We haven’t killed 90% of all plankton
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Between pre-prints, overly enthusiastic press releases, and reporters who often don’t have the slightest clue what they’re talking about it’s not worth it.
I’m not surprised an ever increasing portion of the public doesn’t believe in science. We’re practically conditioning them not to.
It's incredibly myopic to state first that you don't believe in the science news you hear, and yet somehow you (a) believe the news you hear about how much of the public believes in science, which itself would appear to be [social] science news, and (b) have apparently discounted the probability that the public just like you doesn't believe in science news.
Really, it's not myopic, it's xenophobic and bigoted.
Re-reading my comment it may be unclear what I meant. So to state it plainly it was the original claim I knew was bunk.
that's not to dismiss the threat of covid, but to merely put it in perspective. people at risk (elderly, or with co-morbidities) should get vaccinated and perhaps take other precautions. but none of that fearmongering did any good, and in fact, did a lot of bad, by sowing division rather than fostering unity.
There is some evidence. But as you said, it's a novel disease and still being studied.
https://www.bcm.edu/news/what-eegs-tell-us-about-covid-19-an...
Some of the EEG alterations found in COVID-19 patients may indicate damage to the brain that might not be able to be repaired after recovering from the disease.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/dcpc/research/update-on-cancer-de...
However. This is a long way from where things started.
*> that's not to dismiss the threat of covid’
Actually, I think what you’re doing is worse. As a doctor I’m happy to treat current covid as something we need to live with and get on with, but you’re actually dismissing the prior threat of COVID as well. Dismissing all the people who did die. Dismissing the 140,000 children who were orphaned in the US alone. Dismissing the real contribution of COVID to actual deaths - your distinction of ‘deaths from covid to deaths with covid’ is meaningless when excess mortality clearly shows that without the impact of covid the US population would be 1m higher than it is today.
The fact that you choose to see the COVID information as having sowed division speaks more to the bizarre information landscape you have in the US. Many other countries found the last couple of years intensely frustrating but managed to forge a sense of national spirit in fighting it, and as a result have significantly lower excess deaths, significantly less orphaned children, and significantly lower societal scars to bounce back from.
no country has "significantly lower"-ed anything. at most, we have slightly different diffusion curves, but mortality and morbidity rates are going to be pretty similar regardless of how we were "fighting it". every single person on earth will get covid at some point. at best, we've delayed that point a little bit for some people, not to mention some shifting of mortality. note that liver disease and chirrosis deaths rose last year - why aren't we making video montages and pouring one out for them, or their orphaned children, again?
>no country has "significantly lower"-ed anything. at most, we have slightly different diffusion curves, but mortality and morbidity rates are going to be pretty similar regardless of how we were "fighting it".
This is simply not true. Countries that avoided early surges, avoided overrunning hospitals and were able to get their populations vaccinated and dealing with lower virulence covid strains have had lower overall deaths over the 2 and a half years of the pandemic.
Australia for example, had largely flat excess deaths in 2020 & 2021 (actually a reduction in 2020, due to no covid, reduced travel, no flu season). Australia started dealing with the actual burden of COVID in late 2021 and 2022, and has seen 10,000 COVID deaths so far. Excess deaths in 2022 is 17.5% above average for the year to end of May. [0, 1].
If the US had of been able to pull together, instead of, as you have, variously dismissing it as 'nothing more than the flu', 'no more important than Cancer and Heart disease deaths', or moving the goal posts and declaring that, essentially, the area under the curve will be the same but the timing will be different (which is at conflict with earlier points) - ie if the US had of been able to pull an Australia (or one of many other countries that didn't just totally shit the bed and hide their heads in the sand) than COVID deaths, scaled for population, could have been in the 150-200k range.
Or, to put it another way, if Australia had of shit the bed as badly as the US did, then Aus would have had 60,000 deaths.
[0] https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/measuring-australias-excess-... [1] https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/causes-death/provis...
Unless they all would have died at that time regardless, in the absence of COVID, isn't this a distinction without relevance?
