Tag: mass extinction

How dare YOU – Doom Pixie Greta and your political pals!?!

Swedish activist Greta Thunberg earned her moniker Doom Pixie because of her diminutive height and shrill accusations of human and planetary doom allegedly due to fossil-fuel-fueled climate change.

How dare YOU employ bogus scares based on computer models that can’t even recreate past climates, much less predict future climate and weather? How dare you turn every temperature and weather event, flood, drought, and forest fire into assertions that wildlife, humanity, and planet face imminent demise?

How dare YOU claim plant-fertilizing, planet-greening, life-sustaining carbon dioxide from fuels, manufacturing, and agriculture somehow endangers our human health and welfare?

From CFACT

By Paul Driessen

Swedish activist Greta Thunberg earned her moniker Doom Pixie because of her diminutive height and shrill accusations of human and planetary doom allegedly due to fossil-fuel-fueled climate change.

Her most famous tirade was directed at world leaders for allegedly doing too little to stop it.

“How dare you?” she fiercely scowled at United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, presidents, prime ministers, dignitaries, and functionaries in the UN’s General Assembly Hall.

“You have stolen my dreams, my childhood with your empty words…. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. How dare you?!”

No, Miss Thunberg and the politicians, bureaucrats, and activists who turn your diatribes into policy.

How dare YOU employ bogus scares based on computer models that can’t even recreate past climates, much less predict future climate and weather? How dare you turn every temperature and weather event, flood, drought, and forest fire into assertions that wildlife, humanity, and planet face imminent demise?

How dare YOU claim plant-fertilizing, planet-greening, life-sustaining carbon dioxide from fuels, manufacturing, and agriculture somehow endangers our human health and welfare?

How dare YOU demand that we shut down the energy systems that make our lives, health, and living standards possible? That we must be deprived of modern comforts, aspirations and loved ones, because you force us to eliminate energy systems that work – and replace them with expensive weather-dependent substitutes that bring blackouts, poverty, disease, deprivation, joblessness and shortened lives?

How dare YOU tell the poorest people on Earth that they must renounce their God-given right to modern technologies, health, and living standards – and sacrifice their landscapes and wildlife with wind turbines, solar panels, and renewable energy trash on your altar of climate fanaticism?

How dare YOU demand that we abandon free enterprise democratic capitalism that has brought health and prosperity to billions – and replace it with socialist-communist-totalitarian governments that have immiserated billions and starved and murdered over 100,000,000 people?

Shortly after the October 7, 2023, barbarities, Doom Pixie shifted her focus to promoting Hamas, Hezbollah and Palestinian terrorist dreams of eradicating Israel and Israelis “from the river to the sea.” Perhaps her audiences had tired of her climate rants, perhaps because they realize the “crisis” is wildly overblown, the world will need oil and gas for decades to come, and mining, manufacturing and installing wind, solar and battery power is environmentally horrific. Or maybe vilifying Israel simply pays better.

But her climate harangues continue – and her acolytes still glory in imposing diktats that raise costs and cost lives, while doing nothing to stabilize Earth’s frequently and perpetually fluctuating climate.

Indeed, I am eternally astonished at how often I think their callous insanity and depravity couldn’t possibly sink any lower … and I’m proven wrong.

California policies have forced oil drilling and production, refineries, coal, gas and nuclear power plants, and even hydroelectric plants to shut down. Big surprise: it now has the highest electricity and gasoline prices in the continental USA. Kind bureaucrats now say they will shave a few cents off per gallon.

By mandating improved “tire efficiency,” so tires glide along roads with less resistance. All-season 65,000-mile US tires must now be replaced with 27,000-mile Euro tires. That will at least double tire costs over a vehicle’s lifetime. Far worse, it will bring more accidents, injuries and deaths, because the new tires require longer stopping distances, especially under wet conditions.

California, Connecticut and New York also lead the US on Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and net-zero policies – with Virginia’s “moderate” governor and legislators working feverishly to catch up, thereby driving household, school, hospital, business, factory, and data center electricity and operating costs ever higher. You need heating, air conditioning, cooking, lighting, and computing? Too bad.

Under those same climate-centric policies, Britain’s per capita primary energy consumption has plummeted since 2005. Its wealth and living standards have done likewise. Meanwhile, its electricity prices are among the world’s highest, thanks to wind and solar replacing coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants. Jobs and entire industries have disappeared, and residents have been forced to remove air conditioning units if they actually use them during heatwaves.

The jobs, energy cost, and industrial situation is just as bleak in Germany where “bathroom ministers” now inform homeowners they cannot have a shower and bathtub in the same bathroom.

As absurd as all this is, nothing compares to the totalitarian imperialism of UN, European, World Bank, World Economic Forum, Obama-Biden, and other “climate crisis,” “energy transition,” and “traditional agriculture” ministries. For decades, they have imposed their “moral” and “ethical” principles on poor countries, to keep them from developing “excessively.” Until recently, they’ve gotten away with it.

Obama science advisor John Holdren insisted that the United States and other industrialized nations must “de-develop” – and then tell underdeveloped countries what “ecologically feasible development” they will be permitted to reach.

For decades, this meant no grants or loans for coal, gas, or even nuclear power plants – because impoverished countries were expected to “leapfrog dirty fossil fuels” and go directly to “clean, renewable, sustainable” wind and solar.

That’s why, even today, the average Sub-Sahara African has electricity 20 minutes a day, 141 minutes a week, 123 hours per year (out of 8,760) – sporadically, at totally unpredictable times, for a few minutes or hours at a time. Homes, shops, and even schools and hospitals are severely energy-deprived, and access to clean water is a luxury.

Eco-imperialist, neo-colonialist policies have also dictated agricultural and health policies. Farmers were told for years that they must not use pesticides, herbicides, or biotech seeds – especially if they want to sell their produce in European markets. They should even forego tractors and be content with ox-pulled plows and “traditional,” “ecological” subsistence farming.

Even malaria control must be done without pesticides, with often counterfeit and substandard drugs, and with hospitals that lack clean water, adequate electricity and even window screens.

Thankfully, President Trump has restored regulatory sanity and American energy dominance – and ended the use of foreign aid as a weapon to browbeat poor countries into accepting these lethal policies.

That compassionate approach – and the refusal of China, India, and other emerging powerhouse economies to buy into the insanity – has further encouraged still poor developing countries to reject eco-imperialism and neo-colonialism. They now tell the world they want, demand, and expect rapid, dramatic transformations in living standards, nutrition, and health through modern energy, industrial, agricultural, and healthcare infrastructure. As their sacred right.

The world is changing, at least in many states and countries. It’s about time. But there is still much left to be done – beginning with electing American, European, Asian, and African leaders who understand and champion these realities.

