Professor Corey Bradshaw from Flinders University was this months guest on Nature Bats Last.
The audio of the episode is embedded here:
“Dr. Bradshaw is the Matthew Flinders Fellow in Global Ecology at Flinders University, where he directs the Global Ecology Laboratory and is also Chief Investigator of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage. He heads the Flinders Modelling Node of the latter organization. Professor Bradshaw has published some 300 peer-reviewed scientific articles, 11 book chapters and 3 books. His book titles include The Effective Scientist, published by Cambridge University Press and, from Chicago University Press and co-authored by occasional guest on this show Professor Paul Ehrlich, Killing the Koala and Poisoning the Prairie. In total, his work has been cited more than 20,000 times. Bradshaw is co-Head of the Ecology Section of the Faculty of 1000 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Australia. He was awarded the 2017 Verco Medal from the Royal Society of South Australia, a 2017 Rockefeller Foundation ‘Bellagio’ Writer’s Fellowship, the 2010 Australian Ecology Research Award from the Ecological Society of Australia, the 2010 Scopus Young Researcher of the Year, the 2009 HG Andrewartha Medal, and a 2008 Young Tall Poppy Science Award. He is regularly featured in Australian and international media for his research. The Professor’s blog has been visited more than 2.3 million times.” Quoting Professor Guy McPherson
Links to Professor Bradshaw’s published works are embedded here, his personal blog with a subscription option is Conservation Bytes
“More than 99% of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct”. See the short presentation at the top of the Professor Bradshaw’s blog for more on that diamond of information and lets get over our human hubris and invincibility.
We have previously discussed on the show Professor Bradshaw’s work with Professor Paul Ehlich. That episode is embedded in the following link: Professor Paul Ehrlich returns to Nature Bats Last
Until recently I assumed that at least Tardigrades would get through the extinction bottleneck. That has recently be called into question as we discussed on the show and below;
“Tardigrades are tough little critters. When conditions get nasty, they can dry out, reconfigure their bodies and enter suspended animation – called dessication – for years. You can throw virtually anything at them: frozen temperatures, zero oxygen, high pressures, the vacuum of space, cosmic radiation, and even being boiled.”
“But new research has shown these tiny organisms may have a weakness – long-term exposure to high temperatures, even in their dessicated state. The longer the temperatures are maintained, the lower the tardigrades’ chances of survival.”
Tardigrades Are Basically Indestructible, But Scientists Just Found Their Weak Point
In the following embedded Flinders University presentation Professor Bradshaw jokes that his colleagues describe him as Dr or Professor Doom. This subtle form of gas lighting has stoked scientific reticence as the extinction event accelerates, discouraging the less courageous scientists from telling you what they really think is unfolding. Professor Guy McPherson and I admire Professor Bradshaw’s courage, professionalism and scientific integrity. BRAVE | There’s No Plan(et) B – What you can do about Earth’s extinction emergency.
Professor Bradshaw and I discussed the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Embedded below is the trailer to a new documentary titled “Murder On The Reef”
All my time at sea over 16 ‘blue water’ passages and hundreds of races taught me the importance of the “Precautionary Principal”. The prudent skipper needs a wide margin of error. Caution and prudence seems to have been cast to the wind as the dominant culture grinds the living planet into dust.
Next months guest will be Jeff Gibbs, director of “Planet of the Humans” recently censored off You Tube for daring to question the renewables sector.
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.
Kevin Hester 
THE SIXTH MASS EXTINCTION AND THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY
https://populationmatters.org/news/2021/05/sixth-mass-extinction-and-future-humanity?fbclid=IwAR1amYqGMBWYFW6Nw6ACkVYwjIKAWAgC4vYZIUg4IrxNO8j0RGCb3fnqHUo
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I’ve got the answer! We just need to find some Unobtainium and all our worries will be taken care of by the new corporation that will take complete control and save us all. And don’t worry, these will be NICE corporate rulers who will give all those miner kids unlike the current corporate heads that won’t. Those clips included made this all so clear!
Or maybe it was the fungi chocolates talking about magical non-thinking…
And Hansen didn’t relate what he told Congress to any of the papers that had already come out on Global Warming/Greenhouse Effect. I never thought about that before. Hmmmm.
Well of course it’s about maintaining the status quo for these powerpoint people. Who wants to be broke and poor and going to the food bank every week? Who wants to never afford another vacation, ever? Mann has a good gig and knows it and he did give the world the Hockey Stick graph after all! He just needs to keep the game going until, of course, it all goes tits up but not until after he dies of old age which is probably his magical hope.
