ENVIRONMENT

The Eco-Zealots Were Wrong Again

I & I Editorial Board

December 19, 2025

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https://issuesinsights.com/2025/12/19/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.

That 100 years coincides with the era in which we have supposedly been overheating our planet by burning fossil fuels. They also contradict the results of “prominent research studies” that “have suggested our planet is currently experiencing another mass extinction,” which is “rapidly accelerating.”

The authors analyzed “rates and patterns of recent extinctions” over the previous five centuries, and were surprised to find that “past extinctions did not strongly predict current risk among groups.” In fact, “extinctions varied strongly among groups, and were most frequent among mollusks and some tetrapods,” while being “relatively rare in plants and arthropods.”

As it turns out, “recent extinctions were predominantly on islands” and “were most frequently related to invasive species.”

The mass extinction fears that the snarling doomsday cult is constantly screaming about are based on extrapolations from academics’ previous research. It isn’t fake science, but it’s not a trustworthy approach, either. After looking carefully at the evidence, the authors of the University of Arizona study “caution against extrapolating” extinction patterns “into the future.”

Maybe this study is in error and will be retracted sometime in the future. But that wouldn’t mean that the alarmists were right. Instead, it would solidly confirm that real science never stops probing, never rests on its findings, never abandons its curiosity, and always has room for debate. Skeptics should always be welcome to the discussion.

Eco-zealots, meanwhile, live in another world, where their narrow minds and their perpetual, feral anger have made them not just wrong but dangerous, too.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board