British Intelligence Goes Full Guardian Promoting Untestable Computer-Generated Scares of Eco-System Collapse

Conspiracy nuts have had a field day over the delayed release of work compiled by the British Intelligence Services warning of possible eco-collapse, mass extinctions, food shortages, conflicts and mass migration. In fact, the flimsy 14-page report is little more than a cutting job from the Guardian. Twenty-six mostly usual suspect sources are named, and highlights of the most extreme scenarios are cherry-picked in yet another Net Zero Blob effort to create population panic

A close-up of a man in a tuxedo with a bow tie, standing in front of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, looking serious.

From The Daily Sceptic

By Chris Morrison

Conspiracy nuts have had a field day over the delayed release of work compiled by the British Intelligence Services warning of possible eco-collapse, mass extinctions, food shortages, conflicts and mass migration. In fact, the flimsy 14-page report is little more than a cutting job from the Guardian. Twenty-six mostly usual suspect sources are named, and highlights of the most extreme scenarios are cherry-picked in yet another Net Zero Blob effort to create population panic. Who knows how much taxpayer money was wasted on this compilation – AI could have done the job in under a minute. The obvious reason for the delay in publication was that someone intelligent in the Intelligence Services said something along the lines: ‘We can’t publish this BS, we will look complete idiots.’

The claim is that the original report was blocked at the top of the British government for being too negative. This is obvious nonsense. No claim of eco-system collapse and devastating climate change would ever be considered too extreme by almost the entire British political class, at least if past evidence is anything to go on. It appears that the report was compiled by the Joint Intelligence Committee, which coordinates the work of MI5 and MI6. It only saw the light of day with publication by the Government’s environment department following a Freedom of Information request from the Times newspaper. Green author and activist Rupert Read was suitably affronted by what was seen as a cover up.

Tweet by Rupert Read discussing the importance of nature-based climate adaptation and referencing a suppressed climate report warning of mass migration and nuclear war.

The report is strewn with fake scares that have been widely debunked over the years. The surprise is to see some of them still being published by bodies with reputations to lose. It would be interesting hear Rupert Read debate some of these contentious matters, but, alas, along with Caroline Lucas, George Monbiot and Clive Lewis MP, he signed a 2018 letter to the Guardian stating that he would no longer lend his “credibility” by talking to those who question the opinions around human-caused climate change.

It is claimed in the report that the rate of extinction is tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the past 10 million years, and this is said to “suggest a sixth mass extinction may be underway”. These types of claims require copious computer modelled estimates and assumptions, but they have a problem in connecting with observed reality. In a paper recently published by the Royal Society, it was found that extinction rates for animals and plants have “generally declined in the last 100 years”. Past extinctions are said to “strongly suggest” that climate change is not an important threat to biodiversity. The paper’s conclusions about extinctions are not new, and there is not a scintilla of scientific proof that the planet is in, or facing, a sixth mass extinction of animal and plant life.

All eco systems are said to be degrading around the world and population sizes of monitored vertebrate species are claimed to have fallen by an average of 68% since 1970. This is an old scare and arises from the bi-annual activist WWF ‘Living Planet’ report. Needless to say, this highly improbable figure has been effectively debunked. In 2020, a group of Canadian biologists examined a previous decline figure of 69% and showed that it was a statistical freak. They revealed that the estimate was driven by 2.4% of wildlife populations, adding, “if these extremely declining populations are excluded, the global trend switches to an increase”. Put simply, population of wildlife species often dramatically wax and wane – it’s called nature.

Collectors of laughable cherry-picking would have been delighted with a ‘case study’ that claimed falling coffee harvests are driving migration from central America to the USA. Not any more they are not, thanks, of course, to President Trump. Disease in 2012-2015 and what is characterised as “highly erratic weather” in 2018 led to particularly bad harvests. It happens, might be the realistic explanation. Although yields have recovered in recent years, production in this part of the world is hampered by primitive farming methods and small holdings. Central America is a world outlier. Elsewhere, coffee growing is booming with global production doubling over the last 30 years. Higher productivity farms in neighbouring Brazil and Columbia can often achieve double the hectare yields recorded in central America.

The report highlights biodiversity loss that it says will cause crop failures and intensify natural disasters and infectious disease outbreaks. If only there was substantial evidence to back all this up. Nowhere in this silly report is it mentioned that crops yields are soaring almost everywhere you look due to the enormous boost recently supplied by hydrocarbon-produced fertiliser. If you want half the world to starve, stop drilling for oil and gas. As is common in activists’ agitprop, there is no mention either of the recent 14% ‘greening’ of the Earth caused by higher levels of carbon dioxide. A good case can be made that natural famine has been eliminated globally for the first time in human history.

A number of desert areas are reducing in size and some marginal areas sustaining a better quality of life. Trees around the world, including those in the Amazon, have been putting on bulk in CO2 party time. The millions, make that billions, of climate refugees on the move exist only in the fevered imaginations of Guardian readers. Meanwhile, natural disasters show no sign of intensifying, while the number of global human fatalities caused by them has dropped 99% over the last 100 years.

The report relies heavily on the computer modelled fantasy world of ‘tipping points’. By 2030 there is said to be a “realistic possibility” that the boreal forests will start to collapse. Of course, the actual evidence suggests otherwise. In recent years, boreal forests in the northern hemisphere have become greener and more productive, helped by gentle climate warming and increased CO2 feeding levels. There has even been some measurable northwards expansion. The FOA Global Forest Resources Assessment indicates that boreal forests have shown relatively little net change in total area over recent decades.

This ridiculous scare alone gives us an idea about what is going on here. Humans affect the environment they live in, as do all species, but political extremists are given free rein to magnify to truly absurd levels the dangers of exploitation. Their solution is a neo-Malthusian command-and-control Net Zero takeover that would inevitably cause societal and economic collapse. When people are starving and destitute, biodiversity will be torn to shreds. Cobbling together 14 pages of reheated sandwich board-scares that have been doing the rounds for decades is an absurd waste of time for security professionals with presumably better things to do.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.

Remember when they told you climate change was causing a ‘mass extinction’? Never mind!

From the University of Arizona and the “Emily Litella er, Greta Thunberg School of Climate Attribution” comes this breath of fresh air. BTW, Willis was right.

A close-up of a weathered human skull resting on cracked, dry ground, with a surreal fiery glow in the background.

From Watts Up With That?

By Anthony Watts

From the University of Arizona and the “Emily Litella er, Greta Thunberg School of Climate Attribution” comes this breath of fresh air. BTW, Willis was right.

Extinction rates have slowed across many plant and animal groups, study shows

Prominent research studies have suggested that our planet is currently experiencing another mass extinction, based on extrapolating extinctions from the past 500 years into the future and the idea that extinction rates are rapidly accelerating.

