1/ My interview with @SkyNews yesterday, in four parts
“This is not the new normal. It is going to get worse and worse and worse until we stop burning fossil fuels and stop destroying nature”
2/ “I remain convinced that the only way to force our leaders to take the required action is to get out on the streets in huge numbers”
3/ “Denialism is common, the media must take some responsibility for that. For decades media organisations such as Sky News, such as yourselves, have been downplaying the risks and helping ridicule environmentalists for warning us about this”
4/ “What a Net Zero deadline of 2050 means is that we’re going to carry on making the problem worse for another 28 years”
Not sure they'll have me back, but as always we must #TellTheTruth
Thrilling to see many new direct action groups around the world seemingly inspired by Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil, and using similar tactics such as motorway blockades and/or having a simple demand right there in the name
A brief 🧵
In Canada, @saveoldgrowth have been blocking highways and disrupting meetings to try and stop deforestation 2/
“I am not convinced that climate change is a huge threat to many species” is an extraordinary thing to hear from a leading conservation scientist, from Australia, in 2021.
It's also dangerous and needs to be countered, so here goes
We’ve all seen some of the disasters that biodiversity has suffered from climate-related events in recent years, from the 3 billion animals killed in the 19/20 Australian bushfires to the 1 billion animals boiled in the 2021 North American heat dome. 2. theguardian.com/environment/20…
Less extreme weather events can also cause huge mortality in individual species. For example, in 2015 high temperature and humidity killed 200,000 saiga (a critically endangered antelope) in a mass mortality event.
3. science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
Unpopular (but short)🧵on conservation in the climate emergency
The past 5+ mass extinctions were all prob. driven by changing climate. They occurred in an ecologically intact world where species could adapt by shifting their ranges. Nevertheless, mass extinctions occurred 1/5
Current climate change is happening in a devastated, highly fragmented world, where most non-flying species can’t shift their ranges. They’re trapped in their habitat fragments as they break down, & have to adapt with hugely reduced populations, distributions and gene pools 2/5
Given this, we're naïve to think we can still either:
i) save every species (see e.g. this Science paper calling for a global extinction rate of <1 species/yr in 2120 🤣)