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And if we can’t discover Unobtainium, we have this to fall back on!
Nuclear Fusion: Why the Race to Harness the Power of the Sun Just Sped Up
Fusion companies have now raised $2.3 billion in investment, believing they can begin producing unlimited amounts of zero emissions energy by the 2030s.
By Tom Wilson in Oxford and Ian Bott in London, Financial Times
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08122021/nuclear-fusion-why-the-race-to-harness-the-power-of-the-sun-just-sped-up/
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And no, I don’t hear a single word about the lag time between emission of GHGs and when the effects hit. Not a peep just about everywhere I read.
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I hope Guy appreciates my not sending him any questions whatsoever.
sealintheSelkirks
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[…] “Climate change is one of a host of environmental ills for which technological solutions are being proposed. In fact, most of the proposed solutions exacerbate environmental ills in other dimensions such as species loss and mass extinction. This tendency of technological reasoning to ‘bleed’ from one dimension or axis to another— to cause unintended consequences, is a function of the structure of this type of reasoning.”“Paradoxically, calls for analytical rigor tend to narrow the realm of scientific concern, thereby raising the range of unintended consequences. This paradox is internal to the structure of technological reasoning. In practical terms, the 2018 IPCC Report on climate change relies on dubious technology to produce ‘negative carbon emissions.’ This both distracts attention away from more plausible methods and it could wildly exacerbate mass extinction.” Climate Change and Technology Mark Brimblecombe’s piece de resistance on the mitigation myth is a must read; “It is not nice to be told that you have been diagnosed with a terminal condition. It is even worse to be given false hope that if you did this or that you could mitigate the problem or turn it around when it cannot. If a medical practitioner does this, they lose their job. But climate scientists do this frequently, and probably to keep their job. It is virtue-signalling to agree with national and international climate agreements which propose that we can fix this by reducing (mitigating) our carbon footprint and carbon emissions… and so continue ‘business as usual’ and live happily ever after.” Climate Change and the Mitigation Myth In the above video I mentioned the paper by Professor Corey Bradshaw suggesting that even Tardigrades are in danger. Our interview with Professor Bradshaw and links to the paper we discussed are embedded following; Professor Corey Bradshaw explains the unfolding “Extinction Cascades” on Nature Bats Last. […]
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“Curtin-led research has revealed an increase in levels of both acid and hydrogen sulfide in the ocean was the double whammy that wiped out marine life during a mass extinction event 201 million years ago.”
https://news.curtin.edu.au/media-releases/new-study-pinpoints-twin-triggers-of-triassic-era-extinction-event/?fbclid=IwAR0xAlllX30je_nRFpQjDc5ycpYBW7AoIdICx9A6GmPgbKI1cmiQIAMPi-4#.YeB7PVqpoPo.facebook
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Oh, I thought you were going to say ‘the double whammy that wiped out marine life during the current mass extinction event.” Because this is Hunziker today:
The Oceans Are Overheating
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/01/14/the-oceans-are-overheating/
Your link was from ‘…curtin.edu’ and how appropriate is that because, you know, it boils down to ‘curtains’ for all of us. And boils fits there quite well, too.
sealintheSelkirks
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Sam Carana
WHEN WILL HUMANS GO EXTINCT?
In ‘Environmental thresholds for mass-extinction events’, Guy McPherson, Beril Sirmacek and Ricardo Vinuesa point at an analysis by Song et al. (2021) that shows how major mass extinctions over the past 541 million years (the Phanerozoic) are linked to temperature rises higher than 5.2°C and rates of change higher than 10°C/Myr.
Authors point out that, next to temperature rise and rates of change, there are further variables such as rates of deforestation, ocean acidification and spreading of toxic substances that can additionally contribute to cause species to disappear.
Accordingly, many species are likely to go extinct at rises much lower than 5°C.
Humans – who depend on many species – could go extinct with a 3°C rise.
This makes it even more critical to assess how much the temperature has already risen from pre-industrial. As illustrated by the image at the top, we may already be more than 2°C above pre-industrial and face a potentially huge temperature rise over the next few years.
