Sensationalism Naturally, or How News Can Be Misleading
Date: June 12, 2008
“According to the latest research, species around the world are going extinct faster that previously thought, at a rate not seen since the extinction of the dinosaurs. The Living Planet index which was released today shows that due to destructive human activity, the diversity of all life on earth has decreased by over 30%, nearly a third in fact in the past thirty-five years.” –World’s Species Going Extinct Faster than Scientists Thought
Food for thought:
1. Reliable Information
Do we really have reliable enough information on species back to the Triassic period to state that extinction is moving at a rate not seen since then? Judging by another article, we can’t even decide if there are just 2 million or 100 million species that exist now.
2. Discovery
We’re still discovering species, and often, so it seems premature to make statements about all species and their extinctions since the dinosaurs. The status of species changes quite often, historically.
3. A Fallacy Waiting to Happen
Saying that the “diversity of all life on earth” (a rather big and arbitrary claim) is decreasing “due to human destruction” could very easily become more that one type of fallacy, if it isn’t one already.
4. Maybe Environmentalists Are to Blame
Our notion of modern environmentalism, which has born a number of political powers that have changed numerous laws, started really in the 60s and 70s, or roughly 30 to 50 years ago. If we’re going to go with the logic of “A happened, then B happened; therefore, A caused B,” we might also be able to use it here. What then?
5. Vertebrates Only
It’s interesting that the Living Planet Index is making statements about all species on our planet, when the LPI only handles information about vertebrate species–in other words, the minority of life on our planet–and only about 1,300 of those (another minority), at that. There are many invertebrate species; according to Encarta, via wiki, they account for 97% of all species on our planet. Whether that’s accurate or not, it appears their existence or extinction wasn’t actually important enough to make it into a statement about all Earth’s life, at least not with any factual basis, that is.
6. Self-Loathing
Do these statistics include the species that are, for all our knowledge at present, dying out naturally? If so, it seems a bit harsh and self-loathing to accuse humans of that.
7. Sometimes Natural
Mathematically speaking, it’s not abnormal to see lots of extinction or spikes of it that might be perceived by humans that don’t live long as being abnormal. See here for easy to understand graphs proving this.
8. Questionable Ethics in Reporting
The article states that similar conclusions and statistics have been found by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and suggests that the Global Footprint Network (GFN). This is really no surprise, as even though the article alludes that the ZSL is separate from the LPI, it is actually the group that maintains the Planet Index, so it’s hardly any shocker that the statistics of the ZSL are the same as those the LPI found. The GFN is a group that sets international standards for how to go about collecting data and determining ecological footprint information, so it makes sense, too, that they would come to similar conclusions and nearly similar statistics themselves. Either NaturalNews has some seriously unethical reporting practices, or the WWF, ZSL, LPI and GFN are all trying to seem like much more separate entities than they sometimes are.
9. Possible Political Agendas
The World Wide Fund for Nature, which is behind the LPI, has two solutions for this problem: sustainable living and shrink and share. The latter is described as such: “If the global community agrees in principle, decisions are then needed on how much to shrink its footprint, and how this reduction in aggregate human demand is to be shared between individuals and populations. Possible allocation strategies could include an absolute allotment of footprint shares, or an initial distribution of rights or permits to consume, which could then be traded between individuals, nations, or regions.” These ideologies seem vaguely familiar somehow. Oh, yes, Communism and Socialism.
10. Critical Thinking
Information is worth little if the information found is never thought about critically.
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