A new study by Kristen Saban and John Wiens with the University of Arizona Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, however, revealed that over the last 500 years extinctions in plants, arthropods and land vertebrates peaked about 100 years ago and have declined since then. Furthermore, the researchers found that the past extinctions underlying these forecasts were mostly caused by invasive species on islands and are not the most important current threat, which is the destruction of natural habitats.  

The paper argues that claims of a current mass extinction may rest on shaky assumptions when projecting data from past extinctions into the future, ignoring differences in factors driving extinctions in the past, the present and the future. Published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, the paper is the first study to analyze rates, patterns and causes of recent extinctions across plant and animal species.

For their study, Saban and Wiens analyzed rates and patterns of recent extinctions, specifically across 912 species of plants and animals that went extinct over the past 500 years. All in all, data from almost 2 million species were included in the analysis.

“We discovered that the causes of those recent extinctions were very different from the threats species are currently facing,” said Wiens, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. “This makes it problematic to extrapolate these past extinction patterns into the future, because the drivers are rapidly changing, particularly with respect to habitat loss and climate change.”

According to Saban and Wiens, the most direct information on species losses comes from recent extinctions over the past five centuries. However, studies extrapolating these patterns into the future generally assume that recent extinctions predict current extinction risk and are homogeneous among groups, over time and among environments, the authors argue. 

“To our surprise, past extinctions are weak and unreliable predictors of the current risk that any given group of animals or plants is facing,” said lead author Saban, who recently graduated from the U of A and is currently a doctoral student at Harvard University. 

Extinction rates varied strongly among groups, and extinctions were most frequent among mollusks, such as snails and mussels, and vertebrates, but relatively rare among plants and arthropods. Most extinctions were of species that were confined to isolated islands, like the Hawaiian Islands. On continents, most extinctions were in freshwater habitats. Island extinctions were most frequently related to invasive species, but habitat loss was the most important cause (and current threat) in continental regions. Many species appeared to go extinct on islands because of predators and competitors brought by humans, such as rats, pigs and goats.

Somewhat unexpectedly, the researchers found that in the last 200 years, there was no evidence for increasing extinction from climate change.

“That does not mean that climate change is not a threat,” Wiens said. “It just means that past extinctions do not reflect current and future threats.”

The authors also considered threat levels – for example “threatened,” “endangered” or “least concern,”  – for 163,000 species as assessed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. 

“The current threat level provides probably our best hint of what is currently happening and might happen in the near future,” Wiens said. “We found the patterns of today’s threats to be different from those of past extinctions. For example, most extinct species are mollusks and vertebrates on islands that were driven extinct by invasive species, but most threatened species today are mainland species facing habitat destruction.”

Saban said she doesn’t want the study “to be taken as giving people a carte blanche” to suggest that human activity does not present a significant and urgent threat to many species. 

“Biodiversity loss is a huge problem right now, and I think we have not yet seen the kinds of effects that it might have,” she said. “But it’s important that we talk about it with accuracy, that our science is rigorous in how we’re able to detail these losses and prevent future ones.”

Contrary to many studies, the rates at which species are going extinct are not rapidly accelerating, the study found. 

“We show that extinction rates are not getting faster towards the present, as many people claim, but instead peaked many decades ago,” Wiens said. 

For some groups, such as arthropods and plants and land vertebrates, extinction rates have actually declined over the last 100 years, notably since the early 1900s, he added. One of the reasons for declining extinction rates “is many people are working hard to keep species from going extinct. And we have evidence from other studies that investing money in conservation actually works.”

According to Saban, the study was born out of a motivation to take a step back from doomsday scenarios.

“If we’re saying that what is happening right now is like an asteroid hitting Earth, then the problem becomes insurmountable,” she said. “By looking at the data in this way, we hope that our study helps inform our overall understanding of biodiversity loss and how we can come up with better ways to address it.” 

Guardian: “A climate of unparalleled malevolence”: are we on our way to the sixth major mass extinction?

Apparently, our pitiful atmospheric contribution is comparable to the 2-million-year eruption which drove the Permian–Triassic Extinction, which wiped out most life on Earth.

An eruption of a volcano spewing lava and ash, with a barren landscape and small animals in the foreground.

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

A graph depicting atmospheric CO2 levels over geological time, highlighting the transitions between greenhouse and icehouse climates, with models and proxies for carbon dioxide levels.
Fig. 1. Phanerozoic time scale, greenhouse vs. icehouse conditions and three models for atmospheric CO2. Source: 
User-friendly carbon-cycle modelling and aspects of Phanerozoic climate change

Apparently, our pitiful atmospheric contribution is comparable to the 2-million-year eruption which drove the Permian–Triassic Extinction, which wiped out most life on Earth.

‘A climate of unparalleled malevolence’: are we on our way to the sixth major mass extinction?

Churning quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at the rate we are going could lead the planet to another Great Dying

By Peter Brannen
Tue 19 Aug 2025 14.01 AESTLast modified on Tue 19 Aug 2025 14.20 AEST

…

Put enough CO2 into the system all at once, and push the life-sustaining carbon cycle far enough out of equilibrium, and it might escape into a sort of planetary failure mode, where processes intrinsic to the Earth itself take over, acting as positive feedback to release dramatically more carbon into the system. This subsequent release of carbon would send the planet off on a devastating 100-millennia excursion before regaining its composure. And it wouldn’t matter if CO2 were higher or lower than it is today, or whether the Earth was warmer or cooler as a result. It’s the rate of change in CO2 that gets you to Armageddon.

…

Here’s a plausible sequence of events at the end of the Permian. First, and most simply: the excess CO2 trapped more energy from the sun on the surface of our planet – a simple physical process that was worked out by physicists more than 150 years ago. And so the world helplessly warmed – models and proxies both point to about 10C of warming over thousands of years – pushing animal and plant physiology alike to their limits. It’s also a simple physical fact about our world that for every degree it warms, the atmosphere can hold about 7% more water, so, as the temperature climbed and the water cycle accelerated, storms began to take on a menacing, drowning intensity. As the ocean warms as well, it holds less oxygen.

…

Now let’s pull back from the brink. However similar to this era our modern experiment on the planet might first appear, it’s worth acknowledging, even stressing, that the end-Permian climate catastrophe was truly, surpassingly bad. And on a scale unlikely ever to be matched by humans. Upper estimates for how much carbon dioxide the fossil-fuel-burning Siberian Traps erupted, ranging up to 120,000 gigatons, defy belief. Even lower estimates, of say 30,000 gigatons, constitute volumes of CO2 so completely ridiculous that matching it would require humans to not only burn all the fossil fuel reserves in the world, but then keep putting ever more carbon into the atmosphere for thousands of years. Perhaps by burning limestone for fun on an industrial scale for generations, even as the biosphere disintegrates. As it is, industrial civilisation could theoretically generate about 18,000 gigatons of CO2 if the entire world pulled together on a nihilistic, multicentennial, international effort to burn all the accessible fossil fuels on Earth.