"with covid" is the same. that's why co-morbidities are almost universally indicated in covid deaths. it's because the people dying of covid are pretty unhealthy already, and covid is not the primary cause of death, but a contributing one, often a minor contributor at that.
the distinction is also important because it has multi-faceted follow-on effects. in terms of treatment, a doctor could otherwise have focused more on treating a co-morbidity than covid. a researcher might focus more on other ailments than covid. the public might have been less fearful and tribal. public health guidance might have been different. it has lots of relevance actually.
Add in how overly sensitive the tests were, especially pcr, testing for the virus and not for actual proof of infection... It's all a joke.
It makes sense for a lot of people in the US to be scared of COVID, it is a dangerous, infectious disease after all.
there is active research on the topic but no conclusive evidence that it's any more than a form of negative hawthorne effect and/or hypochondriasis.
>The authors mined electronic health records identif[ying] 353,164 patients diagnosed with COVID-19 between March 2020 and November 2021. They then matched each COVID-19 patient in a ratio of one to five with 1,640,776 control patients. All of the survivors and controls were monitored for at least a month and up to a year. Overall, 38.2 percent of COVID-19 survivors developed a post-COVID condition, compared with 16 percent of uninfected controls.
(Also note that the “post-COVID conditions” include things as minor as a persistent cough.)
The real headline should be "More than 1-in-5 COVID cases serious enough to be noted in medical records may result in long-term symptoms, greatly ranging in severity."
Upwards of 60% of the US had been infected with COVID as of April 2022 [0]. If serious long-COVID symptoms indeed occurred in upwards of 20% of COVID cases, that would mean >12% of Americans are currently suffering from debilitating long-term illness, which would be obvious on a societal level. We simply do not see this.
[0] https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20220426/almost-60-percent-i...
Equating the two is just nihilism or solipsism, as if there's no reality, just people saying things.
> they're not in this business for commonwealth, objective truth-seeking.
This is an attempted attack on motives, and again, not on any real substance.
> "Ars Technica is pretty good, partly because so many of their writers are experts with advanced degrees."
passes the test for "real substance"?
read both, and any other favored news service. read a small sample of their coverage and their self-serving motives jump right out of the page and slaps you silly like a rubber chicken. it's that obvious. and it is their problem, by association, since you're trying to make a (unsubstantiated) claim on reputation.
and a science writer is often writing about science far afield of their narrow education/research. the author of this very article is the "automotive editor" at ars, not a marine biologist, or anything close to it.
"expert" is a normative (aka political) nominative, not a descriptive one.
The author has a PhD in Pharmacology. Biology is an integral part of Pharmacology.
Not to mention that if you click through the author's article history, the most recent three pages of articles he's written (over 100 articles) are exclusively about cars, not science. (Ok, one exception, looks like he wrote an article about Disney's Obi-Wan series.)
While I wouldn't say he has no domain knowledge at all, I don't think it's fair to say he has "expertise in marine biology". And he doesn't even write about stuff related to his credentialed field, at least not recently.
At the risk of committing the sin of No True Scotsman, perhaps these people don't really have the expertise they claim.
I would expect a journalist who has actual, real expertise in a particular field to be able to sort out the junk from the newsworthy, at least most of the time. If not, then I don't think their expertise really exists. Sure, everyone makes mistakes sometimes, but I would expect people with real expertise to be at least mostly reliable.
Abstract and conclusions. The middle if it seems interesting, followed by looking for related research to confirm the conclusions.
Most people don't have the skills to do this, we need better science journalism.
(We also have an incentive problem for science, but that is another problem.)
Read the abstract of the research article and look for the most important graphic / table. Does it support the abstract of the article? Does it even support the caption of the figure? Ctr+F for some keywords, like "control group", "exclusion criteria", "almost statistically significant". Try to find out if they are using some "interesting" method to filter the data.
Use some back of the envelope statistic, like comparing the difference, variance and Sqrt(N). Count how many results are statistically significant and how many are reported. How many implicit results are not reported? Also, are there some results with an incredible small error?
There are just too many predatory journals and bad journals with a peer review that is a joke. Unless it's a journal in your area, just ignore the journal and look at the data. And even some serious journals publish bad articles.
I use a modified version of the crackpot index were the article starts with +5 points https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
In god we trust, all others must bring data.
It's the sane approach.
