This is what mass extinction feels like
It is New Years’ Day.
I am standing on a small sandy beach looking at the sea. The sun is near the horizon and it casts a gentle russet glow across the frothy crests of waves as they dance along the shore. Behind me, I can hear the sound of passers-by. I can hear a couple sharing happy stories of a family gathering. I can hear a biker rush past, playfully navigating the dunes that protect the pinewoods from the onslaught of the southern sea, and I can hear the shouts of children as they play games, enjoying the warmth of this perfect afternoon.
It is the scariest moment of my life.
It is not the heat wave that scares me. The temperature is a mere 12 degrees. It is the fact that we are enjoying it. It is the beautiful innocence of my fellow human beings as they play joyfully on that gentle shoreline on the precipice of our time.
The European heat wave on New Years’ Day 2023 was felt across much of Europe. Temperatures peaked at 12.6°C in Denmark, 16.9°C in the Netherlands and at 19.0°C in Poland. It was soon forgotten. Who notices a heat wave in January? Nobody dies. Indeed, it is actually quite pleasant. But a statement from the UK Meteorological Office read “… It’s been extreme heat across a huge area, which is almost, to be honest, unheard of …”.
In the year that followed, while cool rain fell on Sweden, southern Europe experienced Cerebus. Weather attribution scientists, referring to this heat wave, wrote that “[the] maximum heat in July 2023 would have been virtually impossible to occur […] in Southern Europe if humans had not warmed the planet by burning fossil fuels.” And, as temperatures soared again in September, a meteorologist wrote, in the Guardian that it was “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas”. And then records were broken, every month, and we came to the end of the warmest year since records began.
2023 was 1.5 degrees warmer than it should have been.
And in the year that came after, eastern Spain experienced rainfall that was 12% more intense and twice as likely, because we continue to burn fossil fuels, warming the planet we live on.
2024 will be close to 1.6 degrees warmer than in should have been.
It is happening so fast.
Experiencing over a degree of warming in a lifetime is not normal. It is terrifyingly fast. And it is the speed of warming, not the amount of warming, that kills.
The climate zones that living things depend on to survive are racing across the globe at speeds that are almost unheard of in the 3 and half billion-year history of life on Earth. This means that living things must move with them, and hope that whatever they need to eat to survive moves with them too, or adapt. But there is not enough time to adapt, so plants and animals suffer and die, and all that depend on them suffer and die too.
According to the IPBES (which is the equivalent of the IPCC for biodiversity), 1 million of the 8.7 million plants and animals which we share the Earth with are at risk of extinction because we have abused the world will live in. That’s 11.5%. The threshold for a mass extinction is 75%.
Sometimes we equate “mass extinction” with an asteroid hitting the planet. But that is only true for the fifth one: the one that killed the dinosaurs. The other four mass extinctions were less sudden and less dramatic, but equally (if not more) painful. Their common factor was climate change: either cooling or warming, happening too fast for plants and animals to adapt to.
The end-of-Permian mass extinction, 252 million years, which is aptly known of as “the great dying” is a case in point. We are not sure about the trigger, but a massive addition of carbon dioxide to the air, poisoned the oceans, eliminating 96% of sea creatures (and at that time, almost all life was in the sea). Yet the change to the Earth’s climate at the end of the Permian was far slower than the change we have all experienced in our very short lifetimes.
Mass extinction is not dramatic. It is slow and painful. As we play on winter beaches, the plants and animals that we love, that make our world beautiful and that our children’s futures depend on are fading away, one by one.
This is what mass extinction feels like.
