[cogitator]

To do so, you would need to define what a rate of ecological change is, and what the data points are, for some prior period, and then for some current period. Impossible.

No, this isn't impossible. It's been done in a number of paleoclimatic/paleobotanic studies. The rate of ecological change can be measured against the rate of climate (temperature) change using fairly direct measures of temperature, such as stable carbon or stable oxygen isotope ratios.

As you note, I think he goes out on a limb labeling the changes as both abnormal AND the result (at least partially) of human influence, but it is possible to compare current rates of ecological change to the rates of change that have occurred in the past.

[Libertarianize the GOP]

http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/bump-list

[bybybill]

Do these studies prove that plants and animals can adopt to changes in their environment? Golly Ned,maybe the spotted owls don`t stay in the tree after its cutdown.

[Rodney King]

Well, what is ecological change? How is that defined? Theoretically its possbile, but how would you do it? The population is every single living thing or organism. To do the study, you would need an appropriate sample.

It's hard to know what the sample size would be, because it is hard to know what the total number of living organisms is. However, let's say we decide that we need a sample size of 1,000.

You would need to probably break that down in to a certain number of ecological climates, and then take a random sampling in each. Let's say we broke it down in to 10 climate zones, and we took a sample of 100 organisms from each.

How exactly would you select random samples?

Do you really think that this guy did that?