“Nullius in verba” is the original motto of the Royal Society, arguably the birthplace of modern science. It roughly translates to “take no one’s word” and encouraged an epistemological worldview based on empiricism. This was situated in a world where truth of all matters was primarily dictated by authority, even those of the natural philosophies.
The truths of science were to be experienced in the laboratory just as the truths of a cake recipe were to be experienced in the kitchen.
The person that I am responding to is lamenting the fact that there is a certain expectation that one must “believe in science”. This is in direct contrast to “nullius in verba”.
Believing in whatever is said by a random person claiming to be a scientist is less solid.
Believing in what is reported in general news media as being the discovery of said random people is rather gelatinous.
Honestly, since this is really just a shadow discussion of the same Reddit posts (https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/w2x10v/beware_of... and https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/w1ahrq/scots_tea...) we should all just come out front and say "A bunch of people overreacted to single non-science source of bad and un-peer-reviewed research". The fact it was debunked so quick is a credit to the science ecosystem. The fact that a bunch of dopes piled onto the original report without any due diligence is the problem. That is a problem worth unpacking - how information is distributed and our poor general education in critical thinking and evaluation of source materials.
I don’t think most people do.
And I don’t care if it was debunked in a day or two. It’s not 1980. It spread very far in that time. And given how outrageous the claim was (and the knock on effects we should be seeing if it was true) no outlet should have ever published it in the first place without further review.
If the police tell the media they shot someone in a robbery it gets reported. It’s reasonable to assume that’s not fake.
If police say they shot 5,700 people during a robbery at a McDonalds this morning, no one would report that uncritically. They’d look for some kind of confirmation because the story is so far out there.
That’s what I expect of science reporting. At least the most basic cursory check. I’m not asking for the media to duplicate studies themselves. But blindly reporting what someone tells you uncritically is likely to lead to obvious mistakes like this.
"Science reporting" is not analogous to "the police" since the police are a single entity. Let's leave aside, as we know from recent tragedies, that we know the police lie in the media frequently. But by the same standard, this is a problem of the general public confusing random publications in a Scottish newspaper as science reporting. Let me know when this happens in Nature. I don't think the science desks at the BBC or the NYTimes would have even published this, either. Those are the science media. Calling this science reporting is a category error.
But the skill had atrophied.
I had to learn how to count again, practice counting, and cool thing is I can now count--with about the same level of error I had as in late high school--to 18, 20, 30, 32, 37 the way most people can count instantly when there's 6 or less. I made a game to practice.
But back to the point: yeah too many people blurt stat. They didn't count right. Just blurt stat.
That uh isn't how stats works. 500 data points is a significant amount if they were being taken in a proper (randomized) manner. Maybe Johns is being taken out of context (i.e. his point might be that the sampling methodology was poor) but this too sounds like BS.
Because the GOES Foundation use volunteer yachts to collect the data:
https://www.goesfoundation.com/citizen-science-project/
>Twice a day, (if possible) we want you to take a 0.5 litre of sea water, put it through a GOES filter (developed by Dr.Jesus Ramon Barriuso Diez), count plankton, microplastics (fibres and beads) and any other particles which are over 20 microns.
I believe they went with this method because it's easier for non-scientists to contribute to their study.
They mention nets, but you're right in being suspicious in the method of collection. It does not seem like it uses best practices.
1: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-some-beaches-have-clear-...
Which should probably cast their study in an even more negative light. Even ignoring the fact that the samples were collected contrary to a standard method, we can't be sure the samples collected by random people were actually all done in a similar way as each other.
If the plankton counts suddenly shot up 2 orders of magnitude in a location, I expect that would cause a lot of questions to be asked that might result in more accurate results. But a decline or increase of 25% might just be assumed to be population fluctuations instead of a shift.
>Also "13 vessels and more than 500 data points" for a finding this sweeping in its assertions is enough to make any microbial oceanographer fall off their lab bench laughing.
The accuracy of their model would have to be incredible, assuming those boats weren't jet powered racing boats.
It would be interesting to see the coordinates of each sample. I assume we'll see something unimpressive since, as the article points out, the data containing many times the samples does not agree, suggesting this did not use the appropriate statistical methods/sampling.
https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/climate-drives-...
