I read the GP comment with this caveats in mind, and I still think it's accurate. The figure used assumes that 100% of animals in areas affected by fires were

I read the GP comment with this caveats in mind, and I still think it's accurate. The figure used assumes that 100% of animals in areas affected by fires were killed. Even a quote like: > It's reasonable to think that for animals caught up in the fires, at least for ground dwelling animals, more were severely impacted than were not. taken literally, mean that the estimate is off by a factor of 2. I understand that you didn't mean this literally, but it's illustrative of the structure of the claims and skepticism here. On top of that, even the core methodology of the study doesn't make any sense. Per the university's methodology notes[1], they copied the method used by a previous study on land clearing, ie, permanent destruction of habitat. It's a somewhat reasonable approach in that context: cleared and developed land is lost to wildlife in the equilibrium state, and it only relies on some fairly mild assumptions about a constant carrying capacity per species in order to use this methodology to calculate losses. There's no indication that destruction of the habitat leads to immediate death of the animals, and no attempt to account for the proportion of animals that may have successfully fled. In the case of these wildfires, the burned land isn't being permanently and explicitly kept out of the ecosystem. It's easy to imagine species density increasing in the remaining areas in the short term, and I don't think anyone expects the habitats not to grow back onto the destroyed land. Unless the claim is that the burned habitats are lost forever, the same logic obviously isn't applicable. The spread of this "fake news" is down to an irresponsible claim from the university and an incompetent/irresponsible game of Telephone from journalists. That being said, this isn't anything new for journalism. I'm in the habit of checking the sources of dramatic claims, as reported even by "prestigious" outlets like the New York Times, and the hit rate is laughably low if you follow the trail of sources and have even a modicum of scientific literacy. Again, this is true of _every_ topic they report on, not just specific, politically-loaded areas, which suggests it's not just a question of dishonesty and bias: Journalism's incentives are fucked right now, epistemology in the modern era is _really_ hard, and the hiring bar for journalism doesn't select all that stringently for intelligence. I don't know what the solution to this is... [1] https://sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2020/01/03/a-statement-about-the-480-million-animals-killed-in-nsw-bushfire.html https://sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2020/01/03/a-stateme...