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Mass Species Extinction Is Fake News, Says Greenpeace Co-Founder Patrick Moore

James Delingpoleby James Delingpole

Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore has testified to Congress on the imminent Sixth Great Extinction predicted in a recent UN report. His verdict could hardly be more devastating to the cause of environmental alarmism: he says there is no evidence to support these doomsday predictions whatsoever.

Moore – whose role in co-founding Greenpeace is so embarrassing to the organisation that it has tried to airbrush him out of its history – was appearing as a witness before the House Subcommittee on Water, Oceans and Wildlife.

He told the Democrat-led committee that the UN’s Global Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IBPES) was merely a “front for a radical political, social, and economic transformation of our entire civilization”.

“As with the manufactured “climate crisis” they are using the specter of mass extinction as a fear tactic to scare the public into compliance. The IBPES itself is an existential threat to sensible policy on biodiversity conservation.”

The IBPES report was released earlier this month and widely covered in the mainstream media. It warned a million species are threatened with extinction.

But Moore told the committee this claim was nonsense.

The IBPES claims there are 8 million species. Yet only 1.8 million species have been identified and named. Thus the IBPES believes there are 6.2 million unidentified and unnamed species. Therefore one million of the unknown species could go extinct overnight and we would not notice it because we would not know they had existed.

This is highly unprofessional. Scientists should not, in fact cannot, predict estimates of endangered species or species extinction based on millions of undocumented species.

There are three main ways in which humans have caused species to go extinct, Moore explained:

  1. Overhunting for food and purposeful eradication of pests. The dodo bird on Mauritius, the passenger pigeon, the Carolinian parakeet in the US south, and the mastodon are typical examples
  2. Massive clearing of native ecosystems for food and fiber production. Vast fields of corn are grown for biofuel due to “green” priorities. Equally vast expanses of land have been converted to palm oil plantations for biodiesel. The same is true of massive solar farms covering land that could be rich in native species. These policies should be reconsidered.
  3. The introduction of exotic predators, such as rats, cats, foxes and snakes, especially on islands where this has been the greatest cause of extinction in recent centuries. This has abated somewhat as particularly vulnerable species are already extinct and those remaining are either not vulnerable or are protected by programs aimed at their survival and recovery.

Moore is quite right, though he arguably missed a trick. The two biggest human threats to wildlife in the last century have been a) Communists and b) Environmentalists.

It was communists – specifically the Soviets – which came close to driving whales to extinction in the last century.

This has been little understood (most people thought it was the Japanese) until the publication of a fascinating 2017 article in the Pacific Standard describing what the author Charles Homans called The Most Senseless Environmental Crime of the 20th Century.

Homans was talking about the massacre of 180,000 whales by the Soviet whaling fleet (in violation of international treaties which, even before the 1986 whaling ban, gave whaling nations limited quotas).

What makes the massacre so bizarre is that the Soviets had little demand or use for whale produce. It was almost as if they were killing the whales for the sake of it. As indeed they were…

full story at https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/05/23/greenpeace-co-founder-patrick-moore-species-extinction-is-fake-news/

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