From the post ‘When will humans go extinct?’, at:
https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2022/02/when-will-humans-go-extinct.html?fbclid=IwAR1U_YRSJRGKPcRpWdGgNixHogD9-_RSa_wLioxq5OSTpFJ2Ug1xrxAxG_E
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Extinction of species, All species end up this way and why do we think we’re so different? Because we are doing to ourselves! That DOES make us special, the only species on the planet ever to do that.
And this new species pterosaur was found by a paleontologist on the Island of Skye at low tide and they almost lost it. I wonder if 170 million years from now if some intelligent species will be cutting my fossilized skeleton out of a rock with a diamond saw?
sealintheSelkirks
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Guy and I have had the pleasure of interviewing the two primary scientists mentioned in this latest paper by Professor’s Corey Bradshaw and Paul Ehrlich.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcosc.2020.615419/full?fbclid=IwAR1-t4Pboa1Xb8ZB6fL2X1Eff93tTgqARNbqeWpAjFx-Tj3R-esk3amgsqg
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Two years ago I discussed extinction cascades and marine species migration due to climate change with Professor Corey Bradshaw.
This is a classic case;
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jul/01/population-explosion-octopus-boom-prompts-joy-and-concern-cornwall?CMP=twt_a-environment_b-gdneco&fbclid=IwAR2OFZm9BqNx1Tko0SpgziWb6xXxNgviuGgoaNagGZ-9MRxu2CiJTCqeklA
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Anecdotal from me:
After last year’s ‘Heat Dome’ smothered me with 116-120’F/48C temperatures the bugs and the birds died or left. They did not come back in Fall when temps finally dropped.
This Spring has seen the wettest Spring in decades in these mountains but there are fewer bird species and practically no flying insects compared to what used to be normal. It’s was 96’F today, hot sunshine, and there would always be huge clouds of little tiny bugs buzzing in massed circles off the front porch between the apple tree and the Ponderosa pine. You could see them in the sun’s rays every afternoon. There would be multiple species of birds flitting around, all sorts of different bird calls and song bursting out. It was a symphony.
It’s 1July and walking down to the gate to check the mail there were just a few birds flying about and I heard just a few songs. And nearly zero flying bugs. The space between the property trees are completely empty except for yellow jackets and house flies buzzing past. Definitely not the crowds of madly circling tiny bugs I’ve always seen. I did catch sight of different butterflies at least, one quite large and I didn’t recognize it at all. Beautiful, though.
The flowers finally came out after all the rain and now intense sunshine, and I passed through the multiple scents halfway to the gate. Intoxicating. But nearly no bugs on them.
There are hardly any moths flying to the windows at night demanding to be let in (when they do I catch them and put them back out). I have heard a couple of owls lately. Obviously a mated pair as they call back and forth to one another. But I don’t know what the bats could be eating unless it’s mosquitoes. Plenty of them around at dusk.
This is spooky, dude.
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4July
Yesterday there was a little cloud of circling bugs in a ray of sunshine beaming down through the T-storm cloud masses that were boiling in. I could see them between the apple tree and the Ponderosa pine off the front porch. Not thousands like it was a year ago but at least a few hundred maybe. But only one little cloud instead of the entire yard being full of them. So they’re not all gone.
Did I breathe a sigh of relief? No, the change is so massive in what used to be normal that I’m just shaking my head instead. I did see one robin yesterday, probably one of the babies born on this property in the last few years but there used to be a couple of dozen just two summers ago all born on the property.
I’ve got a kid’s book nearly done, Woodshed Baby Robins, where I took all the pictures under the woodshed roof of the stages from blue eggs to open red-rimmed beaks waiting for the camera to feed them to first feathers and the teetering of the bravest about to jump off the nest for its first flight. And of it landing it with mama robin in the background. Pre-school age book, one for parents to read while they look at the pictures. I think it’s pretty cool though I do need to edit the backgrounds a bit and then zoom in better.
I haven’t seen a single robin nest this year. Not one.
A few other little birds have been hitting the suet feeders including woodpeckers that don’t eat suet. What’s up with that? I think there are far fewer bugs to peck out of the tree bark is what. I’m guessing because they have to be pretty dang hungry to be eating seeds… I’ve got a couple of nests in birdhouses but most are completely empty. I think they are swallows. The dozen or so hummingbirds have disappeared with only a male Rufus and a male Calliope still showing up. Maybe the females are sitting on eggs at this point?
