SciAm video whiffs it on this extinction event

Smilodon at the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits

Kitty. Victim of the late-Cenozoic extinction at the Page Museum in Los Angeles.

I usually like Scientific American’s short science explainer videos, but this one — Instant Egghead – Are We Facing the Sixth Mass Extinction?” — bothers me for a few reasons.

Fred Guterl starts off by saying that we don’t know yet whether our current extinction event qualifies as a “mass extinction.” It’s a bit of a semantic question, as the threshold for what constitutes a mass extinction is debated, and some rankings put different events in the top five. But let’s just take Guterl’s statement as meaning “we don’t know whether this current extinction is as big as the really big ones we’ve had in the past.” It’s an excellent point. It’s become received wisdom among a certain crowd that we’re facing Big Dieoff 6.0, and reminders that this isn’t necessarily any worse an event than, say, the extinctions at the end of the Eocene are always good. Not that the end-Eocene extinctions were a kitten romp.

The video goes off rather quickly, though, starting with the quick “citation” of a UNEP estimate of up to 200 species extinctions per day, which seems to have been taken urban legend style from an estimate Norman Myers made in the 1970s. Myers gave the range as 50-200, and he was saying 50 in 2006. We’ve seen a lot of estimates by different biologists. In 1993 E.O. Wilson offered an estimate of 30,000 species per year going extinct, about 85 a day. It depends on what models you use, and those models are the topic of debate.

Still, that’s more an editing quibble than anything. Few maintain that species aren’t going extinct faster than is “usual” for the Cenozoic.

There are a couple other WTF moments in the video, chief among them the statement that the end-Permian extinction was caused by Siberian lava flows igniting large coal deposits, creating a atmospheric CO2 spike “on the order of what we’re seeing today.” There’s certainly lots of evidence to support the idea, but it’s not a slam dunk, and other mechanisms remain possible.

There’s also an interesting mention of passenger pigeons that goes nowhere. In the context of species extinction rate models Guterl mentions that there was a population of billions of passenger pigeons in North America for who knows how many millions of years, and yet only two fossils of the species are known. And then he drops it, not explaining the fact’s relevance. I mean, I got there, and you probably did too — it implies that for each species we know went extinct back in the day, there were likely many we don’t know of whose fossils we have not yet found. What that implies in terms of past extinction rates I’m not sure: it’scertain that species we don’t know of  went extinct and aren’t counted in the totals, but it would seem equally plausible that species we don’t know about survived the extinctions of the past, or that species we do know about that we now count as victims of mass extinctions actually survived those extinctions but left no trace for a few millon years afterward. Perhaps someone here with a better understanding of paleontology can help me out with this. In any event, it would have been nice to have Guterl finish his thought there.

My biggest problem with the video, though, is in Guterl’s suggestion that our changing the atmosphere’s composition — referring to the end-Permian extinction, as well as the “Great Oxygenation” of the Paleoproterozoic — is what’s got scientists worried about mass extinction these days, given that we happen to be adding CO2 to the atmosphere faster than the Siberian Traps did 252 million years ago. And scientists are indeed worried about the effects of climate change on biodiversity.

But scientists working on studying and preserving biodiversity — which after all is the positive way of saying “not having a mass extinction’ — are worried about a whole lot more than climate change. We could completely solve the atmospheric CO2 overburden on Tuesday and still be faced with an extinction crisis as we plow up grasslands, cut down forests, bottom-trawl the oceans, and build new sprawling cities on land that once supported wildlife.

The IUCN identifies habitat loss as the main threat to 85% of the species it lists as “Threatened” or “Endangered” on its Red List. The Red List includes 391 terrestrial plant species of all threat levels described as potentially threatened by climate change or severe weather, compared to 5,582  that may be threatened by human disruption of their habitat. The equivalent numbers for terrestrial animal species are 1,991 potentially threatened by climate change and 13,388 by habitat disruption.

There are errors inherent in the IUCN data that stem mainly from lack of resources to assess species, but the implication is clear. Climate change is thought to pose a serious threat to many species. Human-caused habitat disruption is likely a more serious threat.