…Read more: 

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/19/a-climate-of-unparalleled-malevolence-are-we-on-our-way-to-the-sixth-major-mass-extinction

Back in the real world, the Earth is still locked in a brutal Late Cenozoic Ice Age, which started 34 million years ago, yet still threatens to crush our civilisation under mile high walls of ice – so we have plenty of buffer between us and any kind of geologically significant global warming event.

Life has thrived under far higher CO2 levels than today. The graphic at the top of this page came from User-friendly carbon-cycle modelling and aspects of Phanerozoic climate change. During the late Carboniferous for example, CO2 levels were likely far higher than today, but despite elevated CO2 the Earth still experienced icehouse conditions, similar to today’s ice age cycle. So clearly CO2 isn’t the only factor driving climatic conditions.

The ice age of the last 34 million years is a lot of ice age. Clearly something more powerful than CO2 is keeping our planet locked in the ice box. It is likely industrial CO2 emissions will fail to overcome today’s geological ice box forcings, just as much higher CO2 levels failed to overcome the powerful geological ice box forcings which created the Late Paleozoic icehouse during the Carboniferous.

Even if I’m wrong, and substantial warming does occur, we have strong evidence humans would thrive in such conditions. Our monkey ancestors made their debut in the fossil record during much warmer conditions than today. The Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, 5-8C hotter than today, was the age of monkeys. Our monkey ancestors thrived on the abundance of the hothouse PETM, and colonised much of the world, only retreating when the cold returned. If a bunch of monkey ancestors with brains the size of matchboxes could thrive in a much world, then we humans certainly could – which gives us at least a 5-8C buffer of safety against any imaginable global warming event.

Fish also did well during the PETM – so it’s not just humans who would thrive in such warm conditions.

Study: Ancient Fish Thrived During PETM Extreme Global Warming

Given the remarkable stability of the Earth’s climate on geological timescales, the fact the Earth is still locked in an ice age, the benign conditions which prevailed in previous much warmer ages, and the existence of previous ice age epochs with far higher CO2 levels than today, those who focus on the carbon cycle alone are overlooking some pretty important evidence. Given all this, I believe we can reasonably conclude claims that industrial emissions are creating a man-made Permian Extinction are an absurd fantasy.

Dale Vince’s Ministry of Eco Education Preaches Climate Crisis to Seven-Year-Olds

We must not dwell too long on private misfortune nor ought we to speculate on Mr. Dale Vince’s alleged lavish lifestyle of fast cars, quaffing Dom Perignon, designer clothes, yachts and private jet travel. Mrs Vince is in a divorce court giving details of conspicuous consumption, with her ex suggesting he has been inspired by the “concept” of lower consumption since the 1980s. Such is the disputatious way with these trying family battles, it is good manners to stay silent.

From The Daily Sceptic

By Chris Morrison

We must not dwell too long on private misfortune nor ought we to speculate on Mr. Dale Vince’s alleged lavish lifestyle of fast cars, quaffing Dom Perignon, designer clothes, yachts and private jet travel. Mrs Vince is in a divorce court giving details of conspicuous consumption, with her ex suggesting he has been inspired by the “concept” of lower consumption since the 1980s. Such is the disputatious way with these trying family battles, it is good manners to stay silent. Except perhaps to note that Mr. Vince has made his fortune from collecting over £110 million in taxpayer windmill subsidies and has been making a bit of a virtue of late about everyone cutting down on consumption to save the planet. Nobody it seems is safe from his proselytising. While Vince runs his onshore wind farms, children as young as seven are being educated in the technology of the past by his foundation-funded Ministry of Eco Education (MEE). Fed a diet of climate and ecological catastrophe, the children are also being encouraged to build their own model wind turbines.

At this age, children probably don’t understand what electricity is and a primer explaining the difference between an amp and a volt might be more useful. Or perhaps just learning to read and count properly. Times change, but probably not very much. When your correspondent was seven, the nuns at his Catholic primary school were very excited by something called the Second Vatican Council and scrapbooks were kept about something that in truth meant nothing to Dartford schoolchildren. I have it in mind that slightly older pupils were making models of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Get them young and you get them for life, as the Jesuits say. Meanwhile, any doubts about the existence of the Almighty would have been met with condign punishment similar in some ways to Vince’s recent suggestion that “climate denial” should be illegal.

Whether or not Vince has been glugging vintage shampoo and shopping at chic clothing emporiums, his Ministry of Eco Education is one of the finest moral fashion accessories money can buy. It recently said its ambition was to insert its curriculum into 1,000 schools with green messaging on transport, nature and society.

Its stories seem designed to scare the living daylights out of anyone lacking the intellectual ability and wider education to question the climate Armageddon presented. All seven-year-olds in fact. They would not, for instance, be able to challenge the claim made by MEE that around the world “diversity is being annihilated at a terrifying rate”. Population sizes of thousands of species of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles are claimed by MEE to have fallen by 60% since the 1970s. No source is provided for this imprecise claim, but variations of it are common in alarmist circles. Some of the evidence suggests otherwise. A bedrock scares repeated endlessly in the mainstream is that 69% of vertebrates across the planet have declined since 1970. The figures are provided by the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London. However, a group of Canadian biologists recently revealed that the figure was a statistical freak. They pointed out that the estimate was driven by 2.4% of wildlife populations, adding: “If these extremely declining populations are excluded, the global trend switches to an increase.”

According to a paper on MEE’s website identifying the foundations of its eco curriculum, the Earth’s environment is breaking down with warmer temperatures wreaking havoc causing an increase in ‘extreme’ weather and leading to a sixth mass extinction. It can of course be argued that slightly warmer temperatures bouncing back from a recent colder period have been almost entirely beneficial for life on Earth. Food supplies have risen, and famine is at bay in many parts of the world, carbon dioxide has significantly ‘greened’ the planet, mass extinction scares are the product of computer models, most ‘extreme’ weather events are not becoming more frequent or more severe and there is barely a scintilla of evidence to suggest humans have a hand in their frequency or ferocity. On this latter point, even the IPCC confirms, at least for now, this interpretation of the science. Presumably, such reassurance is not to be encouraged in the classroom – indeed it seems that according to Vince any ‘denial’ of climate science that is thought to be ‘settled’ should be against the law.