A few bird songs chirping yesterday, too, which was nice to hear. I don’t know the species but there are some I’d recognize that haven’t been heard yet. It’s July already so I don’t think the mountain bluebirds and the other missing birds are going to show up to nest…
Yesterday also saw a very quick moving T-storm blow in, thunder booming in the distance as it flowed across the mountains from the southwest with flickering multiple lightning strobe lights up in the clouds that turned into a deluge of very large raindrops pounding on the roof. Then the hail hit while I was out back moving the cannabis garden into the shop to avoid having them crushed by the onslaught on a hand truck. Happened fast and the rain was so heavy it was already bending them by the time I got them in. The hail hurt hitting my bare arms. No kidding! I was wearing my summer Aussie wide brim river-runner hat to protect my head but dang those ice balls were smacking me hard. I did get them in without hail punching holes through leaves or breaking limbs and stalks. They were a bit droopy from the rain pounding on them but perked up under the T-5 grow lights within a couple of hours.
Strange that the clouds were moving fast across the sky but at my elevation the trees were hardly moving. Was predicted to happen today which I don’t mind a bit being that it keeps the idiots from starting wildfires due to all the fireworks being lit off in these mountains from people who don’t think very well. Celebrate ‘Freedom’ with the sounds of war never did make much sense to me…
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You did hear about the radical religious extremists on the US unSupreme Court that just made the decision that the EPA cannot regulate ‘Clean Air’ from coal-fired power plants, yes? Actually, they cancelled the ability of the government to regulate ANYTHING that big business wants to spew. Here is a list of what they’ve destroyed in this country in the last few weeks. From counterpunch Roaming Charges 7July:
+ The damage assessment from the cluster bombing of rulings dropped by the Supreme Court over the past few weeks, includes:
gutting Miranda (Egbert v. Boule) the rule that makes cops inform you of your rights,
forcing the state of Maine to fund schools that provide religious instruction (Carson v. Marin),
refusing to consider evidence of innocence appeals in death penalty cases (Shinn v. Ramirez),
curtailing the ability of states and cities to enact gun safety laws (New York State Rifle Ass. v. Bruen),
overturning Roe (Mississippi Dept. Health Services v. Dobbs), NOTE: abortion is now illegal again.
legalizing prayers by teachers and coaches at public schools during school hours (Kennedy v. Bremerton),
obliterating tribal sovereignty over law enforcement on Indian lands (Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta), NOTE: colonialism at its finest!
eviscerating the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon emissions from coal plants (W. Virginia v. EPA), NOTE: which will apply to EVERY regulating agency over polluting businesses
approving grossly gerrymandered congressional districts along racial lines (Robinson v. Ardoin)
and, as a parting shot, granting cert. to hear a crazy case (Moore v. Harper) in the fall involving the the “independent state legislature theory” that could completely upend how elections are administered for the next presidential election.
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A Mad Max world, Kevin, orchestrated by an un-elected group of six mentally deranged extremely right wing Roman Catholic cultists who have no restraints to do whatever the fuck comes into their pointy little mindless heads. If there were gods watching this world they would have hit them all with heart attacks by now for being so insane and a danger to us all…but there aren’t any gods and we’re on our own and so so screwed anyway.
This is the link to the entire piece. It’s a hell of a list that shows the total insanity going on. My advice? Stay the hell out of this dying collapsing country because HELL is coming and it will be wrapped in a flag carrying a bible with an AR-15 in the other hand…
Roaming Charges: Whatd’Ya Expect Us to Do About It?
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/07/01/roaming-charges-59/
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My parting shot today:
‘Tipping Point of No Return’ Feared as Amazon Rainforest Fires Surge
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/07/03/tipping-point-no-return-feared-amazon-rainforest-fires-surge
sealintheSelkirks
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Seal I really appreciate these anecdotal observations.
Many thanks comrade.
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“Big fish sightings are spiking. Climate change may be the cause.”
The migration professor Bradshaw and we predicted is underway.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/07/08/big-fish-warm-waters-climate-change/?fbclid=IwAR1tRqPl-7dDFyXuS0ManiGxlM78cQ4Rk5DrC1c29coTt3tr4w4_8NzS0i8
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“In part, the issue is the change of water temperature conditions required to support certain species life cycles. It appears that global warming’s impact is displacing them northward as the equatorial waters turn too warm.”
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/07/29/breakdown-of-the-marine-food-web/?fbclid=IwAR1_IEFBPem8-y50etXaNj0mwLaBhnJTH3ptu0Cj1s391HIqK0Emz8z5jm8
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