We Are NOT Headed For World Without Insects - Insect Decline Survey Hitting Headlines Non Systematic, Patchy & With Limited Data

By Robert Walker | February 11th 2019 | Print | E-mail

 

Please don’t be scared by this, it is just the journalists hyping things up again. It does not mean what it seems to mean from the headlines. Insects can’t vanish and we will continue to be able to grow our crops and do agriculture. The study itself involves a lot of extrapolation on inadequate data, not their fault, it is just that there hasn’t been that much research done on insect populations for them to draw on.

The number of studies they found, 73, is not a lot for the whole world and the studies are limited. The authors are also getting criticism on twitter by experts for the way they conducted the survey, for instance they found it with a literature search in "Web of Science" for “[insect*] AND [declin*] AND [survey]” which seems likely to bias in favour of groups that are declining as well as miss out many surveys that don’t happen to use the term “survey”.

They should have stated the limitations of the survey and they do not seem to have taken the extra care needed for a survey likely to influence public opinion and decision making. This was a traditional review, and not the carefully conducted systematic review that you get in medicine and that first began to be used in conservation in 2006.........To Read More......

The sky is falling?!?

Ridiculous report claims humans have killed more than half the world’s wildlife in past 48 years

Greg Walcher

A recent World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report claims humans have killed more than half of all the wildlife in the world since 1970. Alex HortonEmail Bio Follow The report attracted media mass attention, even though the actual 145-page essay doesn’t really say that, much less prove it.

More ironic, the political focus is mostly on countries where the declining wildlife populations do not live, and the solution suggested is so vague it couldn’t possibly address the issue.

The hype about the document, an annual harangue called the “Living Planet Report,” is not surprising, considering the source. This is the same organization that told us a decade ago we would all have to abandon Planet Earth.

“Earth's population will be forced to colonize two planets within 50 years if natural resources continue to be exploited at the current rate, according to a… study by the WWF. [The study] warns that the human race is plundering the planet at a pace that outstrips its capacity to support life. The report… reveals that more than a third of the natural world has been destroyed by humans over the past three decades.”

That was a remarkable conclusion, especially considering that 71% of the Earth’s surface is water. That means humans would have to have destroyed virtually every square inch of land on Earth for the report to be credible. So it’s incredible that the WWF and its annual report continue to attract media attention.

This year’s diatribe claims almost 60% of all the fish, birds and animals on Earth have been killed by people in two generations. It proposes “a new global deal for nature,” a companion for the Paris Climate treaty. Except unlike Paris, the proposed “new deal for nature” has no numbers and no specific goals. In fact, there is no definition of what the agreement might entail.

Rather, it includes vague suggestions that we’re not locking up enough land from public access, nor creating enough national parks, wildlife refuges, wilderness areas and other “unpeopled” places. For the United States, that means the WWF is not satisfied that laws, regulations and other actions have already prohibited mining, drilling, timber harvesting and other human activities on 427 million acres of federal land. That’s the size of Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming combined, and it does not include state and private lands that have also been closed to most human activity.

The report’s language is decidedly European and American, using policy terms common to the western environmental industry. For example, it discusses the “progress” in removing dams in the USA – levying special criticism on agriculture in the Rio Grande Valley – and approvingly cites efforts to designate more wild and scenic rivers.

It continues the ongoing criticism of western mining, timber production and “unsustainable agriculture,” accusations with which we’re all too familiar. In truth, these people simply want to stop most human uses of land, water and other resources of the American West.

There is another major problem with using this report to further that goal. The wildlife it laments do not live in the American West. Many are found in countries where energy-deprived, jobless, hungry, desperate people cut down forest habitats for fuel, eat wildlife to survive, and kill other species to sell their ivory, horns or meat for a few dollars.

Also, keep in mind that the reported declines in wildlife populations are based on computer modeling, not actual counting of actual animals. Still, even if you give such a report the benefit of the doubt, as many will, the dangers cited are from “warming oceans choked with plastic,” allegedly toppled rain forests, and supposedly dying coral reefs. Thus, populations are said to be tanking worst in the oceans and tropics, including an 89% decrease in South and Central America.

But make no mistake – the U.S. is nonetheless at fault. The report claims “crop failures brought on by climate change” are the reason caravans of Central Americans stream to the United States illegally. That’s why we must “urgently transition to a net carbon-neutral society and halt and reverse nature loss – through green finance and shifting to clean energy and environmentally friendly food production.”