While primary schools seem to be the main target of MEE, there are hopes to extend it to the secondary sector, while the material is also said to be suitable for home educators. A recent MEE presentation highlighted the work of an MEE London-based home educator who was using MEE materials entitled ‘The future of electricity’. Those great unreliables wind and solar had pride of place but given that windmills first started operating in Britain in the reign of Henry II (1154-89), perhaps the materials should be called “The past of electricity’. Children as young as seven are encouraged to build their own wind turbines using Lego and the blades should turn when placed near a fan. Children are keen on animals, so it is just as well they are not told that wind turbines around the globe kill millions of bats every year. The giant turbines being planned to blanket Britain should make a good start on the next mass extinction. Blades almost as high as the London Shard will efficiently sweep the countryside of tonnes of wildlife from the smallest fry to the largest eagle. If the blades don’t get the bigger birds, the vast number of new high-capacity electric cables and pylons probably will.

What happens to the children’s toy windmills when the fan are switched off would be a good question for them to ask, although it might get a similar response to innocents in a former age inquiring of Sister Agnes if God actually existed.

Day-to-day running of MEE seems to be in the charge of Paul Turner. who styles himself a “Radical Geographer Paul” on his website. Among his noted activities is “teaching climate breakdown” along with providing material asking, “who owns England” and “should land be returned to the masses”. He claims to be inspired by the radical theatre collective called Three Acres and a Cow. The show’s cast includes a Kohenet Hebrew Priestess and a “radical queer Christian activist” who these days spends most of his time “gardening with asylum seekers”.

Turner’s site also links to the Radical Geographers’ Handbook, which provides a definition of radical geography. It is said to recognise the need for a “reclamation of geography from its imperialist past, showing how geographical knowledge and thinking could play a key role in radical, social, political and environmental activism”.

How school geography has come on from rocks, contours and map reading! Apparently, useful observational and practical skills are not nearly as interesting for some teachers as converting young children into parent-nagging activists. Let loose in schools, the radical geographer is charged to declare a climate and ecological emergency, sell his or her car and walk everywhere (not you Dale) and “teach what you love and not to the exam”.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

Mass Extinction Fail: Messenian Salinity Crisis Version

While the Messinian Salinity Crisis and subsequent Zanclean Megaflood comprise one of the most incredible episodes in geologic history… So incredible that the uppermost stage of the Miocene epoch is named the Messinian and the lowermost stage of the Pliocene epoch is named the Zanclean… There was no MASS extinction associated with it.

From Watts Up With That?

Guest “I couldn’t make this sort of schist up, even if I was trying” by David Middleton

From the American Association for the Advancement of Science of America…

Fossils tell tale of devastating mass extinction when Mediterranean dried up

While the Messinian Salinity Crisis and subsequent Zanclean Megaflood comprise one of the most incredible episodes in geologic history… So incredible that the uppermost stage of the Miocene epoch is named the Messinian and the lowermost stage of the Pliocene epoch is named the Zanclean… There was no MASS extinction associated with it.

The AAAS of A article references a very interesting paper:

Agiadi and her colleagues have now traced the extinctions and subsequent recovery with a comprehensive analysis of most of the fossils from this region, published today in Science Advances.

Fossils tell tale of devastating mass extinction when Mediterranean dried up

So… Not only was it not a mass extinction.., It was an extinction from which there was a recovery. Why use the word “extinction” at all? Let’s go to the subject research paper:

Coral reef biodiversity

The cooling directly affected temperature-sensitive organisms such as the tropical reef-building z-corals and their associated faunas (reef fishes and sharks) and bryozoans, leading to local extinction of vast populations, particularly in the Eastern Mediterranean (Fig. 1) (40). In addition, the decrease of water temperatures in the Mediterranean allowed boreal species to expand their distribution to the basin during the Messinian, while strongly thermophilic Tethyan relic species disappeared. Monegatti and Raffi (33) noted that the MSC caused regional mass disappearances of molluscs but only a limited number of actual extinctions and that the greatest Messinian extinctions took place in the Atlantic Ocean and were triggered by the TG22, TG20, TG14, and TG12 glacials during the MSC. In the Zanclean, the establishment of psychrospheric water masses in the Atlantic further exacerbated this impact (41). For example, the great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) and the blue shark (Prionace glauca) first appeared globally at the Miocene/Pliocene boundary (42) and in the Mediterranean after the MSC (43).

The MSC played a crucial role in the local extinction of shallow-water z-coral reefs, but it was probably not the main driver (40, 44). Z-corals, as tropical reef corals, are highly sensitive to temperature.

Agiadi et al., 2024

When is an extinction not an extinction? When it’s a local extinction. The “limited number of actual extinctions” occurred in the Atlantic Ocean and were triggered by glacial episodes, not the MSC.

The Messinian Salinity Crisis and Zanclean Megaflood clearly comprise “a tale of upheaval and battles won and lost. Gothic tales of sweeping change, peaceful times, and then great trauma again.“

During the late Miocene, the Mediterranean Sea literally dried up and deposited a layer of halite and gypsum about a mile thick (Messinian salinity crisis). Then in the early Pliocene Epoch, the Mediterranean rapidly flooded (Zanclean megaflood), leading to the formation of the modern Mediterranean Sea. The Zanclean megaflood was a doozy.  If Gavin Schmidt’s Silurian civilization had been thriving on the Messinian  salt flats during the Late Miocene, the Zanclean megaflood would have wiped them out without a trace.  The transition from the MSC to the Zanclean megaflood marks the transition from the Miocene to the Pliocene.  It left a serious mark on the stratigraphic record.

Some reconstructions of the Zanclean megaflood suggest that sea level in the Mediterranean could have risen at a rate of 10 meters per day during the peak flow of water from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean basin.

Now, that’s what I call climate change!

“History’s Greatest Sea is Dying”… Because Gratuitous Reference to Climate Change

The MSC caused the deposition of a thick layer of evaporites (salt, gypsum, anhydrite, etc.) across the Mediterranean basin:

Schematic cross-section of the Leviathan Basin (Bowman, 2011).

However, this is not an extinction story, much less a mass extinction story. We can chalk this up to a combination of good science and bad science journalism.

References

Bowman, Steven. (2011). “Regional seismic interpretation of the hydrocarbon prospectivity of offshore Syria”. GeoArabia. 16.

Konstantina Agiadi et al., Late Miocene transformation of Mediterranean Sea biodiversity. Sci. Adv. 10, eadp1134 (2024). DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adp1134

Chris Packham’s BBC Series Warning of “Mass Extinction” by CO2 is Propaganda, Not Science

Last year, Chris Packham hosted a five-part series on the BBC called Earth, which compared a mass extinction event 252 million years ago to the small rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide seen in the last 150 years. He said he hoped the “terror factor” generated by his programme would “spur us to do something about the environment crisis”.

