“Extinction threat ‘a call to world leaders’ at Rio Earth Summit”
Headline from Britain’s Telegraph:
“Rio +20: World faces mass extinction of wildlife, UN warns”
Forget about global warming for a moment; it’s time to shift into near-panic mode over another apocalyptic threat to our planet. According to United Nations officials and UN-anointed experts who gathered in Rio de Janeiro, the so-called Red List of endangered species indicates that our biological diversity on Planet Earth is dangerously imperiled. Thousands of species of birds, mammals, amphibians, plants, and other flora and fauna will soon disappear, due to human causes.
To prevent this natural disaster, they say, we must implement the UN’s global mandates on biodiversity and sustainable development. This involves accepting massive new restrictions on our energy use, travel, consumption, productivity, and economic prosperity.
The Red List of endangered species is produced by the IUCN, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, more commonly referred to as the World Conservation Union. The IUCN played a major role in producing this massive study, The Global Biodiversity Assessment, in 1995 following the first UN Earth Summit. It was published by UNEP, the United Nations Environment Programme.
The World Conservation Union, IUCN, is funded with hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers, funneled through the UN and its myriad of agencies, such as UNEP. It gets massive cash infusions as well from government agencies in the United States, such as the EPA and Energy Department, and from the European Union. And then, of course, it gets millions more from the usual leftwing tax-exempt foundations: Ford, Rockefeller, Soros, Ted Turner, Bill & Melinda Gates, etc., who have been more than willing to fund virtually every “green” cause, no matter how extreme.
The Red List and the species extinction claim are not new. This is a claim that has been recycled — and repeatedly discredited — many times over the past several decades.
Remember Paul and Anne Ehrlich? They’re the co-authors of a number of doomsday studies that have been causing panic among the gullible for more than 40 years. They are best known for The Population Bomb published in 1968 and The Population Explosion published in 1990. In the 1980s they launched several editions of their book, Extinction: The Causes and Consequences of the Disappearance of Species. Last year, in preparation for Rio+20, they came out with another, updated edition, along with other co-authors.
The Ehrlichs’ claims about over-population and their predictions of mass starvation, resource depletion, pestilence, and annihilation of human, animal, and plant life have been wildly, spectacularly wrong. However, despite the fact that their Chicken Little predictions have failed repeatedly, they can always count on much of the media to treat their latest pronouncements of global doom as if they had come from the lips of Biblical prophets.
Ditto for the predictions of the IUCN. The IUCN’s thick studies look impressive, but like the reports of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, they fall apart under rigorous scientific examination.
