A response to "The horrible possibility of a sixth extinction event"

When my news feed delivered an article titled "The horrible possibility of a sixth extinction event" written by a man who is stated to have spent the last few years writing a book on climate change I took a peek and then because the article was so heavy on politics and projections while being short on science and reason I was moved to write a short rebuttal.

At the bottom of the article there is a list of 22 references but they are almost all links to political bodies, political documents or opinion pieces. Not one of them is a link to an observation of meaningful observations of reality in the full context. I will quote from the article and provide well-known scientific data such as you can find in the scientific literature or textbooks for each to illustrate just how far from reality are the claims made in the article and presumably the author's book.

Statement 1. "Everyone is aware of the fires and floods and dire predictions for the future."

Rebuttal 1. Awareness of news does not mean it is a fact. Since we have access to news about everywhere and everything all the time it is easy to mis-perceive reality without objective measurements to put information into context and make it knowledge. The study below clearly shows a large decrease in North American wildfires since the industrial revolution. This is due to factors such as better land management, fire detection and suppression technologies, all powered by abundant affordable and scalable fossil fuel energy.

The same goes for drought, by the way, with a steady decline over recent decades due to technologies like irrigation, fertilizers, weather forecasting and the like.

When it comes to floods, I presume the author refers to floods caused by sea level rise. In this case, like the others I will touch on, the full context includes looking at the historical record rather than models projecting doom. The graph that follows shows sea level over the last 24,000 years and highlights the effect of the end of the last glaciation that led to a sea level increase of 120 meters as most of the ice sheets covering land melted. The last few thousand years include a very gradual and steady rise, although this varies significantly depending on where the measurement is made. Tectonic plates move and collide steadily and some land masses are still rebounding from the mass of ice that pushed them down for millennia. Thanks to abundant machine energy humans can modify their shorelines and even raise buildings and cities if needed. With sea level changing slowly and steadily we have plenty of time to adapt to local changes. People in the Netherlands have managed to live below sea level for centuries and more people than ever before are choosing to build and live at the edge of the oceans.

Statement 2. The extinction of all living things is pretty well guaranteed unless our species starts acting now.

Rebuttal 2. There is literally no scientific data to support this statement and not even the biased IPCC science report makes any such assertion. In contrast, all measures of pollution and environmental damage decrease once a society reaches a sufficient level of wealth and this phenomenon is known as an Environmental Kuznets Curve. Seventy five years ago cities in the western world that were filled with air and water pollution are now far cleaner and safer and this occurs wherever freedom is allowed to grow and energy production flourishes.

Statement 3. Nature has always produced Co2 and methane, and it stored it through natural processes. This production and storage cycle was carefully balanced until we humans came along.

Rebuttal 3. This statement anthropomorphizes nature by using the word "carefully." Yes, there are many factors in balance in nature but nature, both living and inanimate is also constantly in change. Not only it is well established that the greenhouse effect of CO2 is a logarithmic one with further amounts having an ever-diminishing effect since a saturation point for the absorption of specific wavelengths is reached, the future effect of increasing Co2 is calculated to be about 0.5C. The graph that follows shows the geological history of Earth over the last 60 million years and CO2 has almost always been much, much higher than today and we can see that the correlation between CO2 and temperature is negligible. When CO2 is higher plant life flourishes and thus so does animal life. The graph shows the present CO2 level is close to a record low while there are periods of much higher CO2 and lower temperature. Over the shorter time scale of the last six hundred thousand years, Antarctic and Greenland ice core studies show that warming occurs first and CO2 level follows with an average lag of 600 years. 

Statement 4. News reports of wildfires, floods, hurricanes, droughts, melting ice fields, deaths by hyperthermia and killer pollution have become the new normal. 

Rebuttal 5. While it is true that news reports of natural disasters are the new normal, this is because we have so much more news, not because people are dying at a greater rate. In fact, it is just the opposite - and dramatically so. Deaths from extreme weather events have declined over the last hundred years - not by a factor of two or five, not even by a factor of ten, but by a factor of fifty - a 98% drop in deaths. This is due to our machine power that enables us to build resilient infrastructure, warm us of coming weather events, mobilize resources to support people at risk and rescue those in imminent danger. Deaths from cold are more than five times greater than those from heat, so a slight warming has saved lives. 

Statement 5. Once past the tipping point, global warming will keep on increasing beyond control. The eventual destruction of the Earth’s ecological systems will then eliminate the Earth’s supply of breathable air and potable water, and critically reduce habitable lands.

Rebuttal 5. There is no evidence for such a tipping point, it is pure and arbitrary speculation. Since CO2 in the atmosphere has been many times higher and no runaway warming occurred and since as pointed out above the potential impact of further CO2 is so small, this assertion is simply fear-mongering.

Statement 6. The August 2021 IPCC report stated, “Many changes due to past and future greenhouse gas emissions are irreversible for centuries to millennia, especially changes in the ocean, ice sheets and global sea level.” 

Rebuttal 6. There is no science to support this. This is a political statement and not a scientific one. For example, the graph below shows satellite data for the Antarctic since the start of the satellite era and it shows no change. Sea level was discussed above.

Statement 7. Can the human species become extinct? Why not? 

Rebuttal 7. The first question is a rhetorical statement since humanity's survival is not guaranteed by nature but rather is a constant struggle against a naturally dangerous environment. The second question is a matter of mastering machine energy, since with enough energy humanity can colonize the Moon, Mars and other planetary bodies and build starships that would enable us to leave our solar system. Heavier than air flight was invented just a short time ago (when my grandmother was born) and in just a few of my grandmother's lifespans we have advanced our knowledge and machine power more than in all of prior human history. Today a SpaceX ship is close to launch that is two thousand times cheaper to operate than NASA's best effort. 

Conclusion: for every assertion of danger or doom in the article it is easy to find hard evidence of the contrary or else the statement can be seen as lacking evidence - to be an arbitrary assertion. Since the statements are so consistently wrong, we must conclude there is a strong bias present in the writer's mind. If the statements were only partly wrong or were wrong in different directions then at least we could say there has been an honest effort to discover the truth. 

Energy is life. Energy is progress. Energy is the future of human flourishing. With energy mastery all is possible. In the name of all that is good about human life we need the freedom to explore all sources of energy, to experiment, to fail, discover new methods and applications. Today, fossil fuel energy powers 80% of all humanity's energy needs and those needs are growing fast, as is fossil fuel energy. Fossil fuels provide safe, dense, flexible, industrial scale energy that powers all other industries. Nuclear energy of some type is the most likely successor but has been criminalized by pressure from environmental advocacy groups since its discovery and is unsuitable in many applications. No other substitute for fossil fuels is know today.

All proposals to stop energy progress in the name of the weather, climate or pollution ignore all the fantastic advantages of energy capabilities. Such forecasts of doom are always based on hypotheses that have been proven false or upon models that have failed to predict real-world measurements. For humanity to flourish we require thinking that is firmly rooted in observations of reality, that are objective instead of subjective or arbitrary.