| Sydney Uni has posted an updated link: https://sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2020/01/08/australia... They use "killed" and "affected" interchangeably. The exact quote is: Professor Chris Dickman has revised his estimate of the number of animals killed in bushfires in NSW to more than 800 million animals, with a national impact of more than one billion animals. I'm not an expert in this area, but from my reading over the past few hours it appears the distinction between "killed" and "impacted" is not something ecologists think about a lot. It appears that they expect most of those "impacted" which do not immediately die, to die soon after (from predators or from habitat loss), or if they don't die they expect them not to be able to reproduce successfully (the young are too vulnerable in destroyed habitats). I'd note this from the report (part you quoted): The true mortality is likely to be substantially higher than those estimated in this report. Edit: here's the interview where he makes the updated number claim: https://www.kosu.org/post/1-billion-animals-have-died-austra... Edit 2: But it is true I'd like to see some more rigour around the estimates. I'd note that estimates for the 2009 Black Friday bushfires were for 1M animals killed with 400K hectares burnt. These fires have already burnt 8.5M hectares, but taking the 2009 death rate produces a number roughly an order of magnitude less. |
> It's not clear why you keep picking it over looking for reasons not to believe it.
Because that's what lots of people do - at best, and I believe a solid argument can be made that this seemingly simple fact of human nature actually brings with it significant and unrealized risk.
Maybe it's worth pointing out explicitly: I'm not accusing the University or the professor of significant wrongdoing, intentional or not. Rather, my concern is with the effects our various styles of reporting the news (aka describing reality) has on the beliefs that individuals hold in their heads, and in turn the cascading/recursive unintended consequences that result from that.
HN is a relatively sane place, but look around at some of the other conversations taking place on planet earth - is it terribly innacurate to say that signs of fairly severe delusional thinking and insanity are becoming increasingly widespread?
An alien from another planet might reasonably predict that an increasing occurrence of (plausibly) climate-related calamities would result in massive widespread/unanimous concern among humanity for the health of the planet....and yet, what do we actually observe?
The same alien might reasonably predict, considering what's at stake, that the response to this unexpected outcome would be widespread concern among officials and intelligent people about what the hell is going on with people's thinking, and perhaps even a few initiatives to figure it out and rectify it while there's still time. But instead, we seem passionately satisfied with "groups x,y,z are stupid, and if they'd just stop we'd be all sorted....end of discussion!".
If our alien had a sense of humor, he might find this situation rather humorous.