Tonight, as soon as the standoff on war funding ended. Pace and Gates quoted about planning for scaling back combat role and reducing the number of troops in Iraq to support role. I was pretty sure it was a constitutional fight for the president and a big show for Dems, as Maliki was saying that Iraqis would be ready to take over in October.
"We are indeed experiencing the greatest wave of extinctions since the disappearance of the dinosaurs," said Ahmed Djoghlaf, head of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity. Dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago, perhaps after a meteorite struck.
"Extinction rates are rising by a factor of up to 1,000 above natural rates. Every hour, three species disappear. Every day, up to 150 species are lost. Every year, between 18,000 and 55,000 species become extinct," he said.
"The cause: human activities."
A "Red List" of endangered species, however, lists only 784 species driven to extinction since 1500--ranging from the dodo bird of Mauritius to the golden toad of Costa Rica.
Craig Hilton-Taylor, manager of the list compiled by the World Conservation Union grouping 83 governments as well as scientists and environmental organizations, said the hugely varying figures might both be right, in their way.
"The U.N. figures are based on loss of habitats, estimates of how many species lived there and so will have been lost," he told Reuters. "Ours are more empirical--those species we knew were there but cannot find."
The U.N. estimate has a pretty wide margin for error, but let's take three species an hour, which amounts to 26,298 species a year, as a middling estimate. The U.N. is claiming that 33.5 times as many species go extinct every year as the WCU says have gone extinct in the past 507 years.
Or, to put it another way, the U.N. estimates three species an hour, or 26,298 a year, go extinct. The WCU estimate amounts to 0.00018 species an hour or 1.54 species a year. The difference is four orders of magnitude!
And you have to love the way Hilton-Taylor damns the U.N. with faint praise. "Ours are more empirical"--in other words, ours are based on fact, whereas the U.N. just makes stuff up.
So how does Reuters report this? Under the headline "U.N. Urges World to Slow Extinctions: 3 Each Hour." The first paragraph:
Human activities are wiping out three animal or plant species every hour and the world must do more to slow the worst spate of extinctions since the dinosaurs by 2010, the United Nations said on Tuesday.
Not until the ninth paragraph do we learn that the U.N.'s numbers are quite possibly bogus. That actually turns out to be a pretty good story, whereas "U.N. Issues Alarmist Report on Environment" is dog-bites-man if anything is. So not only are the Reutervillians allowing their political prejudices to show; they don't even have any news judgment.
Actually, this critique of the UN "species are all dying" portion of Taranto's article is just as interesting as the Edward's portion.
Four orders of magnitude difference in the figures, but "...both might be right, in their own way."... LOL ... I don't know why anybody believes these liberal maroons.