> "“Loss of sea ice and sea ice algae will change the timing and the amount of production that goes into high-quality food. Everything might happen earlier. There might be a longer plankton season with more abundant plankton and some studies have suggested this may benefit the ecosystem,” said Kimmel. “The region is warming and it remains to be seen how the ecosystem will ultimately respond.”"
Media unfortunately runs one-sided clickbait, apparently because they think this brings more views and engagement. In-depth analysis and nuance isn't very popular, particularly when there are several opposed parties with agendas involved.
As a programmer (and not as an academic person), I have no idea how to check if an article was peer reviewed or had harsh response from academic sources.
I wish it was like npmjs.com who provides me an audit tool for their Nodejs packages in the same npm CLI.
It's on you to go sniff the butt of the journal that publishes a research article and see if they're legit. You're also on the hook for seeing if there have been any retractions, letters of concern, articles in reply, and who if anyone cited the thing you're reading.
Some journals offer tools specific to themselves to help you with some of this, and there are a few non-journal services that can help you get some of this information across journals (google scholar, pubmed, etc...) but they're scattershot and discipline specific.
That's overly pessimistic. There's lots of effort making publicly funded research more accessible.
You won't get universal consensus on authority. That's not pessimism; that's an odd kind of optimism, really...
There isn't one, as far as I know, but supposedly one can turn to bona fide publications for peer-reviewed studies/reports etc; there are specialist journals about almost any science subject, however mainstream or niche.
However, the peer-review process is increasingly discredited/broken, according to articles such as this recent example [1] Peer review is frustrating and flawed – here’s how we can fix it.
It would also seem that many supposedly reputable journals often publish without due diligence, too. The site Retraction Watch [2] exists to draw attention to published papers subsequently having to be withdrawn. Reasons for retractions can be poor methodology, dubious authorship and lots more - which point to failings in the peer-review system.
[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/peer-review-frus...
This is a different problem than the issue of a central repository for all peer reviewed articles. Some journals allow you to see the trail of the actual peer review (questions raised by reviewers, responses & changes made by authors, etc) but this is far from the norm. The standard practice is to only offer the final version of the article, and to not release the trail of peer review to the general public.
pubpeer.com does allow people to raise concerns and discuss individual publications for technical issues/plagarism, and its typical for the authors to come on there and provide further information or clarifications. Pubpeer however is a third party site distinct from the peer review process that journals do before publication. It's also not uncommon to see papers pulled due to concerns raised on pubpeer.
Seriously, if 90% of plankton had been killed off there would be some very noticeable effects. Something like 50% of our oxygen is generated by phytoplankton. (50% is probably the floor - I see some estimates going up to around 70%) And plankton of all types is at the bottom of the food chain - if 90% disappeared there would be mass starvation in our oceans.
This institutional disdain is all engulfing by this point, and unfortunately being used more and more by politicians and any party that is morally bankrupts enough and finds a way to exploit this.
Is there anything we (as in people who believe in science and still have some institutional belief) should be doing to help science/media/institutions get their shit together?
The reason for this new method of arguing is that arguing without fallacies is hard, and the other person may have a good argument, but then if you follow logic and don't use fallacies and somehow believe that argument everyone will cancel you and completely ignore everything you have to say because when they investigate your background they will find that you believe an argument that makes you cancellable.
This is just repackaged Lysenkoism where you stop questioning someone's theory because the whole rest of your life will get cancelled if you do.
"More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the Soviet campaign to suppress scientific opponents. "[1]
Then later on, Stalin, in "Marxism and the Problem of Linguistics" decided that he had made a mistake politicizing basic science and denounced people who attached ideological labels to science and language. That's because Beria was having trouble getting the nuclear bomb project finished because ideologues inside the party were trying to cancel scientists who believed in relativity.
All of the conspiracy theory people feel a loss of control over their lives or disconnection with society. They feel like traditional media is trying to invalidate their personal experiences. Lots of people are willing and ready to exploit that feeling by wedging in a conspiracy theory. Then these exploiters will either sell them something, or try to get them to vote for a candidate, or something. There are also some genuine crazy people, but don't assume that as the default.
So what can you do? I think you can only make a difference in a 1 on 1 conversation. You can't directly repudiate their weirdo beliefs. You have to acknowledge what they believe. You have to accept at the start of the conversation that you may not turn them around. If you really want to make a difference, have a tiny goal for each conversation - just connect with them. Let them feel like people from the mainstream world care about them.
