The Eco-Zealots Were Wrong Again

Remember the bratty but fabulously worshipped Greta Thunberg thundering “How dare you” in front of the United Nations, in a screeching speech in which she claimed “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction”? The adults swooned at her feet, not just at the U.N. but at every stop she has made on her never-ending, neurotic speaking tour. But did anyone fact-check her? They should have. She was wrong.

Then 16, several years before she caught the next trend and became a Palestinian justice warrior, Thunberg told the General Assembly in 2019 that “People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”

And then there are the forever-aggrieved vandals who named themselves Extinction Rebellion, because, they say, they are on “the right side of history” by trying to stop the Anthropocene extinction. But the name also gives these hysterics license to disrupt, destroy, nag, bully, assemble mobs, and act without regard for human life, because who wouldn’t go to those lengths to stop a mass extinction?

But a mass extinction is not what we’re experiencing, according to a University of Arizona study published earlier this fall.

“Over the last 500 years, extinctions in plants, arthropods, and land vertebrates peaked about 100 years ago and have declined since then,” says the University of Arizona news.