Two independent groups of scientists have destroyed the always improbable claim that vertebrates across the planet have declined by 69% since 1970. The averaged claim is made by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL). It is a bedrock climate and ecological scare story repeated endlessly in the mainstream media and broadcast everywhere from UN platforms to school classrooms. A group of Canadian biologists have shown that the figure is a statistical freak. They reveal that the estimate is driven by 2.4% of wildlife populations, adding, “If these extremely declining populations are excluded, the global trend switches to an increase.”
The 69% scare is contained in the Living Planet Index (LPI) compiled by the WWF and the ZSL. The latest bi-annual report was released late last year to coincide with the COP15 Biodiversity Summit in Montreal, and claimed the decline was “an average fall in species population numbers between 1970 and 2018”. Commenting on its report, the ZSL said one million species of plants and animals are threatened with extinction. The joint report is said to have looked at 32,000 populations of animals from over 5,000 species.
The report is highly political, arguing for a complete transformation of society. The planet is said to be in the midst of a biodiversity and climate crisis, and we have a last chance to act. “A nature-positive future needs transformative – game changing – shifts in how we produce, how we consume, how we govern, and what we finance. We hope it inspires you to be part of that change,” say the authors. Less inspiring might have been the message that 2.4% of vertebrate populations are currently doing badly – it’s nature, it happens – but the rest on average are just dandy.
This latest debunking of a cherished green scare is further bad news for publicity-seeking climate catastrophists. Introducing the LPI report, the ZSL also noted that a 0.3°C warming would result in a loss of up to 90% of warm water coral, a scare that has a very ‘last decade’ look about it, given that corals on the Great Barrier Reef and elsewhere have rarely been in better shape. Slowly recovering Arctic ice, including the Greenland ice shelf, plateauing global surface temperature, and more polar bears hunting more seals, have all added to the recent misery.
The essence of the debunking scientists’ argument is that trying to distill disparate population trends into a single global index distorts the full picture. Calculating the straight line average across populations is strongly influenced by outliers, or extremes. For example, the biologists put forward a hypothetical scenario in which one animal population declining by 99%, while a second population increases 50 fold, or 393 populations increase by 1%. In this scenario, the geometric average – the metric used by the WWF and the ZSL – would show a catastrophic decline of 50%.
This work was done by the Canadian biologists before the last 2022 LPI report. The dotted line above indicates overall population stability. The red line shows a 50% decline averaged across all populations, but the removal of just 2.4% of separate populations produces a positive trend. The scientists observe that such clusters of decline require different conservation measures compared to widespread falls across the planet. But such a subtle understanding of focused conservation measures is entirely missing from the unhinged view spread throughout politics and the media that the planet and climate is under mortal threat, and urgent, collectivist Net Zero measures must be immediately implemented.
Accounting for extreme clusters “fundamentally alters the interpretation of global vertebrate trend”, say the scientists. The sensitivity of global average trends to outliers “suggests that more informative indices are needed”, they add.
Last month, a group of Finnish biologists joined the scientific fray over the Index and noted that statistical calculations prevented any straightforward interpretation in the change of animal abundance. The LPI measure is biased downwards because proportions are measured, not actual abundance. In fact, the more populations vary in their rate of increase or decrease, “the more downwardly biased the LPI will be as a measure of abundance”. Even worse, the scientists go on to show, the downward past bias is baked into future calculations, since previous index values are multiplied with the current one. Overall, the Finnish scientists take on board the outlier problems identified by the Canadians, but observe the trouble with the LPI methodology “is deeper than that and cannot be resolved by removing extreme population trends from the analysis”.
The LPI garners massive publicity and it is also used as an indicator for international negotiations within the UN Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD). “We urge scientists that have used the LPI methodology to scrutinise the conclusions of their work, and those negotiating future indicators for the UN CBD to critically review the interpretation of the LPI,” they conclude.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
Stop Press: Toby wrote about the methodological shortcomings of extinction predictions for the Spectator four years ago.
