biodiversity, warning that the ongoing loss of species around the world is affecting human well-being…The words of Henry Louis Mencken we quoted in The Resilient Earth put it best: “The fundamental aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamoring to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” This is a tactic that the UN has turned into an art form. Having succeeded with turning global warming into a “crisis” they are now giving biodiversity a go. Lack of proper science, contradictory claims by activists and experts, conflicts with the needs of average people just trying to live their lives—yes, this sounds like a UN generated, politically motivated “crisis.” After all, the bureaucrats and parasites at the UN rode the global warming gravy train for more than a quarter century. Now, with the panic over global warming all but vanished, they have started pushing a new biodiversity crisis.

Claim: ‘Control the human population to save wildlife’: ‘Called on world leaders to limit population growth in order to stop the mass extinction of species’ – ‘The human population is sowing the seeds of a mass extinction event…The fact is there is not enough space’

‘Ten years’ to solve nature crisis, UN meeting hears – 2011: ‘The UN biodiversity convention meeting has opened with warnings that the ongoing loss of nature is hurting human societies as well as the natural world… ‘We are now close to a ‘tipping point’ – that is, we are about to reach a threshold beyond which biodiversity loss will become irreversible, and may cross that threshold in the next 10 years if we do not make proactive efforts for conserving biodiversity’

‘We Are Destroying Life on Earth,’ UN Conference Claims: ‘Scientists over the past decade have identified new species at an unprecedented rate. The 2008 World Wildlife Fund (WWF) study First Contact in the Greater Mekong reported that 1,068 species were discovered or newly identified by science between 1997 and 2007 — averaging two new species a week. And the Census of Marine Life — an ambitious, 10-year project to catalog the diversity of the world’s oceans — recently concluded, having identified more than 6,000 potentially new ocean-going species.