How those terms are defined or implemented in a truly ecological, sustainable manner (more vague, malleable, politicized terms), the report does not say.

In a way, the details in this report may actually disprove its own conclusions. The U.S. and Canada are among the countries that use the most natural resources. Yet the worst wildlife declines are in the tropics, not in North America. The prime examples cited are African elephants, whale sharks, orangutans in Borneo, wandering albatross near Antarctica, jaguars in South America, gharial crocodiles in India and Nepal, and giant salamanders in China.

To note just one example where the WWF gets its “green finance” and “clean energy” facts completely upside down, a major reason orangutans are disappearing is that their habitats are being cleared to make room for palm oil biofuel plantations. How that is ecological or sustainable the WWF does not say.

The World Wildlife Fund is not the only Chicken Little constantly warning of a dire future. A similar article, published in the National Academy of Sciences journal last spring, was even more shocking. It claimed that since the dawn of civilization, humans have caused the loss of 83% of all mammals and half of all plants on Earth.

That’s because, WWF says, “the vast and growing consumption of food and resources by the global population is destroying the web of life.” However, the WWF and many other environmental industry groups, also oppose modern mechanized farming practices and seeds that significantly increase yields, allowing farmers to feed more people from less land. Still more ironies and non sequiturs.

So while you stop driving cars and heating your homes, you might also need to stop eating – while you pack for the trip to some other planet.

If we are not Chicken Little, is the sky still falling?

 

Greg Walcher is president of the Natural Resources Group and author of “Smoking Them Out: The Theft of the Environment and How to Take it Back,” now in its second printing. He is a former head of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources.

 

Yellow fever kills 600 monkeys in Brazil’s Atlantic rainforest

Reuters

An outbreak of yellow fever has claimed the lives of more than 600 monkeys in Brazil’s Atlantic rain forest region, threatening the survival of rare South American primates, a zoologist said.  The monkeys, mostly brown howlers and masked titis, are falling out of trees and dying on the ground in the forests of Espirito Santo state in Brazil’s southeast.  “The number of dead monkeys increases every day,” said the zoologist, Sergio Lucena. “We now know that the rare buffy-headed marmoset is also threatened by the yellow fever virus and dying.”......To Read More.....

My Take - Extinction happens when a species becomes biologically incompetent.  Extinction has occured to over 95% of all the species that's ever lived.  Extinction is the rule - not the exception.

Colony Collapse Disorder: An Excuse, Not a Reason!

By Rich Kozlovich

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is the term used to describe unexplained die-off of honey bee colonies. This has generated a great deal of speculation that was, and is, erroneous. Fortunately, information outlining how fallacious and unscientific are these claims by green activists, and their drive to ban neonicotinoids, is coming to the fore as more writers expose the lies behind this scaremongering. Paul Driessen recently wrote, To Bee or Not to Bee, Alan Caruba published , Another Environmental Lie Exposed: Bees are Thriving and Jon Entine, Bee Deaths Reversal: As Evidence Points Away From Neonics As Driver, Pressure Builds To Rethink Ban.

Neonicotinoids is a classification of pesticides used extensively in agriculture to provide protection against insects that would destroy our food supply, and we need to get over this silly mantra - “we don’t need pesticides” - from the green movement, because that would really lead to the starvation they claim to be so concerned about.

All this irrational speculation would almost make one want to laugh, except the consequences for listening to these loony ideas is so dangerous. For years the world’s media inundated us with scaremongering articles about CCD with headlines such as, “Are GM Crops Killing Bees?”; “As Bees Go Missing”; “Why the Honey Bee Decline?”; “Who Killed the Honey Bees?”; “Bees Vanish, and Scientists Race for Reasons!”

Reading these biased and unscientific pronouncements from the media would naturally generate a serious level of concern in society. There’s only one problem. It’s all wrong!

I would like to pose a question. Does anyone think it’s a bit odd that everyone is so hot to proclaim total disaster would ensue without honey bees? Yet the European honey bee is an introduced species brought here by European settlers, hence the name “European” honey bee? So, since the European honey bee isn’t native to North America, how did everything get pollinated here for previous untold millennia? It would appear the level of hysteria over this is somewhat misplaced.

