Population Doomster Paul Ehrlich’s New Eco-Scare: ‘Biological Annihilation’

Date: 14/07/17 Ron Bailey, Reason Online
Paul Ehrlich’s new extinction predictions are likely to be as accurate as his famine forecasts.

 

Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich has made a gaudy career of prophesying imminent ecological doom. "In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now," he declared in his 1968 manifesto The Population Bomb. In the subsequent 50 years, as world population more than doubled, the proportion of chronically undernourished people in the world dropped from 33 percent in 1968 to 11 percent now.

Ehrlich is now predicting population doom for the world's animals. The cause? Human overpopulation, naturally. Ehrlich and his colleagues Gerardo Ceballos and Rodolfo Dirzo describe the allegedly impending "biological annihilation" of about a third of all vertebrate land species in a paper for The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"The ultimate drivers of those immediate causes of biotic destruction [are] human overpopulation and continued population growth, and overconsumption, especially by the rich," they argue. "All signs point to ever more powerful assaults on biodiversity in the next two decades, painting a dismal picture of the future of life, including human life." The crisis supposedly results from "the fiction that perpetual growth can occur on a finite planet"; meanwhile, "the window for effective action is very short, probably two or three decades at most."

Ehrlich and his colleagues reached those conclusions by taking the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's data on populations of 27,600 species of mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians and overlaying those figures on a grid of 22,000 plots measuring 10,000 square kilometers across all of the continents. The goal is to identify areas where local populations of each species has been extirpated. They report that since 1900 "nearly half of known vertebrate species, 32% (8,851/27,600) are decreasing; that is, they have decreased in population size and range."......To Read More...