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Here’s a claim that I’d love to be true:
100% of those who instill fear, panic and despondency have declined over the last minute.
In the meantime: Hope, Strength and Tenacity to those who think and judge for themselves!
—“we have a last chance to act.” Oh goody! Where do I sign up?
If only I had quid for every time I’ve read that or similar, I’d be rich as Croesus.
That’s not going to be your last chance for getting quid whenever someone announces a last chance to … !!!
Don’t forget how the climate data was fiddled to show warming where before there had been none:
https://realclimatescience.com/alterations-to-the-us-temperature-record/
The page from the New York Times in 1989 is worth keeping in mind. No warming trend for a hundred years. Since revised to show a warming trend. I’m not sure whether it is politics or religion but it sure isn’t science to keep fiddling the data to get the result they want.
It’s cobblers! I’ve heard all this since cofo in the 70s. There’s just as much if not more life now than then, you don’t get rid of life that easily
I remember when I was a kid, occasionally I really did see men walking about the town wearing sandwich boards proclaiming that “The End Of The World Is Nigh“. Yes, I really am that old.
Thanks to the breakthroughs of science, we’ve come a very long way since then.
Now, international NGO’s, funded by unimaginably rich megalomaniacs, can make the same nutty proclamation all around the world using electronic media.
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The rule of thumb is simply: Whenever someone presents averages of some data which is not different measurements of the same thing (NB: measurements is important here), he’s trying to pull a fast one because averaging is a mathematical algorithm supposed to remove noise, ie, randomly distributed errors, from a set of measurement of the same quantity as each individual measurement is composed of a value part and an error part whose exact values are unknown. That’s solidly undergraduate math.
In this particular case, averaging means that outliers in the original, raw data set end up being evenly distributed over it. For an example, assume there are four species A, B and C and D. A had a 0.1% increase, B a 5% increase, C a 25% decline and D a 2% increase This means the average change will be -5.6%, composed of 1/4 of 0.1 (0.025), 1/4 of 5 (1.25), 1/4 of -25 (-6.25) and 1/4 of 2 (0.5). On average, species declined by 5.6% is a gross misrepresentation of the actual data.
I keep being amazed how shoddily constructed all of this is. One would expect people with that much money and manpower could do a lot better. This leads to two hypothesises about why they cannot:
Something I should have added to the example: The individual contributions of A, B, C and D to the average are: A 0.31%, B 15.58%, C 77.88% and C 6.23%. More than 3/4 of the average come from the change of a single species.
This article is so wrong I stumped up the £5 to comment.
1) The WWF/ZSL do not claim that 69% of Vertebrates Have Declined Over Last 50 Years (whatever that means). Chris was presumably confused by the phrase: “average 69% decline in the relative abundance” in the Executive Summary of the Living Planet report. It is admittedly tricky to know exactly what this means. But the LPI website is clearer.
Here under “common misconceptions about the LPI”:
“The LPI statistic does not mean that 69 per cent of species or populations are declining”
“The LPI statistic does not mean that 69% populations or individual animals have been lost”
The LPI is shows the average rate of change in animal population sizes – something quite different.
2) The Canadian scientists make a good point about the problems in using a geometric mean to represent overall rate of species decline. But Chris left out an important quote:
“Excluding only the 2.4% most-strongly declining populations (354 out of 14,700 populations) reversed the estimate of global vertebrate trends from a loss of more than 50% to a slightly positive growth (Fig. 2). Similarly, excluding 2.4% of the most-strongly increasing populations strengthened the mean decline to 71%.”
They are not claiming there is no problem with biodiversity decline – only suggesting a method that is not so sensitive to extremes. They concluded that decline tends to be concentrated in a relatively few species and areas but this doesn’t mean it is not a serious problem.
