The number of species is decreasing dramatically due to pollution, industrial production and so on. We are witnessing a major extinction. Diversity is declining. Do we need to act now? How many times have you heard or read this? At least a hundred times. And I thought there was a process behind this where each hunter or preserve manager estimates the numbers in their range, that’s somehow counted, and so on. But in reality it’s based on a mathematical model that estimates the trend of the entire population of a species from very piecemeal data.
Now it turns out that that model was flawed and that it was showing declines or extinctions even where the numbers were not declining. If you do a proper recalculation, there is no extinction.
The error was spotted by scientists at the Centre for Theoretical Studies at Charles University in Prague, and their critique was peer-reviewed and published by the super-prestigious Nature. The reaction of the scientific community is interesting, and could be summarized as: we already knew this anyway.
This is not an isolated case. Again,in Meadows’ book Beyond Limits, a key holy writ of the environmental movement, you will find a mathematical model that has the amazing property that no matter what data you enter into it, it always comes out with the conclusion “collapse due to resource depletion.” I noticed this years ago as a reader. And it must be noticed by anyone who reads the book properly.
All right, the scientists will sort it out. That’s part of the scientific world. Someone comes up with a theory, it gains a lot of popularity, after a while more discoveries are made and the theory is dismissed. Only in this case, it also meant billions and billions spent on solving a problem that never existed. Stopping projects, closing factories, destroying jobs… What do you think? How many people will be called to account? Will anyone be brought to justice? Or will those programs addressing a non-existent problem at least be stopped?
These are rhetorical questions, of course.