From The Daily Sceptic

BY CHRIS MORRISON

Last year, Chris Packham hosted a five-part series on the BBC called Earth, which compared a mass extinction event 252 million years ago to the small rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide seen in the last 150 years. He said he hoped the “terror factor” generated by his programme would “spur us to do something about the environment crisis”. But as we shall see, the only terror factor is having to sit through an hour-long film consisting of cherry-picked science data and unproven assertions in the hope of persuading us that the increase in global temperatures in the last 150 years or so is comparable to the rise in temperatures over a considerable swath of geological time. Great play was made of a 12°C rise in average global temperatures 252 million years ago as CO2 levels started to rise, although Packham fails to report that CO2 levels were already at least four times higher back then than in modern times. The ‘science’ that Packham cloaks himself with on every occasion is hardly served by terrorising the viewer with what is little more than a highly personal political message.

Think of all that suffering and wastage, he says about the fourth great mass extinction. I don’t think we want a comparable extinction to the one that happened 252 million years ago on our conscience, he adds. Of course, Packham is not the first person to politicise the end-Permian extinction when most plant and animal life disappeared to be replaced eventually with what became known as the age of the dinosaurs. As we can see from the graph below, even though that extinction event coincided with an uptick in CO2 levels, the general trend over a 600-million-year period was downwards ending in the near denudation currently experienced today. But scientists note that the rise started some time before the extinction event, with most of the Permian characterised by very low levels of CO2.

It is obvious why the three other great extinctions are of little interest to modern day climate alarmists. The Ordovician extinction 445 million years ago occurred when CO2 levels were 12 times higher than today, the Devonian wipe-out happen 372 millions ago when CO2 levels were falling, while the later Triassic/Jurassic event 201 million years ago occurred at a time of stable CO2. Hard to see a pattern there suggesting rising CO2 levels equals a mass extinction event. The disappearance of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago is generally attributed to the impact of a giant meteorite, while the current sixth mass extinction exists only inside the head of the Swedish doom goblin, and need not detain us at this point.

Since Packham was essentially making a BBC political film promoting Net Zero, he inevitably started with the fixed view that all our current environmental problems are the fault of CO2. An intense period of volcanic eruptions that led to huge coal deposits catching fire increased CO2 levels and almost instantly sent temperatures soaring at the end of the Permian period. About 20 million years of rain subsequently followed, he observed, taking some of the CO2 out of the atmosphere and order it seems was restored. Certainly, CO2 resumed a small descent but levels remained almost as high, or for some periods higher, as those at the end of the Permian period for another 120 million years. Packham does not provide an explanation of what happened to the average global temperature at this time.

The graph above shows why he avoided the subject. Temperatures did rise at the end of the Permian period after a long decline, but only as far as previous highs recorded 200 million years earlier. They then stayed at those levels for most of the next 200 million years, throughout the age of the dinosaurs. Helped by the increased levels of CO2, this is considered one of the most verdant periods in Earth’s history.

Is it likely that volcanic eruptions triggered the substantial rise in temperature around 252 million years ago, as Packham claims? In a paper published in 2022, a group of European scientists said their data showed seawater temperature began to rise at least 300,000 years before the main volcanic eruptions. “Gradual warming by approximately 12°C was probably responsible for initial environmental degradation that eventually culminated in the global and Permian extinction,” they wrote. The scientists reviewed much of the published evidence and concluded “a temporal link between volcanic activity, environmental changes and biological impacts remains controversial”.

Carbon dioxide, of course, is the main cause of global warming in Packham’s world. Promoting his film to like-minded activists at the Guardian, he said it was the “urgency that makes me despair”. As we can see, this “despair” is the result of comparing events hundreds of millions of years ago with a small temperature rise in the past 150 years or so of around 1°C – and this after a short-term period of global cooling. You can of course argue about all this, but it is a bit rich to claim the science of recent global warming is ‘settled’ and refuse to debate anyone who disagrees with you.

From such a shaky base, Packham claims we’re all becoming far too complacent about pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. “It’s an experiment we have been running for over 100 years,” he told the Guardian. “The more the CO2, the more the heat is locked in and the hotter our Earth becomes.” But if Packham really believes that, how does he explain those geological periods when temperatures fall as CO2 levels rise? And if a rise in temperatures and mass extinction is inevitable when CO2 rises, how does that work in the current period when CO2 levels are as low as they’ve ever been?

Could it be that the end-Permian extinction was actually caused by CO2 starvation? During the Permian, it was the first time in Earth’s history that CO2 concentrations fell below 1,000 parts per million, perhaps as dangerously low as 200 ppm at some points. This may well have started to stress plant life since 1,000 ppm is a concentration that supports maximum photosynthesis productivity. This is the view of Jim Steele, Director Emeritus of San Francisco State University’s Sierra Nevada Field Campus. In a recent paper, he noted that many researchers have pointed to competition between different plant species for declining CO2 during the Permian period. This was said to result in “severely reduced photosynthesis, the collapse of primary productivity and a significant malfunction of the global food webs”.

The truth is that the scientific jury is still out and the ‘science’, as with most climate science, is unsettled. Perhaps inadvertently, Packham has simply drawn attention to all the observational evidence that suggests CO2, the gas of life, ‘saturates’ at around 300-400 ppm, and its warming effect is greatly diminished beyond that concentration. But “fear is motivating” he claims, and in the BBC he seems to have a compliant megaphone for whatever green propaganda he cares to promote.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

What could happen if we just stopped oil? Six billion might die

But what would happen if we literally just stopped oil tomorrow and did without the natural resources on which the world, its economies and populations depend?
The answer: most likely six billion people would die within a year.

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Paul Kolk

Many of us have been exasperated by the antics of Just Stop Oil protesters. Now, I believe that these are well-meaning and committed to their cause and I am sure that they think that they are trying to save the planet in the best way they can think of – gain publicity, get people talking and influence politicians.

But what would happen if we literally just stopped oil tomorrow and did without the natural resources on which the world, its economies and populations depend?

The answer: most likely six billion people would die within a year. 

I am going to assume the “oil” in Just Stop Oil means fossil fuels – so oil, gas and coal. I am also going to assume that we have today’s technological knowledge and infrastructure, so we are talking about stopping fossil fuels now, not at some unspecified time in the future.

Day 1 – no more mining of coal; the world’s oil wells shut down; the world’s gas fields likewise. The first to feel the change would be gas users.

Gas stocks held above ground are typically not that high. So the UK would quite quickly, say in10 or 15 days, have to turn off its gas distribution system as it would be unable to maintain pressure.

