Chris Morrison
Two independent groups of scientists have refuted the always-improbable claim that vertebrates across the planet have declined by 69% since 1970. The median claim was made by the Wildlife Fund. World (WWF) and Zoological Society of London (ZSL). It is a fundamental ecological and climate scare story that is repeated endlessly in the mainstream media and broadcast everywhere from UN platforms to classrooms in school. A team of Canadian biologists have shown that this number is a bizarre statistic. They revealed that the estimate was driven by 2.4% of wildlife populations, adding, “Excluding these extremely declining populations, the global trend switch to increase.”
The terrifying 69% is included in the Living Planet Index (LPI) compiled by WWF and ZSL. The the last two years The report was published late last year to coincide with the COP15 Biodiversity Summit in Montreal and declared the decline as “the average decrease in the number of species between 1970 and 2018.” . Comment on its report, ZSL says one million species of plants and animals are threatened with extinction. The joint report is said to have looked at 32,000 animal populations from more than 5,000 species.
The report is highly political, arguing for a complete transformation of society. It is thought that the planet is in the midst of a biodiversity and climate crisis, and we have one last chance to act. “A positive future with nature requires change – changing the game – changing how we produce, how we consume, how we manage and what we fund. We hope it inspires you to be a part of that change,” the authors said. Less inspiring might be the message that 2.4% of vertebrate populations are underperforming right now – that’s nature, it happens – but the rest are just dandy people on average. .
The latest debunking of this cherished green scare is yet another bad news for climate disaster advocates looking for publicity. Introducing the LPI report, ZSL also notes that a 0.3°C increase in temperature would result in the loss of up to 90% of warm water corals, a threat that looked very ‘decades ago’ about it, due to corals in the Atlantic Ocean. Coral Reef and other places rarely in better shape. The slow recovery of Arctic ice, including the Greenland ice shelf, stable global surface temperatures and an increasing number of polar bears hunting seals, have all added to the recent misery.
The essence of the debunking scientists’ argument is that trying to distill different population trends into a single global index distorts the picture. Straight-line averaging between populations is strongly influenced by outliers or extremes. For example, biologists give a hypothetical situation in which one animal population decreases by 99%, while a second population increases 50-fold, or 393 populations increase by 1%. In this scenario, the geometric mean – figures used by WWF and ZSL – would show a catastrophic reduction of 50%.
This work was carried out by Canadian biologists ahead of the last 2022 LPI report. The dotted line above represents the overall stability of the population. The red line shows an average reduction of 50% across all populations, but the removal of only 2.4% of individual populations creates a positive trend. The scientists observed that such collapsing clusters require different conservation measures than the collapsing clusters common across the planet. But such a delicate understanding of centralized conservation measures is entirely absent from the optimistic view spread throughout politics and the media that the planet and climate are mortally threatened. and urgent collectivist Net Zero measures must be taken immediately.
Calculating extreme clusters “fundamentally changes the interpretation of global vertebrate trends,” the scientists say. The sensitivity of global average trends to outliers, they added, “suggests the need for more informative indicators”.
Last month, a group of Finnish biologists participate in scientific competition on the Index and note that statistical calculations preclude any simple interpretation of variation in animal abundance. The LPI measure is biased downwards because the ratio is measured, not the actual abundance. In fact, the more populations differ in their rates of increase or decrease, the more “LPI tends to decline as a measure of abundance.” Worse, the scientists go on to show that past downward trends are factored into future calculations, as previous index values are multiplied by the current index. In general, Finnish scientists deal with outliers identified by Canadians, but observe that the problem with the LPI method “is deeper than that and cannot be solved by removing the trends.” extreme population from analysis”.
The LPI attracted wide publicity and it was also used as an indicator for international negotiations in the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). They conclude: “We urge scientists who have used the LPI approach to scrutinize the conclusions of their work and those who are negotiating future indicators for the UN CBD to seriously consider them. take care of the interpretation of the LPI”.
Chris Morrison is daily skepticismEnvironment Editor’s.
Related
