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By Jo Nova
If man made CO2 emissions have any effect at all on extinctions — it stops them happening
New research looked at 500 years worth of extinctions and concludes that species loss peaked about a century ago. Far from the rate accelerating as we pour carbon dioxide into the sky, fewer species are disappearing now than forty or fifty years ago.
Kristen Saban and John Wiens considered data on as many as two million species. They specifically analyzed some 912 plants and animals that became extinct in the last 500 years.
Many of the doom and gloom forecasts took extinction rates from long ago and extrapolated them mindlessly forward, as climate modelers are want to do.
Extinction rates have slowed across many plant and animal groups, study shows
EurekaAlert
“To our surprise, past extinctions are weak and unreliable predictors of the current risk that any given group of animals or plants is facing,” said lead author Saban, who recently graduated from the U of A and is currently a doctoral student at Harvard University.
Humans have wiped out species, but mostly by bringing in rats, pigs and goats to isolated islands:
December 13th, 2025 | Tags: Biodiversity, Biology, Evidence, Extinction | Category: Global Warming |  Print This Post | |
By Jo Nova
Rich nations protect the Earth
Despite the UN blaming the rich nations for destroying the planet, the data shows that wealthy nations have cleaner air and water and less deforestation.
A team at Yale compile a score called the Environmental Performance Indicator. It tracks 58 factors like biodiversity, species protection, particulates in air, pollution in water, forest integrity and fish stocks. It also, sadly, considers “climate change mitigation” measures — which no doubt adds some pointless noise to the line. But the underlying trend is clear. The only countries in the highest ranks of Environmental Performance are the ones with a GDP per capita higher than $30,000 US.
Possibly the best thing we could do for the environment is help poor nations grow their own economy. And the stupidest thing we could do is push unreliable energy onto the third world and deprive them of coal plants “for the sake of the environment”.
https://epi.yale.edu/
Obviously, anyone can raze a forest, and throw rubbish in the river, but it costs money to protect trees and plants, clean up waste, and filter factory chimneys. People who are hungry understandably, don’t care much about setting up […]
The Red Sea
By Jo Nova
Corals around the world stopped growing in 2000BC and the pause lasted two thousand years before they returned like the Phoenix.
Each polyp might be fragile, but coral ecosystems are the couch-grass of the oceans.
A new paper rather puts the man-made panic about corals into perspective.
The most terrible events that could happen to corals have already happened, and the corals appear able to bide their time for two thousand years and return in all their glory.
The worst thing for the worlds corals is not rising seas but falling ones.
We panic over the odd bit of bleaching here and there, but it’s nothing compared to mother nature. The shallow edges of the oceans of the world are savage places. And the best place to study this mayhem is the Red Sea. Not only is it hot, but long, thin, deep, and it’s tectonically active too. In the depths of the last ice age, it was cut off from the Indian Ocean and the salinity rose to a death defying 47% at the Southern end, and 57% in the north. For thousands of years, the Red Sea was pickled.
When […]
Art by NoName_13
By Jo Nova
The prophesy of the Sixth Mass extinction has popped up again with hyperbolic modelling to scare us out of our money and just in time for a UN convention. As Steve Milloy says it’s just a giant land and power grab by the UN, which has just finished another meeting for “Biodiversity” — it’s the Baby-IPCC for biology. It was co-hosted by Canada and China. They couldn’t even be bothered thinking up a new acronym so it was called COP15. Rinse, repeat, and press go for spin.
Journalists can cut-n’-paste the formula and adjectives from the IPCC climate press releases: blah etc blah, …close to 200 countries reached “a watershed agreement to stem the loss of nature worldwide” (but not the US). Somehow the “bleary eyed delegates” (who arrived in jets), have waved their magic wands and cast a spell to save the Earth. The solution, apparently, is for the rest of us not to use about a third of our own country, or something like that. The UN bureaucrats can decide what use is OK, and punish us with threats of “endangered listings” if we don’t spend enough on their […]
By Jo Nova
Kap København is almost the closest point there is to the North Pole on dry land.
The survival of some DNA for two million years is astounding all of itself — breaking the record for oldest known DNA by nearly a million years. Before this, the oldest DNA was thought to be 1.2 million years — beyond which all the global DNA of all the species that ever lived was assumed to be dissolved into unreadable mush.
But now we have found enough of the ancient code to identify a whole ecosystem on the northern edge of Greenland that no one expected to find. Apparently giant elephant-like Mastodons were wandering the far northern parts of Greenland — practically as close as they could get to the North pole without swimming.
At the time, the world was not just 1.5 catastrophic degrees warmer than today, but a full nuclear 10 to 17 degrees hotter.
Strangely life on Earth wasn’t suffering the sixth mass extinction.
Discovery of world’s oldest DNA breaks record by one million years
ScienceDaily
The incomplete samples, a few millionths of a millimetre long, were taken from the København Formation, […]
Since Europeans arrived Koalas have been booming and busting
The calls were out this week saying that koalas will be extinct in New South Wales in 30 years. But they didn’t mention that Koalas thrive and multiply so fast that in the right conditions scientists talk of ‘plagues’. On Kangaroo Island last year, there were so many koalas, the South Australian government has been trying to sterilize or relocate thousands of them over the last twenty years. Periodically scientists even discuss whether we have to cull them (the horror!).
They’ve survived twenty megafires in 200 years. They can recover. Ponder that Koalas were only introduced to Kangaroo Island in the 1930’s but by the 1990’s there were 14,000 of them and even though they are considered a tourism asset they are also considered a problem and pest too.
“Nearly everything you have read or heard about koalas, is wrong” — Vic Jurskis
Koalas favorite snack | Photo by pen_ash
Vic Jurskis is a veteran forester and fire expert who studied them for years. He’s written The Great Koala Scam, Green propaganda, junk science government waste and cruelty.
Jurskis estimates that thanks to European settlers there are more […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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