“Although the global BHM model reveals considerably more nuance than a geometric mean index, analysing across systems still masked important patterns. When systems were analysed separately…., primary population clusters were strongly declining (θ1 < −0.015) with high certainty (95% credible intervals not overlapping zero) in three systems, all of which occurred in the Indo-Pacific realm (freshwater mammals, freshwater birds and terrestrial birds) ….. This suggests that this region has the highest risk of system-wide declines and should be a conservation priority. By contrast, the primary cluster was increasing with high certainty in seven systems, six of which were in temperate regions. In addition, seven additional systems had strongly declining primary population clusters but with less certainty (95% credible intervals overlapped zero), four of which were amphibian or reptile groups.”
The Finnish scientists were just pointing out that the LPI is no good for measuring abundance – but as it was never intended to do that, it is kind of irrelevant.
The LPI is shows the average rate of change in animal population sizes – something quite different.
As explained in another comment: This is a bullshit metric supposed to give the impression of an strong, overall decline which doesn’t exist.
But Chris left out an important quote:
“Excluding only the 2.4% most-strongly declining populations (354 out of 14,700 populations) reversed the estimate of global vertebrate trends from a loss of more than 50% to a slightly positive growth (Fig. 2). Similarly, excluding 2.4% of the most-strongly increasing populations strengthened the mean decline to 71%.”
That’s from a different part of the text and the quote attached to the graph is correct. Further, really taking everything into account, the outcome is
Here we show, however, that this estimate is driven by less than 3% of vertebrate populations; if these extremely declining populations are excluded, the global trend switches to an increase.
[…]
16 systems contain clusters of extreme decline (comprising around 1% of populations; these
extreme declines occur disproportionately in larger animals) and 7 contain extreme
increases (around 0.4% of populations). The remaining 98.6% of populations across
all systems showed no mean global trend.
—–
That’s from the abstract. Another nice quote from the Discussion section of this paper:
Shifting the message from ubiquitous catastrophe to foci of concern,
also touches on human psychology. Continual negative and guilt-ridden
messaging can cause despair, denial and inaction. If everything is
declining everywhere, despite the expansion of conservation measures
in recent decades, it would be easy to lose hope. Our results identify
not only regions that need urgent action to ameliorate widespread
biodiversity declines, but also many systems that appear to be gener-
ally stable or improving, and thus provide a reason to hope that our
actions can make a difference.
That’s absolutely not the kind of serious problem of the WWF and it calls for targetted, perfectly traditional conservation measures, not global lifestyle changes.
It’s all irrelevant, life will do what it wants!
You can see the Board of Directors of the WWF here.
https://www.worldwildlife.org/about/leadership
There’s a lot of money in all those financial institutions so many of them work for. Is it any surprise they pursue the WEF agenda?
Incidentally, it’s only officially called the World Wildlife Fund in the US and Canada. In the rest of the world it renames itself the World Wide Fund, thus allowing it to use funds for other purposes. It’s also been accused several times of ‘greenwashing’, cosying up to big multi-nationals in exchange for donations, human rights abuses, and the use of paramilitaries.
It’s also worth noting that for very many years its patrons, directing the use of funds to protect rare species, then went off hunting those same wild species. Using donor money to keep their exclusive ‘sport’ going?
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It is good to be sensitive and open to the damage that we do as a species but given the agendas that prevail and owe their existence to pure ruling class survival tendencies we do well to be sceptical. If you weren’t born under a Christmas tree. Don’t talk to me about environmental espoiliation when you haven’t given a monkeys about anything until now.
When I studied Physics and Biology at A-Level 35 years ago, and Physics at University thereafter, I must have missed the sections of the scientific method that told me to first determine what I wanted my research to conclude, then disregard any results that showed anything otherwise. Oh, and the step that told me to simply fabricate (adjust) supporting results if I need to. I think I’m owed a Ph. D. from someone …
Me too! And this approach would have meant getting the PhD after about 9 months or so’s study!