Tai-Chi Policy

Sir Mungus pointed me towards some hilariously bad math at over at the New Scientist Environment page, specifically the page about animal extinctions, or this one that links there saying, “More than a third of species face extinction.” According to the article about animal extinctions,

“Overall, 16,119 animal and plant species are in danger of extinction, including 1 in 8 birds, 1 in 4 mammals and 1 in 3 amphibian species. Since records began, 784 species have been declared extinct.”

Now, assuming there’s no class of animals worse than amphibians, how are even a third of species facing extinction? The top of the very same page says two out of every five species face extinction, which is even more than a third?

And this doesn’t even begin to address some of the practical questions one could ask about this article. For instance, another thing Sir Mungus did the favor of pointing out, beetles, one of the notably most survivable of animal groups, account for 40% of the number of species on the planets, with the rest of the insect family accounting for another 40%. Is New Scientist saying that that huge diversity of beetles and insects is at risk? If not, how do they arrive at any number greater than 7% of all species?

Or, leaving the numbers, we could turn our attention to the cause, which they’re inferring is climate change. First of all, Brazil and Indonesia, the two countries that have the most biodiversity in the world (The Amazon river, for instance, has more species of fish than the Atlantic Ocean, and Indonesia contains a similarly impressive percentage of fish and land animal species), are also two countries known to be industrializing themselves with little regard to their environments. Might that have just a wee bit more to do with the percentage of species under threat than some climate change that we’re not even supposed to feel for 50 more years?

Or what about the polar bears, the population of which has gone up, not down in the past 50 years, just as the temperature of the earth has? If it’s gone up, why do they keep getting mentioned? I think it’s because they’re cute and fluffy.

For some other global warming hilarity, you can now buy carbon debits to offset other people’s carbon credits — and then a t-shirt to say what you did.

Also, Greenpeace is going to be building an ark on Mt. Ararat.