“Co-extinctions annihilate planetary life during extreme environmental change”

To understand the true severity of our predicament it is imperative to connect as many disparate, peer reviewed analysis, as are available and to then apply the precautionary principal. Below is a synthesis of peer reviewed papers and some audio and video explanations of them.
Abstract:
“Climate change and human activity are dooming species at an unprecedented rate via a plethora of direct and indirect, often synergic, mechanisms. Among these, primary extinctions driven by environmental change could be just the tip of an enormous extinction iceberg. As our understanding of the importance of ecological interactions in shaping ecosystem identity advances, it is becoming clearer how the disappearance of consumers following the depletion of their resources — a process known as ‘co-extinction’ — is more likely the major driver of biodiversity loss. Although the general relevance of co-extinctions is supported by a sound and robust theoretical background, the challenges in obtaining empirical information about ongoing (and past) co-extinction events complicate the assessment of their relative contributions to the rapid decline of species diversity even in well-known systems, let alone at the global scale. By subjecting a large set of virtual Earths to different trajectories of extreme environmental change (global heating and cooling), and by tracking species loss up to the complete annihilation of all life either accounting or not for co-extinction processes, we show how ecological dependencies amplify the direct effects of environmental change on the collapse of planetary diversity by up to ten times”.“Co-extinctions annihilate planetary life during extreme environmental change”

One of the co-authors of the above peer reviewed article Professor Corey Bradshaw was interviewed on Radio Ecoshock. That interview is embedded here: The Rules of Extinction

“A new study shows that as rising heat drives some key species extinct, it will affect other species, as well, in a domino effect.” Unchecked Global Warming Could Collapse Whole Ecosystems, Maybe Within 10 Years

“It gets unimaginably worse by the day, of course. Recent information from the peer-reviewed journal literature finally caught up to me in concluding the Sixth Mass Extinction could annihilate all life on Earth. A paper in Scientific Reports draws this conclusion based upon the rate of environmental change, consistent with my own conclusions. More than a decade after I began pointing out in this space the importance of interactions between organisms, particularly the relatively unknown yet important microbes, microbial life is deemed important in a synthetic paper in the 18 June 2019 issue of Nature Reviews Microbiology: “[Microbes] support the existence of all higher lifeforms and are critically important in regulating climate change.” Five-and-a-half years after I described the horrors of interacting factors, a paper in the 21 December 2018 issue of Science concludes such interactions are tremendously important.”
“Extinction Foretold, Extinction Ignored”.
Below is a comprehensive overview of our predicament from my co-host on Nature Bats Last on the Progressive Radio Network.

Professor McPherson’s latest peer reviewed paper is embedded here:
“The new study, published in the journal Science Advances, shows that even with extremely conservative estimates, species are disappearing up to about 100 times faster than the normal rate between mass extinctions, known as the background rate.”
“Paul Ehrlich and others use highly conservative estimates to prove that species are disappearing faster than at any time since the dinosaurs’ demise.” Stanford researcher declares that the sixth mass extinction is here:

Our predicament can only be worse than we know and our tenure on this planet less certain than even the most pessimistic of us surmise. The Black Swan‘s are circling, the likely hood of another threat to this set of living arrangements arriving before the current threat abates is a certainty and then rinse and repeat.
“A catastrophic loss in biodiversity, reckless destruction of wildland and warming temperatures have allowed disease to explode. Ignoring the connection between climate change and pandemics would be “dangerous delusion,” one scientist said.”
“How Climate Change Is Contributing to Skyrocketing Rates of Infectious Disease”
These literally are the “Good Old Days”.

About Kevin Hester

I'm an anti-imperialist, environmental activist and blue ocean sailor, who is passionate about the earth and all it's inhabitants without favour. Brace for imminent impact as we bare witness to the non-linear unraveling of the biosphere and habitability disappearing for most if not all complex life on the only habitable planet we know of. To quote President Niinistö in North Russia: ‘If We Lose the Arctic, We Lose the World’. Folks we have lost the Arctic.