Apropos of the discussion we had the other day about the scientific consensus on climate change comes news that:
The most widely used methods for calculating species extinction rates are "fundamentally flawed" and overestimate extinction rates by as much as 160 percent, life scientists report May 19 in the journal Nature.
However, while the problem of species extinction caused by habitat loss is not as dire as many conservationists and scientists had believed, the global extinction crisis is real, says Stephen Hubbell, a distinguished professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA and co-author of the Nature paper. ...
"The overestimates can be very substantial. The way people have defined 'extinction debt' (species that face certain extinction) by running the species-area curve backwards is incorrect, but we are not saying an extinction debt does not exist."
The point is not that we should ignore environmental concerns. The point is that we should be wary about claims that massive social and economic changes are necessary simply because the scientific consensus of the moment claims they're desirable. Like the medical claims about salt I mentioned in my earlier post, and like this latest news, the consensus of the moment can turn out to be seriously flawed.
Another prime example where the consensus was wrong was the cause of most stomach ulcers. Stress and acid were thought to be issue, but H. pylori bacteria ended up being the cause, something that consensus said could not live in the stomach. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall and he seems to have won a Nobel Prize for ignoring consensus. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2005/marshall-autobio.html
Posted by: A | 05/22/2011 at 02:00 AM