One of the problems I have with the mainstream environmental movement these days is that “environmental protection” has been conflated with “climate change mitigation.” You can search environmental publications in vain for a long time for mentions of other issues. When I started editing environmentalist publications in 1992 — the year of the first Earth Summit, in Rio — public attention was about evenly divided between the importance of preserving biodiversity and the threat of climate change. You can see evidence of this in the newly revamped Google Ngram viewer, by comparing mentions of the relevant phrases in books archived by Google as a function of time:

Expressed as a percentage of text in all books in the database, “biodiversity” peaks relative to “climate change” in 1997, then actually starts to decline in 2003. “Climate change” gains the lead the year the Al Gore’s movie came out. Google’s data runs until 2008. My personal anecdata would suggest that the lead “climate change” started developing in 2006 probably grew dramatically after 2009, with biodiversity likely to catch up a little bit sometime next year due to renewed attention to the issue on the UN front.

The point is that environment has become synonymous with climate in many minds. Thinking of biodiversity as of secondary importance (at best) to climate change has resulted in proposals to stem climate change that would actually harm biodiversity. They include everything from seeding oceans with iron to cutting down rainforests for biofuel soy plantations to siting utility-scale solar plants on intact and biodiverse desert habitat when there are former alfalfa farms in the neighborhood.

By mentioning only climate change in a video that purports to address whether we’re facing a mass extinction, Scientific American helps promote this emphasis on climate change — which is obviously a huge threat — to the exclusion of the greater causes of current extinctions. Yes, it’s a video lasting less than three minutes, but one could easily mention agricultural conversion and overfishing and forest clearcutting in a short video. They aren’t complicated concepts.

By all means, SciAm should rail against climate change. SciAm should persuade people to look at their carbon footprints, to demand changes in the way we run our industrial society, and to challenge the idiots in charge who’d deny any climate problem exists. But this was supposed to be a video on the current extinction event, and you somehow failed to mention the larger causes of that extinction. That does a disservice to SciAm’s viewers — and to the science.

Greta Christina could use your help

UPDATE: Greta says people have responded so generously that she doesn’t need more donations. But go wish her well if you haven’t already.

Our friend and colleague Greta Christina, on the heels of losing her father, just got handed some scary bad news:

The bad news is that I was just diagnosed with endometrial cancer. I got the initial biopsy results Saturday, and met with the oncologist Tuesday.

The good news about the bad news: To the degree that there is a “good” kind of cancer, this is the good kind: well-differentiated cells, Class 1, in a body part that I have no great need of and am fine with having removed. But it’s still, you know, cancer.

Greta is one of those people who’s always looking out for other folks; since I’ve started reading her I’ve seen her lend her voice to help a number of people who are having tough times. (I was one of those people this year, dealing with misfortune not even in the same league as what’s Greta’s been handed, but she helped me anyway.)

It’s her turn now. At her blog, she spells out a few ways people can help her get through the next couple of months. But if you’re in a hurry, here’s the shortcut: you can toss her some cash you’re not using here,  or sign up for a year’s worth of monthly $5.00 donations here. PayPal links aren’t working due to session data, it would seem, but you can get there via Greta’s post.

And as long as I have the microphone in my hand, knowing that with this readership chances are high that someone else reading this is facing something similar, here’s something to read on surviving cancer that’s helped quite a few people I know when they needed some calm reason and math.

It has come to this?

I worry a little bit about the direction research funding is going. It’s shrinking, and people are looking for creative methods to fund basic research — like this crowd-sourced project to study the neuropharmacology of amphetamines. It looks like a worthy effort and I wish the investigator well, but whoa, where are we going? Are researchers going to have to sing and dance on street corners with their hats out to eke out funds to support their obscure and esoteric efforts?

It’s also going to skew funding in new ways (not that our existing methods don’t bias the directions research takes). Which would you throw a few dollars at: biomedical research into human mental health, or a pure science project to study bone morphology in some species of herps?

But don’t let my general reservations hinder you: if you think the work looks cool, help them out.

Getting water from a stone

That’s what it looks like in Rancho Santa Margarita, Orange County, California. It’s a lovely suburb if you swing that way, I suppose. It’s fairly affluent. Median household income in 2007 was just over 95K, according to the usual completely unimpeachable sources, and the percentage of RSM residents living at or below the poverty line is less than 3%.

