Bjorn LomborgVarmennettu tili

The "billion animals dead in Australia's fires" meme got extraordinary coverage An irresistibly simple measure of "OMG-bad" leading to the wrong conclusion https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/1/6/21051897/australia-fires-billion-animals-dead-estimate … https://abcnews.go.com/International/billion-animals-estimated-dead-australia-wildfires/story?id=68143966 … https://people.com/pets/australia-wildfires-1-billion-animals-dead/ … https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/more-one-billion-animals-have-been-killed-australias-wildfires-scientist-estimates-180973926/ … https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/australianz/ecological-disaster-may-see-koalas-listed-as-endangered …pic.twitter.com/UpywM4v4Vb

The 1 billion estimate was explicitly based on the 2007 WWF report "Impacts of Land Clearing" https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2020/01/08/australian-bushfires-more-than-one-billion-animals-impacted.html … https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318029981 …pic.twitter.com/0DdtmZlcYO

Report uses similar approach (vertebrates/ha*area burned) and finds about 80% of all dead are reptiles It starts with Australia average of 200 reptiles/ha, and says number higher in large areas of desert land, so smaller in NSW at 129.5/ha (25.9*5, p30) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318029981 …pic.twitter.com/a762P5quNA

The final 3 billion report uses a lot more careful modeling of population density Clearly 61K killed/harmed koalas of 260K population is terrible But overarching main message is "3 billion", of which 87% are reptiles https://www.wwf.org.au/ArticleDocuments/353/WWF_Impacts-of-the-unprecedented-2019-2020-bushfires-on-Australian-animals.pdf.aspx …pic.twitter.com/OteOjj5F3x

For reptiles, researchers use lots of specific estimates for population density and find 2.46 billion killed/harmed They also show that the simple 200/ha gives a very similar but slightly more conservative estimate of 2.29 billion (7% lower)pic.twitter.com/SJp7F9tRJ2

2019-20 was unusual in that it had *much more* fire in eucalyptus forests and much less fire in Grass and Woodland — more fire where WWF estimated dead, much less where they didn't https://twitter.com/BjornLomborg/status/1368550021818421249 …pic.twitter.com/2138FQdsZm

Here, I'm using the Australian average of 200 reptiles/ha This is likely very conservative for central Australia, which prof Dickman says is "reptile-rich" And we know that species density is much higher, and likely also population density …https://www-publish-csiro-au.stanford.idm.oclc.org/book/7845/ pic.twitter.com/hP3YrDgF1W