Samizdata

Indeed:

Photographed by me this afternoon.

But, as we all know, this is weather, not climate.

It’s only the climate if it gets too hot.

Yesterday evening, I attended a discussion group at the home of Libertarian International president Christian Michel. Christian likes to invite intelligent people with a cross-section of views to these events, and although this occasionally leads to heated argument, the conversation usually remains relatively polite.

Last night, the subject of biodiversity came up, and someone made a comment about how human activity is causing every increasing extinction of species. I decided to be Devil’s Advocate to a small extent and I asked a simple question.

“Can you name any large animal that has become extinct recently?”

Nobody else in the room could successfully answer the question. One or two animals that became extinct between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries were mentioned, as were a number of endangered but not extinct species. After they failed to provide any such animals, I mentioned one myself (the Yangtze Dolphin). For what its worth, one can find quite a few large animals that went extinct between about 1800 and 1960 due to human activity. There have been very few since 1960, however. There may be issues with how long it takes for an extinction to be officially declared, or it may be that conservation efforts are working. Or both. But it is far from incontrovertibly clear that extinctions are occurring at an unprecedented rate. There is a lot of uncertainty.

However, I was assured that there is clear evidence of extinction if I looked it up, and some such, and I was assured that it is smaller animals that are mostly becoming extinct and this is what matters. (On the other hand, if this is so, why do the tigers and other large animals get all the publicity?)

After playing the game slightly longer (“Okay, name any species of insect that has become extinct due to human activity, ever”) I backed off. However, as I was doing this, somebody made a curious comment, which was this:

“Michael, you can’t make claims like this without providing evidence”.

This was curious, as I had not made any claims. I had simply asked somebody else for evidence for what they were saying. We have been here before, oddly enough.

However, the question is a very effective one. Many people have accepted the idea that species of animal are going extinct at an alarming rate, without knowing any actual examples. Most people can at least sense the contradiction if you point it out.

The author of this article, “An alternative to the new wave of ecofascism”, Micah White, is rightly horrified by the ideas of Pentti Linkola. Note that the url of that link, which seems supportive of Linkola although I do not know if it is his own, describes him as an ecofascist. The page of quotations seems to back up that description fairly well, and it will not come as a surprise to readers of this blog that Mr Linkola advocates that we learn alike from “the national socialists, the Finnish Stalinists, from the many stages of the Russian revolution, from the methods of the Red Brigades.”

It is sad, then, that Micah White’s own article, though certainly expressing nicer opinions than Mr Linkola’s, itself advocates the suppression of speech that Mr White does not like. Emphasis added in the following quotes:

The future of environmentalism is in liberating humanity from the compulsion to consume. Rampant, earth-destroying consumption is the norm in the west largely because our imaginations are pillaged by any corporation with an advertising budget. From birth, we are assaulted by thousands of commercial messages each day whose single mantra is “buy”. Silencing this refrain is the revolutionary alternative to ecological fascism. It is a revolution which is already budding and is marked by three synergetic campaigns: the criminalisation of advertising, the revocation of corporate power and the downshifting of the global economy.

and

Democratic, anti-fascist environmentalism means marshalling the strength of humanity to suppress corporations. Only by silencing the consumerist forces will both climate catastrophe and ecological tyranny be averted.