Just when you thought the hyped-up rhetoric among climate alarmists couldn’t get any more shrill, a report has declared that a new era of “biological annihilation” is already underway on earth.
The study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, claims that an epoch of mass extinction is upon us, with a “global epidemic” in animal populations signaling an “ongoing sixth mass extinction” caused in large measure by human destruction of animal habitats and exacerbated by human-induced “climate disruption.”
“Our data indicate that beyond global species extinctions Earth is experiencing a huge episode of population declines and extirpations, which will have negative cascading consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustaining civilization,” the study breathlessly reports. “We describe this as a ‘biological annihilation’ to highlight the current magnitude of Earth’s ongoing sixth major extinction event.”
In a fascinating bit of irony, Gerardo Ceballos, the leader of the study, has insisted that the authors “are not alarmists” despite the fact that one of his co-authors, Dr. Paul Ehrlich, is probably the best known—and most discredited—alarmist of all time.
Ehrlich became famous through the publication of his 1968 doomsday bestseller, The Population Bomb, which generated mass hysteria over the future of the world and the earth’s ability to sustain human life.
In the book, Ehrlich floated a series of dire predictions that turned out to be spectacularly wrong, creating the enduring myth of unsustainable population growth.
He prophesied that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s (and that 65 million of them would be Americans), that already-overpopulated India was doomed, and that there was a very good chance that “England will not exist in the year 2000.”
Mankind stood on the brink of Armageddon, the book proposed, because there was no way to feed the exponentially increasing world population. Ehrlich concluded that “sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come,” meaning “an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” he warned.
Since then, Ehrlich—whose name is now synonymous with alarmist hoaxers—has defended mass sterilization, sex-selective abortion and infanticide in order to reduce surplus populations.
To allow women to have as many children as they want, Ehrlich notoriously said, is like letting people “throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor’s backyard as they want.”
In the present study, however, the promised population apocalypse deals not with human beings but with animals, and involves not overpopulation but the supposed underpopulation of animal species.
In spite of the different subject matter of the study, Ehrlich’s misanthropic conclusion is always the same, making him sound like a broken record repeating the same dismal four notes over and over again.
“There is only one overall solution, and that is to reduce the scale of the human enterprise,” he said. “Population growth and increasing consumption among the rich is driving it.”
The study itself concludes on a similar note, insisting that the ultimate drivers of the causes of biotic destruction are “human overpopulation and continued population growth, and overconsumption, especially by the rich.”
Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome
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