Surfing The Sixth Wave
18 hours agoWillis Eschenbach97 Comments
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I keep reading about how we’re already well into the “Sixth Wave Of Extinctions”. Now, I’ve studied this question extensively. I started back in 2010 with a post called “Where Are The Corpses“, in which I looked at the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species and found that contrary to the “Sixth Wave” hype, 95% of mammal and bird extinctions occurred on islands and in Australia, where they were due to humans introducing new “alien” species after millennia of isolation.
Craig Loehle got in touch with me and proposed that we turn it into a paper for the journals. He did the writing and I did the numbers, because I feel like I have to give myself a lobotomy to write in the dense boring style favored by the journals. He did an excellent job and shepherded it through the publication process, for which he has my eternal gratitude. It’s published in Diversity and Distributions as “Historical bird and terrestrial mammal extinction rates and causes“, and it’s gotten over 150 citations in the journals.
But of course, the alarmism continued. Folks said things like ‘But Willis, you only looked at mammals and birds. The Living Planet Index says there’s been a 70% reduction in the numbers of vertebrate species since 1970’.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/01/23/surfing-the-sixth-wave/
