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A professor famous for predicting the imminent demise of the human race at regular intervals since the 1970s has predicted the imminent demise of the human race.
Paul Ehrlich, who is the Bing Professor of Population Studies at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, says it's definitely on this time. In a tinned statement issued on Friday, the arm-waving prof lays it on the line:
There is no longer any doubt: We are entering a mass extinction that threatens humanity's existence ... the window of opportunity is rapidly closing ...
"[The study] shows without any significant doubt that we are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event," Ehrlich said ...
"If it is allowed to continue, life would take many millions of years to recover, and our species itself would likely disappear early on," said lead author Gerardo Ceballos.
The original article can be found at The Register, with coverage of the cited study coming from ScienceMag.org
Original Submission
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2015, @04:37PM
From the supplement:
Then you can check supp table 2 to see they think current extinction rate are ~8 times higher than background. Above they say that studies in the 1990s underestimated background extinction by 2-20x. So all we need is the same thing to happen again and this threat will disappear.
Anyway this model is exceedingly simple (constant extinction rate over time and for different types of animals) and they make no effort to describe what kind of distribution around that value to expect. Thier whole idea is that positive feedbacks occur, so it will not be a simple poisson uncertainty, the variance will be greater.
So, thier analysis does not even guess at how likely the current rates are given thier baseline model, yet they find the evidence for a mass extinction to be "incontrovertable". They may be onto something but this report is hyped up crap.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2015, @04:57PM
Same AC. Here is the press release that Ehlrich quote in the OP comes from:
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/june/mass-extinction-ehrlich-061915.html [stanford.edu]
If you read the paper you see this is blatently false. And thats from the university's PR team.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2015, @05:10PM
"It's a Crisis! We must Take Drastic Action!" - always be wary of these words, they are followed by phrases like, "Here is our Final Solution for the Jewish problem" or "Well, there were no WMDs after all".
While this one doomsayer lies with statistics others are also working on a depopulation agenda -- A "Final Solution" for humanity. Any crisis is being roped into said agenda from Climate Change to food shortage. Given that consent of world religions is needed, and that Catholics are against reproduction limitations, their solution to Humanity will likely be a bloody solution.
Rather than race to the stars and develop sustainable systems for survival beyond Earth which will then directly benefit Earth too, we'll simply call for other drastic action to be taken, ones that are no cheaper and consume even more resources, such as a world war.
If the doomsayers aren't propagandists, they're being used by them. Mark my words, the next global skirmish will be fought on the premise of sustainability for the purpose of population reduction.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2015, @05:29PM
I dunno, I guess scientific skills are different from rhetorical and political skills, but this paper is exceptionally incompetent (no variance component of your baseline model at all, even just a normal error distribution? And the lack of model fit is incontrovertable evidence of mass extinctions? Seriously?). I have trouble believing the people involved are part of some larger plan that has any chance of success. They will mess it up, whatever it is.
What they are accomplishing is to destroy any credibility associated with the word science.