> In August 2007, a Chinese man reportedly videotaped a large white animal swimming in the Yangtze. Although the animal was tentatively identified as a baiji, the presence of only one or a few animals, particularly of advanced age, is not enough to save a functionally extinct species from true extinction. The last known living baiji was Qiqi (淇淇), which died in 2002.
I think the problem is that you can never really know for sure if a species is extinct. But this is pretty sad, and I wouldn't know why anyone would want to go in an argument to prove the GP incorrect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_paddlefish
Even today, there are dozens of videos claiming encounters with tasman tigers, that range from CGI to dogs with painted stripes.
> The last captive thylacine, later referred to as "Benjamin", was trapped in the Florentine Valley by Elias Churchill in 1933, and sent to the Hobart Zoo where it lived for three years. The thylacine died on 7 September 1936. It is believed to have died as the result of neglect—locked out of its sheltered sleeping quarters, it was exposed to a rare occurrence of extreme Tasmanian weather: extreme heat during the day and freezing temperatures at night This thylacine features in the last known motion picture footage of a living specimen: 62 seconds of black-and-white footage showing the thylacine in its enclosure in a clip taken in 1933, by naturalist David Fleay.
> After the thylacine's death the zoo expected that it would soon find a replacement, and "Benjamin"'s death was not reported on in the media at the time. Although there had been a conservation movement pressing for the thylacine's protection since 1901, driven in part by the increasing difficulty in obtaining specimens for overseas collections, political difficulties prevented any form of protection coming into force until 1936. Official protection of the species by the Tasmanian government was introduced on 10 July 1936, 59 days before the last known specimen died in captivity.
> The thylacine held the status of endangered species until the 1980s. International standards at the time stated that an animal could not be declared extinct until 50 years had passed without a confirmed record. Since no definitive proof of the thylacine's existence in the wild had been obtained for more than 50 years, it met that official criterion and was declared extinct by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 1982 and by the Tasmanian government in 1986. The species was removed from Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) in 2013.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thylacine#Extinction_in_Tasman...
350 species previous thought to be extinct are known to still exist.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/features/visit-ani...
Wikipedia is wrong
Do you think its okay to hunt down a species like a blue whale from 400k to 10-30k and say 'yeah thats okay'?
There are plenty of other examples.
And do you assume they grow back because of no intervention or continuous intervention? I would say its about continues intervention.
Continues -> reminding people how shitty it is and that we can't accept the current state which you would say is 'pretty OK'.
And don't get me wrong: Why would you even try to counter argue about something like whale rescue? Do you have the feeling that we as a society are spending too much money on rescuing and saving species versus i don't know cars?
Lets give them more money, lets create jobs which are actually here to help our planet and lets do something useful once instead of writing just another backend.
This argues against something I didn't say, imply, or mean.
This could be a good time for you to think about how to listen to people you disagree with in a constructive way. It's an important life skill even outside HN!
Thats where that one is coming from.
And are the near-certain extinctions noted in the BBC article incorrect? I don't see any reason given in your post to doubt the veracity of the BBC article's claims.
So I view your comment as containing a non-trivial amount of white-washing.
Even if your articles are 100% fact based, selection bias in which stories to report and which to promote is a huge issue.
It's why we love places like HN, also - both for the un-editorialized ranking of stories as well as the ranking of comments.
Absolutely yes. It would be hard to come up with strong evidence that the hundreds (thousands?) of other papers are wrong, but extraordinary evidence would absolutely be shared widely.
As another example - there were huge campaigns to get women to get screened for breast cancer. Turns out there is little to no benefit in doing so based on extensive long term scientific studies (very surprising to me but that’s what it is). It is taking forever for that fact to come out and it’s not even that controversial.
Consider the massive numbers of people and industries who are ideologically and economically motivated to show that climate change is a hoax. It's an absurdly charged issue. Also consider the massive effort that would be required to thoroughly debunk the many dozens of sources of evidence and papers that suggest climate change is both man-made and accelerating.
You are correct that some types of information don't spread as fast as others. In fact, the vast majority of information on earth doesn't get prominent national attention. By definition, it's quite abnormal to reach that level. I don't know much about breast cancer screening, but it seems obvious that "breast cancer screening isn't as reliable as we thought" isn't a shoe-in for front page news, and I'm not sure why that should have any implications for climate change news.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53753458
I don't expect major public health shifts to happen within a month of a paper being published, especially during a pandemic.
HN is a fun discussion site but if it was your only source of information your worldview would be very warped.
Don't state like its the norm now not to believe well known old and trusty news papers.
My basic assumption is, that they are not lying but they can also make mistakes.
Anyway, here is the International Whaling Commission's detailed inventory of populations: https://iwc.int/status
By and large, whale populations are growing back as hunting has stopped.