So, what is the cause? Initially the environmentalists and their acolytes found mankind was clearly to be blamed, i.e., cell phones, power lines, global warming, genetically modified crops, and of course – pesticides – above all –pesticides! But, as Benjamin Franklin noted; “Truth will very patiently wait for us. And of course, I always get the same idiotic question; what is truth? Well that’s actually quite easy. Truth is the sublime convergence of history and reality, so let’s take a quick look at the history of green activist’s claims and predictions versus reality. What we need to understand is green activist’s pronouncements, condemnations and predictions of doom have been so flawed they almost have a monopoly on being wrong.

At one point frogs, salamanders and other amphibians began to sprout extra legs, and naturally pesticides were immediately attacked without any evidence, and the studies that came out later supporting that view failed peer review and reality. Some were even found to be fraudulent as in the study conducted be“Steven R. Arnold, a former researcher at the Tulane University Center for Bioenvironmental Research. The Federal Office of Research Integrity found that Arnold had "committed scientific misconduct by intentionally falsifying the research results published in the Journal Science and by providing falsified and fabricated materials to investigating officials." Yet this work was foundational to parts of the Food Quality Protection Act and still remains in effect.

Although there is an article (Editor’s Note: This is an article worth exploring to find the logical fallacies and misrepresentations, asides and non sequiturs. Take the time to investigate this from both sides. You will find this an enlightening exploration, and remember this was written by one of the authors of Our Stolen Future. As I’m writing this I think perhaps I need to start a series on this subject once again.) supporting ED claims - by one of the authors of Our Stolen Future - and claiming the Tulane study had nothing to do with passage of FQPA, but Carol Browner, EPA administrator at the time, thought it was wonderful research, and Lynn Goldberg, EPA’s pesticide chief, said "I just can't remember a time where I've seen data so persuasive . . . the results are very clean looking.", although it hadn’t been peer reviewed and FQPA was passed before the peer review found it to be fraudulent. Goldberg claims she was taken out of context and expressed the need for validation through replication, however, no one waited for that to happen before FQPA was passed.

As for this study not playing a major role in FQPA’s passage - I think that is a load of rhetorical excuse making horsepucky. Science News ran pages on this, and in more than one issue, leaving everyone the impression it was fact, and in fact I was left a bit stunned by it all. After this was exposed as fraudulent I stopped subscribing to Science News since they refused to respond to my complaints and I never saw any kind of retraction. If there was a retraction it wasn’t anything on the order of the ED scare they promoted.

Dennis Avery pointed out in an article that;

“Minnesota school kids found deformed frogs in some local ponds, the finger of accusation was pointed at pesticides. Now, the deformities have been traced to a natural parasite, the trematode, which burrows into the just-forming leg joints of tadpoles. The absence of yellow-legged frogs in some California mountain lakes had been blamed on pesticide-laden dust rising from the intensively farmed San Joaquin Valley. However, when the fish management teams stopped stocking the mountain lakes with hungry trout, the frogs returned in large numbers.”

He further notes;

“Pesticides are still a favorite bogyman of concerned frog lovers, but the real-world Nebraska frogs thrived in the pesticide-tinged irrigation ditch until the farmer cut off the water. Meanwhile, frogs have been disappearing in lots of remote places where no pesticides are used.”

The real threat to amphibians and the main reason behind the worldwide decline in amphibians, which sees about one third of all species threatened with extinction, is chytridiomycosis, a frequently fatal disease caused by the Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis fungus – not pesticides!

This pattern of inaccurate pronouncements from the green movement plays out over and over again for every animal die off that occurs, and they’ve been largely wrong. So why should we believe anything they say? As for the recent die-off of bumble bees in multiple locations in Oregon? Well, in this case it really was caused by pesticides, but that event was a matter of misapplication, and was not associated with CCD. Initially the Oregon Department of Agriculture (ODA) issued a temporary restriction on use of the two neonicotinoids used, or in this case, misused. After the investigation into this event the ODA allowed the temporary restriction to expire demonstrating confidence in the continued use of these products. There is a substantial difference between the misuse of a product and some sort of unidentified intrinsic, or systemic flaw in the product that has an overall detrimental impact.

