Dear Foxy,

The Greens are denying the reality of extinction when they advocate zero extinction. Those who believe in life after death are denying death.

Dear davidf,

This is what the science says:

"The strong focus on species extinctions, a critical aspect of the contemporary pulse of biological extinction, leads to a common misimpression that Earth’s biota is not immediately threatened, just slowly entering an episode of major biodiversity loss. This view overlooks the current trends of population declines and extinctions.

Using a sample of 27,600 terrestrial vertebrate species, and a more detailed analysis of 177 mammal species, we show the extremely high degree of population decay in vertebrates, even in common “species of low concern.”

Dwindling population sizes and range shrinkages amount to a massive anthropogenic erosion of biodiversity and of the ecosystem services essential to civilization. This “biological annihilation” underlines the seriousness for humanity of Earth’s ongoing sixth mass extinction event."

http://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1704949114

As your objections do seem a little ideological perhaps we need to get back to basics.

An extinction phase is when the number of species going extinct notably outnumber the number of new species created through evolution. The above article and others support the premise that is happening now.

Dear Steele Redux,

I do not deny that the extinction rate is too high for ecological sustainability. However, the goal of an extinction rate of zero iS unattainable and denies reality. Would you keep foul brood or the smallpox virus?

Dear David,

I'm not sure what the Greens mean by "Zero extinction,"
Perhaps they are simply trying to save our endangered species
and our eco-systems?

As for denying death by believing in life after death?

Again - Perhaps that's simply people trying to find the meaning
and purpose of their lives? And not death denial?

Just a few thoughts.

The great extinction is just another of that ever growing list of really really bad things that are going to happen 'soon'.

'Soon' is rarely defined but its always soon enough that we have to do something today. That something almost always entailing spending money and subsidising those who want to do something.

The great extinction scare has been around since at least the 1980s and probably longer. We have all sorts of critters added to the threatened, critically endangered, really-really critical endangered and OMG-endangered list, but few actually go extinct. But once funds have been made available to subsidise those working to save said critter, they never seem to go off the various endangered list. (“Nothing lasts longer than a temporary government program.”).

According to a WWF and US government report in 1979, 1 million species would go extinction by 2000 at the rate of 40000 per year. Not only didn't it happen, it didn't come close to happening. But the anxiously gullible will continue to buy it. And think they're following the science.

david f,
Is that the Christian Reformed Church where they speak Afrikaans?
Or is there a different CRC that shares a name with them?

Anyway, I very strongly disagree with you about the Greens. Extinction rates are, as a result of human action, many orders of magnitude higher than they would otherwise be. And it's reasonable to want to address this problem. It is not anti-science to set a goal of zero extinction by 2030. The differences between zeroed the natural rate is tiny, resembling a rounding error. And in practice the chance of a species going extinct because we fail to meet the goal we set would be much higher than a species naturally going extinct in the same timeframe.

It's local extinction, not biological extinction, which makes room for new species, and the Greens aren't planning to eliminate that.