BBC Science reports Scientists’ concerns over loss of biodiversity.
The report states the paper submitted has identified that biodiversity has fallen by greater than 10% across 58.1% of the globe’s land mass.
The 10% is a figure that is set indicating a LIMIT at which the loss presents a risk to Humans.
The Guardian report on the same subject is keen to caveat the threat as follows
The study does come with some caveats. Foremost is that scientists cannot say exactly what a dangerous degree of biodiversity loss would be – it could be the 10% threshold agreed on, but the authors admit that as much as a 70% loss in variety could count as the safe limit.
It is clear to anyone with any common sense that there can be no hard limit, i.e. 9% is perfectly ok and 11% is disaster, but neither the Guardian nor the BBC have lloked at the MARGIN by which the limit has been breached.
The image in the BBC report shows quite clearly that the only areas where the limit has not been reached are generally the sparsely populated northern latitudes and jungle regions in the central latitudes.
But more importantly the magnitude by which the 10% limit is bypassed is quite stark. For example the whole of Australia shows greater than 40% loss.
This is another example of under reporting climate risk.
It is noted that while the BBC article quotes Tim Newbold saying
“The loss of biodiversity will reduce the resilience of ecosystems in the face of environmental changes such as global warming.”
neither report attributes any of the cause to global warming or climate change. Climate change itself is unmentioned.