There are some things we do know. We do know for sure this problem has nothing to do with cell phones, power lines, and pesticides have little to do with this increased level of die-offs within the honey bee population, and more officials are being made aware of that. We know the worldwide population of honey bees has increased during this so-called crisis; we know Canada uses a lot of neonicotinoids without any adverse effect on honey bees; we know parasites and pathogens play a massive role in these die-offs. Varroa mites are now known to carry tobacco ringworm virus, which is destructive to bee colonies.

We have to understand that no singular species is necessary for continued existence. In point of fact, the elimination of whole orders doesn’t matter either. James A. Marusek, a retired nuclear physicist& engineer for U.S. Department of the Navy wrote an impressive piece in 2004 called, “The Great Permian Extinction Debate”,where he lists all the ocean species that went extinct during that period.

During that period trilobites, which constituted 9 orders, more than 150 families, 5000 genera and over 15,000 species, were completely wiped out. All 9000 species of fusulinids ceased to exist, along with blastoids. Rugose and tabulate corals, and 90 percent of all brachiopod families and 95% of brachiopod genera went extinct, 98% of all crinozoa, 96% of all anthoaozans, 97 percent of ammonoids, 59% of all bivalves, 8 families of ostracods, 85% of the gastropods and 79% of bryozoans.

That didn’t include any land creatures, of which 70% of everything living on land died. Amazing!  All that devastation, destruction and extinction, and life still goes on!

As for the greenies who are so worried people will starve– that is an specious and emotional argument as an excuse to eliminate pesticides – all pesticides! They want to eliminate billions of people from the world’s population and the most radical of them want humanity totally eliminated. Their desire for the elimination of pesticides will go a long way toward attaining that goal. This issue with honey bees is just one more excuse by the environmental movement to ban more pesticides. Products we absolutely need to human existence. Once we get that firmly fixed into our heads clarity will follow. The bees are fine, these colonies will recover, we aren’t going to starve, pesticides are our friend, and soon the greenies will come up with a new or recycled scare. And based on their record for accuracy –another scare society can ignore with impunity.

March 4th. - Picks of the Day

Posted By Rich Kozlovich

Greenpeace Co-Founder Slams Species Extinction Scare Study - 'peer-review process has become corrupted'
Moore: 'I quit my life-long subscription to National Geographic when they published a similar 'sixth mass extinction' article in February 1999'

GOP-led House hearing brings cross-examination of EPA's regulations
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson faced pointed questioning during a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing about the agency's climate rules and other regulations such as oil containment to water quality. "I believe EPA is headed in the wrong direction with an aggressive and overzealous regulatory agenda that far exceeds the authority it's been granted," said House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers, R-Ky

"I believe EPA is headed in the wrong direction with an aggressive and overzealous regulatory agenda that far exceeds the authority it's been granted,"

Since so much of the legislative authority given to the EPA has been from the courts and not from the Congress, and the Congress has done nothing about it for 41 years, I have to ask.  Who's at fault for that?  It isn't like anyone could have missed the fact that they have been a virtual lava flow of scientifically dubious regulations since they came into existence.  They are not now, nor have they ever been, an agency in love with science, or truth for that matter.  They were created by Nixon to be a political entity and that is what they are. 

First, review every regulation and every piece of legislation implemented for them and by them.  Secondly,  get rid of them because they can't be re-trained to be anything except what they are. 

You know the story about the scorpion and the fox.  The scorpion asked the fox to carry him over a river.  The scorpion stung the fox and as he was dying he said; you promised not to sting me, why would you do such a thing?  Now we will both die.  The scorpion replied; you knew what I was, why did you trust me?

A scorpion will always be a scorpion, and the EPA will always be out of control if allowed to exist.  RK 

Overstated chemical risks can lead to bans
Chemicals such as bisphenol A are unnecessarily scrutinized by regulators with "limited scientific knowledge," according to Jon Entine, a senior fellow and director of the Genetic Literacy Project at George Mason University. Restrictions on chemicals can cause much more harm than good, he argues. "Chemicals get a bad rap. It's becoming increasingly difficult for the public to distinguish genuine risks from chemophobia," Entine writes.

This will never end until the greenies are no longer funded by the public and they can be sued for making false claims and prosecuted for the end result of their actions if it results in the loss of life or property.  I don't see this any differently than when ELF or one of the other "really radical" environmental terrorist groups burns down millions of dollars of private property. 


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