Tear down the Amazon rainforest idol at WorldNetDaily January 31, 2009 Many environmentalists claim that tens of thousands of species are being driven to extinction every year because of the destruction of tropical forests like the Amazon: ...
Most of these estimates are rooted in the research of Harvard's Edward O. Wilson, featured by Time magazine as an environmental "hero" in its special Earth Day 2000 edition. In the accompanying article, Wilson argues passionately to stem the tide of extinctions "now 100 to 1,000 times as great as it was before the coming of humanity" -- neglecting to mention that his estimates of 50,000 extinctions per year are based on his own computer models. ...
Moore maintains no one can name these species that are said to be going extinct.
"The only place you can find them is in Edward O. Wilson's computer at Harvard University. They're actually electrons on a hard drive," Moore states.
When asked if he can name a single species of the 50,000 that are said to go extinct, Keating admits: "No we cannot, because we don't know what those species are." ...
Stott agrees that the focus on species loss is misguided from a scientific point of view.
"The earth has gone through many periods of major extinctions, some much bigger, let me emphasize, than even being contemplated today and 99.9999 percent (of all species) and I wouldn't know the repeating decimal have gone extinct. Extinction is a natural process," he asserts.
Another claim the environmental movement makes is that fires are destroying the Amazon. ...
A 1995 study backs up Moore. The scientists concluded: "The incidence of burning cannot be taken as a direct indicator of deforestation rates." By combining satellite data, on-site visit information, and years of topographic data, the researchers concluded that most of the new fires were not being set to deforest new tracts of forest. Rather, they were lit to keep already cleared areas from growing back. ...Merle Faminow, a professor from the Federal University of Parana, Brazil, agrees. According to Faminow's research, the Amazon has a "wide and varied range of soil properties" and only "8 percent of the soil is classified as having a high erosion risk." He concludes that "there is ample scientific and practical evidence to confirm that agriculture can be carried out in a profitable and sustainable manner."
Save Capitalism at The Investor.com April 21, 2009 Every year Steven Hayward, a scholar at the Pacific Research Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, compiles his Index of Leading Environmental Indicators. And every year, his findings contradict the alarmists' warnings that the world is on the edge of environmental cataclysm.
From evidence "that tropical rain forests may now be expanding faster than they are being cut down" to the improving health of U.S. ocean fisheries to better outdoor air quality in American cities with the worst air pollution, Hayward shows there's more to be optimistic about than there is to be troubled about.
The Environmental Protection Agency has also published its own Report on the environment. Last year's report, the most recent, indicates outdoor air quality has improved, there's been a net gain in wetland acreage, public-source drinking-water problems are uncommon and forest land is expanding after declining for a century.
Americans are actually generating no more trash per-capita than they were in 1990, our production of hazardous waste has fallen from 36 million tons in 1999 to 28 million tons in 2005, and lead levels in our blood have shown "a steady decline since the 1980s."