Look up "High Demand Groups" (aka Cults). The resources for them also apply to people who believe in conspiracy theories.
After covid I've lost a lot of that hope. We've seen the masses unwilling to undergo the incredibly minor inconvenience of wearing a mask and getting a jab to prevent deaths of their neighbours.
How can we hope to together give up our comfort to the extent it will be needed to face the challenges that lay ahead?
> Is there anything we (as in people who believe in science and still have some institutional belief) should be doing to help science/media/institutions get their shit together?
Help in Education. There are levels to this. Start with your children. Encourage and foster their curiosity. Help them to become critical thinkers. Be involved in their educational institutions. Asks if the kids could have a field trip to the local museum of science / natural history or the planetarium or astronomy observatory. Offer yourself to be a reading/literacy mentor and pick interesting books. If you really got a nack for it, get involved in the institutions themselves: Become a science educator, be it a school teacher, in a community college, or elsewhere.
This is the long game. Will take at least 18 years.
Change politics. Again there are levels. Become interested at first. Then become more involved. Bring your expertise to the table. Etc. It is a very very difficult path where we will often fail to succeed, but I think we should try. In politics we would have access to the biggest levers to enact changes.
A big problem is that science becomes politicized and corrupted to serve a certain agenda, see COVID response [2]. Or how big corporations can sponsor fake science (tabacco, oil, sugar industry) and use it to deter political decision.
=== [1] on a very basic level, like looking for patterns in empiric observations, of formulating a falsifiable theory, test it with experiments. That level.
[2] in the beginning the response was science based, but then an agenda kicked in and the measurements did not change when the science/dynamics of the pandemic changed. (Vaccines do prevent hospitalization, but not infection. They do not lead to herd immunity. They became ever less effective with newer variants. The variants became less lethal. Still the government was hell bent on vaccine mandates, when it was clear that it would really just only protect you and not others. There was never a study on the effect on long COVID. Children's response is overwhelmingly mild, ect.
- Covid isn’t real
- and if it is real, it’s not that bad
- and if it is that bad, it’s not as bad as the vaccine
- and if it is worse than the vaccine, it’s fine because I already had it in 2019
source: Real conversations I had with a family member.
Even bad information gives us a small sense of power and security.
If you agree with the political conclusion of a study then it’s science. If you disagree then it’s fake news.
(Some have conclusions that policy entrepreneurs find useful to support a political agenda, either because of what they actually say or because of what people can be deceived into understanding them to say, but that's a different thing than actually having a political conclusion.)
Republicans would be quick to dismiss the article assuming it is another attack in economic success, global warming etc... Democrats would be quick to point to the article as support for reasons to support progressive policies.
Literally everything is political today
This is why I try to pollute as much as I possible can. "Science" keeps telling me that climate change is an important issue and that we need to curb pollution to fight it. As you just said, since it comes from a place that can't be trusted, the logical choice is to take the opposite stance.
So as long as the shit is wrapped up better we should eat it?
I want to stress here that in this instance I may still be fully in the wrong and he may in fact be correct with regards to our assessments of the overall situation—my point is merely that my friend took the mere existence of a research paper in a journal with findings that affirmed his beliefs as if it were Gospel, because it's a Study in a Scientific Journal, you see. never mind that social sciences are far more fuzzy than hard sciences, never mind the methods used in the study, never mind following up and seeing if anything changed in seven years. no, a Study in a Journal asserted that his Beliefs were Correct, so that might as well be a Science stone tablet with Science written on it that some Scientists were directly told by Science God from Science Heaven to write.
this friend is, of course, an atheist, basically an anti-theist really, and the degree of Faith he places in the Gospel of Science (even Social Science!!!) being comparable to that which adherents to conventional religion place upon their holy books remains completely lost on him.
I don't think this is a particularly uncommon way of thinking these days.
I think we colloquially get drawn into thinking that science-as-in-physics is the same thing as science-as-in-biology is the same thing as science-as-in-economics, especially when it comes to what they all mean by "fact" and "proven". Media then takes advantage of this general misunderstanding to make "weather facts" sound like they are just as concrete as "fundamental physics facts" because it gets more attention. Then we find ourselves arguing about climate science with the same level of self-assured veracity we might argue about billiard balls on an ideal surface in a vacuum.