RSM is also described by the above-mentioned unimpeachable source as having had phenomenal growth in population during the 1990s. The city went from around 11,000 residents to more than 47,000. But the following decade was different. Between 2000 and 2010, RSM added fewer than 1,000 new residents to its Homeowners Association’s membership rolls. That’s not a situation anyone wants, as long as you define “anyone” as “developers.”

The problem is water. RSM is in southern Orange County. Southern Orange county doesn’t have enough groundwater for the people who already live there: there’s no way it can make those needed further 300% increases in its population without finding some.

And so the Santa Margarita Water District is very interested in whatever water they can find. And right now they think they’ve found some.

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Paper describes cost of biodiversity, though not its value

Pika

Any excuse to post a photo of a pika is a good one.

This is interesting: a new paper in Science purports to chart the cost of protecting what’s left of the world’s biodiversity, and the figure seems be eliciting gasps:

We estimate the cost of reducing the extinction risk of all globally threatened bird species (by ≥1 IUCN Red List category) to be US$0.875-1.23 billion annually over the next decade, of which 12% is currently funded. Incorporating threatened non-avian species increases this total to US$3.41-$4.76 billion annually. We estimate that protecting and effectively managing all terrestrial sites of global avian conservation significance (11,731 Important Bird Areas) would cost US$65.1 billion annually. Adding sites for other taxa increases this to US$76.1 billion annually. Meeting these targets will require conservation funding to increase by at least an order of magnitude.

I haven’t taken a look at the methodology, what with being on the wrong side of the JSTOR Curtain, but a reviewer quoted by Daniel Cressey in Nature’s article on the paper has said the work seems “smart,” though he does point out that its scope is limited.

Henrique Pereira, who works on international conservation issues at the University of Lisbon in Portugal, says that although there are uncertainties inherent in extrapolating from birds to all species, the work is an “extremely smart paper”. “For the first time we have an estimate of how much these targets will cost,” he says. “For any negotiations that occur over the next few years [on CBD targets], these numbers can be used as a reference.” But Pereira also points out that the figure is for just two of the 20 targets agreed by the CBD. “If you look at the range of targets for 2020, the total bill will be higher,” he says.

If the paper’s emphasis is on protecting habitat, as the abstract and the Nature coverage seems to indicate, then there are a few issues unaccounted for. The North American pika, for instance, is in trouble — and not because its habitat isn’t legally protected. Of course in the absence of a copy of the full paper I really can’t do anything but armwave on its possible limitations. [Edit: I now have a copy. thanks!]

But writer Daniel Cressey’s angle on the $76 billion figure in his news piece in Nature is interesting. His lede:

Protecting all the world’s threatened species will cost around US$4 billion a year…. If that number is not staggering enough, the scientists behind the work also report that effectively conserving the significant areas these species live in could rack up a bill of more than $76 billion a year.

Cressey does include a quote from study leader Stuart Butchart mentioning what we get back from protecting that biodiversity, including things like pollination services (estimated at $2 billion) and carbon sequestration ($6 billion), Butchart also mentions that $76 billion isn’t a huge amount given what we as a species spend on other things.

An example: the world plowed $1.74 trillion into military expenditures in 2011, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. $76 billion is a scoche more than 4% of that.

Or, for a less obvious example, $76 billion spent worldwide to conserve biodiversity is a significantly lower amount than tourists spent in California in 2011, according to one estimate. A person with access to surveys could tease out how much of that gross income would disappear if California lost its biodiversity; at least some of those tourists came to see the redwoods and the Joshua trees.

Newsweek panders to the deluded again

I’ve got to wonder who is responsible for this nonsense, and how it gets past the staff at Newsweek. Every once in a while, they’ve just got to put up a garish cover story touting the reality of Christian doctrine, and invariably, the whole story is garbage. This time around, the claim is proof of life after death, in Heaven Is Real: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife. This time, we have a real-live doctor who has worked at many prestigious institutions, as we are reminded several times in the story, whose brain was shut down and who then recites an elaborate fantasy of visiting heaven.

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