This would mean in turn that the domestic supply would be shut down too – gas would stop flowing, and some 21 million households (74pc of the population) would no longer have heating, hot water, and cooking facilities. In their panic, people might turn to electricity for their cooking and heating, but wait…

The UK electricity grid relies on natural gas as its “buffer” energy source. Every day, demand varies according to consumer demand, and the other main energy supplier, renewables, are highly variable and can only power the grid when gas is picking up the lion’s share of the gap between their output and consumer demand.

So the moment that the main gas distribution system is de-pressurised, the grid-balancing system fails and power cuts ensue.

It is impossible to gauge how extensive these power cuts would be, but the grid would be so seriously compromised, possibly fatally, that they may be widespread and permanent.

Electricity demand would have rocketed through the switch to electric space heating, cooking and water-heating, and so it seems very likely that the sudden excess demand would be undeliverable, and therefore that the grid would spiral into uncontrollability.

No electricity means no communication systems – no mobiles, no TV, and no running water.  With no power and no heating, vulnerable people start to die.

Initially just the elderly in their own homes, then in hospitals when the diesel back-up generators run out of fuel, but then new existential problems emerge for ordinary people in the form of food availability and distribution.

Day 25 – I’m probably being generous with the timing here, but diesel and petrol are likely to have run out by day 25. This means that food distribution would fail, and so the population, most of which are entirely dependent on bought food, begin to starve.

In dire national emergencies, international help is often forthcoming, but in this case, this scenario is taking place, in largely identical ways and timing, across the developed and developing world. Only isolated rural communities, agriculturally self-sufficient, would be relatively unaffected. So no international rescue mission.

Day 50 – in the urban world, many people would be near death from starvation. In the 50 days since the ending of fossil fuel supply, law and order would have broken down, and I suspect that mass conflict and slaughter would have been taking place with the increasingly desperate search for the means of survival.

But disease would be on the rampage too, with no power, no water supply and no sewage flow, so cholera, dysentery and all the other Victorian diseases of crowding would take over.

Day 100 – just three months or so since the world just stopped oil – my guess is that around half of the world’s population (say four billion people) would be dead. The first to die would be the urban poor; then the middle and upper classes, with money and status becoming increasingly irrelevant with the passage of time.

The survivors would be largely rural, able to live off local agricultural produce, or live off dwindling food stocks.

Accessing food and safe water for urban dwellers (about 55pc of the 2023 world population) would be nigh-on impossible, as all the normal distribution routes for food would have failed, and storage facilities (chillers/freezers) would also have failed without electricity.

Pumped water would be unavailable, so access to clean water would be close to impossible.

Day 365 – perhaps a further two billion people would have starved or frozen to death, leaving, say, two billion left alive; remaining food stocks would have been exhausted or spoiled, and the inevitable breakdown of law and order would have meant many would meet a violent end.

Competition for scarce resources, so elegantly solved by the invention of markets and prices, would be replaced by murder and mayhem. The means to reverse the just stop oil experiment would have gone, and the future of humans on the planet would be as insecure as at any time in human history.

The mass extinction would have robbed societies of their cultures, education and survival techniques. A new dark age would ensue.

I have summarised what is a nightmarish scenario. But everything I claim is well supported by fact. For those interested in understanding the intricate interweaving of humans and fossil fuels, I would recommend Vaclav Smil’s book How The World Really Works.

This is not a book written by someone with a particular interest in fossil fuels; it’s just a very well-balanced description of how modern civilisation actually works (as the title claims).

The world took two centuries to build the fossil-fuel based energy infrastructure. That infrastructure represents a material part of the investment savings of the world; it provides humans with huge amounts of flexible, usable energy at extremely modest cost.

This affordability has reached right down to the world’s poor and is transforming their lives – China and India being stand-out examples.

Here’s my question: do the nice, well-meaning people of Just Stop Oil understand how the world works, or not? If they do, they are nihilists; if they don’t, then why are they disrupting the smooth running of our society, promoting an extreme course of action of which they have no understanding?

If, by the way, my analysis is wrong, they should enlighten us on how an immediate ban on fossil fuels will allow civilisation to continue and flourish.

To be clear I am not suggesting that the world is forever in the grip of fossil fuels. Far from it.  History tells us that human civilisation is a story of constant change.

Humans are inventive and adaptable, and fossil fuels are also finite. So in due course new, cheap, non-fossil-fuel energy sources will be developed, new ways of storing and transporting energy will be perfected, and fossil fuel use will slowly become a thing of the past; a transition from one world to another – a better one.

But I suppose the slogan, “Stop oil when the technological and economic conditions allow it, consistent with an improvement in human wellbeing and that of the planet” is not such a catchy phrase.

Neil Record is a former Bank of England economist and author of ‘Sir Humphrey’s Legacy’

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/consumer-affairs/just-stop-oil-what-happens-six-billion-might-die/

To be fair, Just Stop Oil would say they merely want to stop new drilling for oil, rather than stop all production overnight.

But that would merely bring about the same results in ten years time or so, as by then most of the existing drilled reserves would be quickly drying up.

They believe that by then we will all be living happily with intermittent wind and solar power.

But what if they are wrong? It will be too late in ten years time to suddenly stand up and say “Sorry, we got it wrong. Can we have some more fossil fuels please?”

“We are rapidly crashing”: Global Warming Extinction Claim

Past global warm epochs were bursting with abundance and life, but apparently this time the computer models tell us we’re all going to die.

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

Past global warm epochs were bursting with abundance and life, but apparently this time the computer models tell us we’re all going to die.

Climate change: if warming approaches 2°C, a trickle of extinctions will become a flood

Published: December 11, 2023 11.37pm AEDT
Alex Pigot
Principal Research Fellow, Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research, UCL

…

Our world has warmed by roughly 1.2°C since the pre-industrial period. Many species are already exposed to increasingly intolerable conditions, driving some populations to die off or contract at the hottest edges of their geographic ranges. Biodiversity is feeling the heat in all ecosystems and regions, from mountain tops to ocean depths.

…

Are there thresholds of warming beyond which the risks to wildlife accelerate? And if so, where and when might we cross them? In short, what does the future hold for Earth’s biodiversity?

…

My colleagues and I overlaid the projections of climate models with data on the geographic distributions of more than 35,000 species on land and in the ocean. We found that the area over which each species will be exposed to intolerable temperatures is likely to increase abruptly during the coming decades. 

Most populations may initially appear safe. But then, suddenly, a threshold of global warming is crossed beyond which multiple populations across widespread areas face intolerable conditions in rapid succession. 

…

This scenario is already playing out on coral reefs. Just a few decades ago, coral bleaching events driven by extreme sea surface temperatures were rare and localised. Today, these events degrade reefs globally on an almost annual basis. 