So science literacy is slowly increasing, but the amount of bullshit masquerading as science to nudge you to buy more Camel cigarettes or vote whatever policy the charlatan wants to push is increasing a lot faster
And in this particular case, even a less well known publication's lies can go around the world via social media sharing before the truth gets its boots on.
This memory is about 25-30 years old, so not sure how accurate it is.
If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view.
He is well aware which side of the bread the butter's on.
That said, the scientific method is not without its gargantuan biases and filters. It looks through a pinhole.
Of course, professing 'belief' doesnt confer actual knowledge about that faith. EG. anyone who's ever said that science 'proved' something or other.
If this misstatement about phytoplankton is misleading (gee I hope so), if it gets people to start carrying that canary into the mines, that's a positive outcome. We probably aren't aware of all of the tipping points.
Things like the Florida governor banning state use of the term "Global Warming", as if that's going to fix the problems Florida faces. Or maybe the view that the USA government shouldn't back 30 year mortgages for places expected to be unusable in 30 years.
I had a little taste of this when my city's schools decided to kill off a major academic program based on a "peer reviewed publication". Parents were shocked, layoffs were made, the decision was made after normal meeting hours when the video recording was off. People asked for more clarification. Turns out a parent wrote up an opinion piece that boiled down to, if their kid didn't get in, they wanted the program gone. They showed it to a friend (the peer) who liked it. They thought that counted a "peer reviewed publication" and thought it was justification for killing off AIM/Gate, despite the success of the program and minimal cost (the AIM/Gate classes had the same teacher/student ratios).
Another sad case was a new development that set aside some land to make room for burrowing owls, after a year or two that land was sold to developers. The reason? They didn't think any owls actually lived there, it didn't occur to them that you'd only see the owls at night. I walked the perimeter every night with my dog and would often see the owls on fence posts.
The main claim that this blogger uses before calling the article rubbish is that it had a sample size of 500. This is a good sample size. It vastly weakens the credibility of the blogger to imply this is insufficient.
It’s really problematic to have a reaction decrying the decline of literacy because some blogger said something was bad. If there is a decline of literacy, it ought to start with the blogger and the Hn poster here.
Scientific literacy is and always has been low. Armchair experts decrying its decline is just ironic.
David Johns, head of the Continuous Plankton Recorder Survey, describes it as "a literal drop in the ocean." Johns would know—the Continuous Plankton Recorder Survey has been running since 1958 and has accumulated more than 265,000 samples.
The Continuous Plankton Survey has indeed cataloged a loss of plankton over the years—but nothing close to the 90 percent loss claimed by Dryden. "We have noticed long-term changes—northerly movements of plankton species as surface water warms, changes in seasonality in some taxa, invasives, etc.," Johns told Ars by email
What’s worse, as far as I can tell the actual preprint doesn’t make the 90% claim. It’s referring to the risk of loss from ocean acidification in the next 20 years.
As far as I can tell it’s just bad science naive bloggers and journalists all around plus armchair experts criticizing each other.
If anyone is going to talk about skepticism and scientific literacy, step one should be ignoring pop summaries in the news.
https://deliverypdf.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=327083003119119...
However the media amplifies bad science to capitalize on narratives and make money.
Good news media is supposed to put things through a critical lens and explain to people things are currently a theory or just a small subset of a bigger picture... but they media has become click bait and unreliable.
They will take the tiniest shred of evidence and use that to make some wildly sensational claim.
But also more skeptical of even legitimate science.
AFAIK, the trend hasn’t changed.
But have killed the ability to tell propaganda from facts in 90% of people.
Scientists are shocked
Google: principles of ecology: "distribution in mosaic"
he has appeared to blame the problem on microplastics
Because Dryden owns Dryden Aqua, a water treatment/filtration company. And its interesting that he makes bold claims like these, and places the blame on something he stands to benefit from, assigning lesser blame on what we know is likely the larger impact on plankton loss (global warming).
In practice, it is almost a statistical inevitability that we will continue to overpopulate at this point and in that way there is nothing hyperbolic about the statement that, more than likely, they are as good as dead.