JohnDenver wrote:MonteQuest wrote:http://www.well.com/user/davidu/extinction.html
Monte, I'm not interested in the PR campaign by the environmental movement. I could care less if Richard Leakey says species are dying at a rate of x per minute. I'm interested in the scientific field work which is his basis for making that claim. Apparently, you don't have that link, and I'm going to have to hunt myself through a ream of PR bullshit to find it.
MonteQuest wrote:So those 200 links to Science Magazine, Scientific American, etc, and all the studies cited therein are all PR propaganda created by the environmental movement?
From my training and research, I have stated on this site 17,500 species per year. That is 48/day or 2 an hour. And this is a conservative estimate.
katkinkate wrote:The ecologists don't know exactly how many are dieing off. They just know its lots.
MonteQuest wrote:John, the current data shows an extinction rate of 17,000 to 100,000 species per year.
JohnDenver wrote:From my training and research, I have stated on this site 17,500 species per year. That is 48/day or 2 an hour. And this is a conservative estimate.
Okay, but where do you get that number? Where did you read it? What's the cite?
JohnDenver wrote:MonteQuest wrote:John, the current data shows an extinction rate of 17,000 to 100,000 species per year.
That 100,000 figure is amazing. Apparently science has only described about 1 million species to date. At a rate of 100,000 species extinctions per year, we'd run out of scientifically described species in a period of 10 years.
MonteQuest wrote:Wilson, E. O. The Current State of Biological Diversity. Harvard University. National Academy of Science. 1988. Pg 13.
MonteQuest wrote:Most of these are insects, which comprises the largest biomass on earth.
JohnDenver wrote:It definitely seems like that happens every year back on the farm. You Bhopal the critters with methyl bromide. It's a mini mass-extinction, a re-enactment of Wilson's experiment on land. And yet, sure as can be, the next year those little fuckers are back out of control, laying eggs all over the place!
Many pesticides reduce the diversity of soil life even further and select for resistant pathogens. This is the history of methyl bromide. Once this fumigant was highly effective if used only every five years. Today, on the same soils, it must be used much more frequently to keep the pathogens under control.
http://www.attra.org/attra-pub/soilborne.html
(ATTRA, the source of this quote, is an outstanding source of information on sustainable agriculture.
David wrote: Granted that's just a ballpark figure, but the order of magnitude shows why the IUCN scientists and almost every other biologist in the world now think we're facing a mass extinction on the same scale as the other great extinction events in the earth's history.
JohnDenver wrote:holmes wrote:sorry dont have the time to tutor you here.
You and Monte are a couple of quacks. I ask you to back up your numbers with scientific evidence, and you both pull the eject cord cause you ain't got no evidence that can stand up to scrutiny.
bart wrote:JohnDenver wrote:It definitely seems like that happens every year back on the farm. You Bhopal the critters with methyl bromide. It's a mini mass-extinction, a re-enactment of Wilson's experiment on land. And yet, sure as can be, the next year those little fuckers are back out of control, laying eggs all over the place!
This an excellent example of the problem, JD. Not only do the critters come back every year after methyl bromide, they GET WORSE!
The problem seems to be that the methyl bromide kills the beneficial soil organisms, so you have a simplified sterile ecosystem. Such systems are vulnerable to opportunistic pests.Many pesticides reduce the diversity of soil life even further and select for resistant pathogens. This is the history of methyl bromide. Once this fumigant was highly effective if used only every five years. Today, on the same soils, it must be used much more frequently to keep the pathogens under control.
http://www.attra.org/attra-pub/soilborne.html
(ATTRA, the source of this quote, is an outstanding source of information on sustainable agriculture.
So, you are right, JD, there WILL be life in degraded non-diverse environments. Unfortunately, that life will be diseases, pests and weeds!
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