We’ve been told over and over that species are rapidly dying off due to human-caused climate change. But it just isn’t true.

Prominent research studies have suggested that our planet is currently experiencing another mass extinction, based on extrapolating extinctions from the past 500 years into the future and the idea that extinction rates are rapidly accelerating.

A new study by Kristen Saban and John Wiens with the University of Arizona Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, however, revealed that over the last 500 years extinctions in plants, arthropods and land vertebrates peaked about 100 years ago and have declined since then. Furthermore, the researchers found that the past extinctions underlying these forecasts were mostly caused by invasive species on islands and are not the most important current threat, which is the destruction of natural habitats.  

The paper argues that claims of a current mass extinction may rest on shaky assumptions when projecting data from past extinctions into the future, ignoring differences in factors driving extinctions in the past, the present and the future. Published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, the paper is the first study to analyze rates, patterns and causes of recent extinctions across plant and animal species.

In reality, the University of Arizona study has nothing to do with climate change. But it points out past recent extinction rates were overstated and due to invasive species on islands, not the most important current threat, which is the destruction of natural habitats.

However, the media is still undaunted in continuing to link extinctions to human-caused climate change.

While conservation efforts have helped get green sea turtles off the red list, climate change is pushing other species towards extinction.

The hooded seal, for example, has dropped from “vulnerable” to “endangered” on the IUCN list, while the bearded and harp seal have both been reclassified from “least concern” to “near threatened”.

Sea ice loss accelerated by rising temperatures has been identified as the “primary threat” to the arctic seals, triggering difficulties for the species to breed, rest and feed on ice sheets.

“Climate change is not a distant problem – it has been unfolding for decades and is having impacts here and now,” says Dr Kit Kovacs of IUCN.

An interview published in 2017 for The Atlantic, paleontologist Doug Erwin pointed out assertions about extinctions are junk science:

“People who claim we’re in the sixth mass extinction don’t understand enough about mass extinctions to understand the logical flaw in their argument,” he said. “To a certain extent they’re claiming it as a way of frightening people into action, when in fact, if it’s actually true we’re in a sixth mass extinction, then there’s no point in conservation biology.”

This is because by the time a mass extinction starts, the world would already be over.

“So if we really are in the middle of a mass extinction,” I started, “it wouldn’t be a matter of saving tigers and elephants.”

“Right, you probably have to worry about saving coyotes and rats.

“It’s a network collapse problem,” he said. “Just like power grids. Network dynamics research has been getting a ton of money from DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency]. They’re all physicists studying it, who don’t care about power grids or ecosystems, they care about math. So the secret about power grids is that nobody actually knows how they work. And it’s exactly the same problem you have in ecosystems.

“I think that if we keep things up long enough, we’ll get to a mass extinction, but we’re not in a mass extinction yet, and I think that’s an optimistic discovery because that means we actually have time to avoid Armageddon,” he said.

Dr. Erwin made these remarks in response to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences headed by ecology professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Gerardo Ceballos in which one of his co-authors was none other than Stanford University biologist Dr. Paul Ehrlich of The Population Bomb fame.

Sadly, some species are bound to go extinct. Throughout history, organisms have lived, adapted, migrated to new habitats, or perished in response to shifting climates and environments. This is a fundamental part of nature and life on Earth, and it is not primarily—or even mainly—caused by human activity.

PHOTO CREDIT: Free Images.