Study Challenges Sixth Mass Extinction Claims As Species Losses Fall

Paleontologists tell us that in Earth’s history, there have been five mass extinctions. A mass extinction event is characterized by the loss of a significant number of species – at least 75% of all known species – within a relatively short time: 2.8 million years or less.

The Earth has experienced five major mass extinctions, the most recent being the one that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs around 65 million years ago.

Some climate alarmists believe that we are now headed for a sixth mass extinction, which they term the “Anthropocene”, or sixth mass extinction. The Anthropocene Extinction is said to involve human-caused biodiversity loss happening at an unprecedented speed.

Current extinction rates are also assumed to be 100 to 10,000 times higher than natural background rates. If that is correct, biodiversity and ecological stability would be under a serious threat.

And, of course, this is all part of what people have been incessantly taught by school textbooks and the media, prompting Greta Thunberg to lament in 2019:

“People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are at the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”

Greta genuinely believed, through no fault of her own, especially when, for example, a study conducted in 2015 came to a conclusion that led to these media reports.

This study, entitled “Accelerated Modern Human–Induced Species Losses: Entering the Sixth Mass Extinction,” was published in the Science Advances journal on June 19, 2015.

Headed by Gerardo Ceballos, the study has six authors, among them Paul Ehrlich, whose ineptitude, stupidity, and absolute hubris were evident in his 1968 definitive work, The Population Explosion. Although just about everything he said in that volume was wrong, he is somehow still regarded as a sage.

This report detailed an analysis of extinction rates since 1500 CE. Some of their conclusions were:

• “Modern extinction rates for vertebrates varied from 8 to 100 times higher than the background rate.”
• “Most extinctions have occurred in the last 114 years (that is, since 1900).”
• “Current extinction rates vastly exceed natural average background rates.”

It is not surprising that the lapdog media would have run with this and that so many, especially our young people, feel so devastated and hopeless.

However, a new study has shed a bright light on this issue. A 2025 study, “Unpacking the Extinction Crisis: Rates, Patterns and Causes of Recent Extinctions in Plants and Animals,” was published in the Royal Society journal in October 2025.

This study, like the one published in 2015, is based its analysis on data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which lists animal and plant species that are extinct, threatened, or in danger of extinction.

“Our goal here was to analyse patterns of extinction among groups, habitats, regions, and time,” they noted.

But this study came to a much different conclusion than the 2015 study. Surprisingly, these authors concluded,

“Extinction rates have increased over the last five centuries, but generally declined in the last 100 years.”

This negates and debunks the assertions of the 2015 study.

Amazingly, this report also concludes,

“These past extinctions also do not support the idea that biodiversity loss is presently accelerating (even if it actually is). … Data on recent tetrapod [4-legged animal] extinctions (cumulative extinctions per century) have been used to suggest that extinction rates are presently accelerating. However, we found that extinction rates in tetrapods were similar between the 1800s and 1900s, have not significantly increased over the last 200 years, and showed a downward trend over the last 100 years.”(emphasis added)

So, in other words, extinctions of species did not increase during the past 200 years. This study came to the remarkable conclusion that the number of extinctions has actually decreased during the last 100 years.

In addition, the authors point out that:

“[P]ast extinctions strongly suggest that climate change is not an important threat to biodiversity. Remarkably, we found here that species-level extinctions related to climate change have not significantly increased over the last approximately 200 years.” (emphasis added)

The report mentions that the IUCN includes extreme weather events in its classification of climate-related extinctions. This explains why some extinctions designated as climate-related happened before the onset of the Industrial Revolution.

In that case, one would expect to see more climate-related extinctions in the last few decades, but happily, this has not occurred.

The authors of this report determined that invasive species were the most important cause of extinctions occurring in species found on islands (as contrasted with continents) and that the freshwater habitat, both on islands and continents, was the one most affected by extinctions:

“Recent extinctions were rare among marine species and common among freshwater species (figure 3a), and the majority of recent extinctions were of island endemics. …

“We make two important but contrasting points here: (i) invasive species appear to have been the most frequent driver of recent extinctions, making them important for that reason alone; and (ii) the circumstances under which invasive species cause widespread extinctions may be limited (i.e., on islands).”

Both studies cited loss of habitat as one of the primary causes of species extinctions. This brings to mind the tremendous destruction of habitats that has been inflicted on wildlife due to the insidious onslaught of wind turbine and solar panel installations.

While human housing has been vilified for this by environmentalists, it is a fact that it would take no less than 375,000 square miles of land — lost habitat — in the United States alone just to get to net-zero.

This is because, for the same amount of power, “renewables”, which are not renewable, require at least 400 times as much land area as a gas or nuclear power plant.

This study criticized some earlier ones, pointing out the dangers of making unjustified assumptions:

“Furthermore, prominent studies have extrapolated from these extinctions to suggest a current mass extinction event. Such extrapolations assume that recent extinctions predict current extinction risk and are homogeneous among groups, over time, and among environments.”

The percentage of extinct species to the total number of species in a taxonomic group differs significantly between classes. A very small percentage of arthropods and plants have gone extinct compared to tetrapods and fish.

The authors are unsure whether past extinctions could predict current threats to living species:

“These issues are crucial to the question of whether past extinctions can be extrapolated to predict future extinctions globally and across groups.”

Finally, these past extinctions do not indicate any rise in the rate of extinction, but rather that the speed at which extinctions happen peaked several decades ago and has even declined in recent years.

They note that extinction rates may be very different from those predicted by other studies. This is very good news. Hopefully, it is correct.

Hundreds of fascinating facts about the climate change scam can be found in Lynne Balzer’s richly illustrated book, “Exposing the Great Climate Change Lie”, available on Amazon. A second, expanded version of this book is due to be published on Amazon within the next month.