…

Burying our heads in the sand will not alter the hard biophysical limits that govern life on Earth – and through which we are rapidly crashing.

Read more: https://theconversation.com/climate-change-if-warming-approaches-2-c-a-trickle-of-extinctions-will-become-a-flood-219182

The abstract of the paper;

Abrupt expansion of climate change risks for species globally

Alex L. Pigot , Cory Merow , Adam Wilson & Christopher H. Trisos 

Climate change is already exposing species to dangerous temperatures driving widespread population and geographical contractions. However, little is known about how these risks of thermal exposure will expand across species’ existing geographical ranges over time as climate change continues. Here, using geographical data for approximately 36,000 marine and terrestrial species and climate projections to 2100, we show that the area of each species’ geographical range at risk of thermal exposure will expand abruptly. On average, more than 50% of the increase in exposure projected for a species will occur in a single decade. This abruptness is partly due to the rapid pace of future projected warming but also because the greater area available at the warm end of thermal gradients constrains species to disproportionately occupy sites close to their upper thermal limit. These geographical constraints on the structure of species ranges operate both on land and in the ocean and mean that, even in the absence of amplifying ecological feedbacks, thermally sensitive species may be inherently vulnerable to sudden warming-driven collapse. With higher levels of warming, the number of species passing these thermal thresholds, and at risk of abrupt and widespread thermal exposure, increases, doubling from less than 15% to more than 30% between 1.5 °C and 2.5 °C of global warming. These results indicate that climate threats to thousands of species are expected to expand abruptly in the coming decades, thereby highlighting the urgency of mitigation and adaptation actions.

Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-023-02070-4.epdf

The study admits they didn’t consider migration in their study, because of their belief that global warming is happening too fast?

… A gradual spread of thermal risks would provide more time for species to adapt via dispersal12 or evolution13, and more opportunity to implement conservation interventions and adaptation policies once the adverse effects of thermal exposure are first detected. ……. While species will be adversely impacted by exposure to multiple abiotic and biotic variables, we focus our analysis on temperature, which provides a universal driver of species distributions across both marine22 and terrestrial23 realms; thus, it is a logical starting point for understanding the spatiotemporal dynamics of climate change risks to species. We do not consider processes of evolutionary adaptation, changes in phenology and behaviour or dispersal to new locations. While these processes will determine the resilience of species to climate change, in this study we focus on the first key step of understanding the spatial and temporal dynamics of thermal exposure that will ultimately drive these biological responses. …Read more: Same link as above

The paper assumes abrupt pulses of global warming.

The paper admits shortcomings in terms of considering short term responses to these assumed pulses of global warming.

… While strong local adaptation in space greatly increases risks, other factors could lead to risks from thermal exposure being overestimated in our models. In particular, many species will be limited by environmental23 or biotic33 factors other than temperature and have fundamental thermal tolerances that exceed their upper realized limit4,34. Species can also be buffered against warming (at least temporarily) by behaviours to exploit cooler microclimates35, changes in phenology36,37, the evolution of higher thermal tolerance13,32 or the contraction of populations into thermal refugia38, such as higher elevations on land or greater depths in the ocean. Thus, while the abruptness of projected thermal exposure is a ubiquitous phenomenon occurring across all terrestrial and marine organisms we studied, our simple temperature-based model of exposure will not be equally useful in understanding climate risks for all species39. However, uncertainty in thermal tolerances and heterogeneity in responses to thermal exposure is unlikely to alter our conclusion that thermal risks will expand abruptly across species’ existing geographical ranges under future warming. …Read more: Same link as above

The biggest problem with the claim that species are at risk from abrupt climate change is such a change has already occurred – and species did just fine.

The Younger Dryas was a severe and abrupt cooling event which occurred 12,900 years ago, and lasted for around 1200 years – possibly triggered by the collapse of Lake Agassiz, the giant glacial lake which once covered much of Canada and North America, though the exact cause is still hotly debated.

The abruptness and severity of the cooling event cannot be overstated – the full impact was possibly experienced in as little as a couple of months.

… Around 12,800 years ago the northern hemisphere was hit by the Younger Dryas mini ice age, or “Big Freeze”[which] lasted around 1300 years.

Until now, it was thought that the mini ice age took a decade or so to take hold, on the evidence provided by Greenland ice cores. Not so, say William Patterson of the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, and his colleagues.

The group studied a mud core from an ancient lake, Lough Monreagh, in western Ireland. Using a scalpel they sliced off layers 0.5 to 1 millimetre thick, each representing up to three months of time. No other measurements from the period have approached this level of detail.

Carbon isotopes in each slice revealed how productive the lake was and oxygen isotopes gave a picture of temperature and rainfall. They show that at the start of the Big Freeze, temperatures plummeted and lake productivity stopped within months, or a year at most. “It would be like taking Ireland today and moving it up to Svalbard” in the Arctic, says Patterson. …

Read more: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427344.800-mini-ice-age-took-hold-of-europe-in-months.html

But the Younger Dryas is not described in the scientific literature as an extinction event. The Younger Dryas was no dinosaur killer. Animals and plants adapted just fine to the abrupt change in temperature, other than some large macrofauna which proved too tempting a target for hungry humans armed with spears. Human populations declined in North America during the Younger Dryas, as the land became less productive, then rebounded as temperatures recovered.

The natural world is resilient. You can see this just by watching your own garden lawn.

In wet, cold weather, my neglected house lawn sprouts broad leafed weeds, which take advantage of the damp conditions. In scorching hot dry weather, the broad leafed plants recede, and the lawn is dominated by long, thin stemmed grasses with yellowed tops, which reflect the sunlight. The biome of my back yard, which is heavily shaded, is wildly different to the biome of the grass in my front yard which receives the full blast of subtropical sunlight. The biome of lawn plants near my citrus trees, which I love and water regularly, is also very different to the biome of lawn plants further away from the water source.

You know the most interesting thing about my lawn? Our urban kangaroos don’t care what kinds of plants dominate my lawn. They eat the hot weather thin stemmed grass just as happily as they munch on the broad leafed wet weather weeds.

Northern Hemisphere animal and plant species survived the Younger Dryas, because the abrupt temperature drop of the Younger Dryas didn’t kill everything, it just shifted some balances. It was an opportunity to plants which had always been in the background to dominate and outcompete formerly dominant plants which prefer warmer conditions. Then when the Younger Dryas receded, so did the plants which preferred extreme cold – but we see them again whenever there’s a cold Summer.

It takes a lot more than a few degrees of abrupt temperature change to set off a mass extinction.

Professor Pigot and the other authors admitted in their study that their work didn’t consider several important factors, and that the study might be overestimating the risks. It’s a pity this qualification didn’t come through clearly in Pigot’s press release.