Chris Packham: We're precipitating a mass extermination event - New Scientist
Chris Packham: "It's not a mass extinction event we're precipitating, it's a mass extermination event" | New Scientist
Our world has led a long, sometimes tumultuous and always complicated life. Telling that story is no small feat, but Earth, a five-part BBC documentary narrated by naturalist Chris Packham, sets out to do so by looking at significant moments in Earth’s history, “its first step, its first word, its first marriage”, says Packham. “And we’ve been very much driven by some of the more exciting new science as well.”
While the series deals with Earth’s history on a geological scale – including how the climate has changed radically, often over millions of years, and sometimes with astonishing results – for Packham, it is the much more-recent legacy of accelerated human-driven climate change and biodiversity loss that troubles him the most. “I’m slightly troubled by the word loss,” says Packham. “We haven’t lost the species. We haven’t inadvertently left them behind the shed. We’ve destroyed them or we’ve destroyed their habitats. So it’s not a sixth mass extinction event that we’re precipitating, it’s a mass extermination event.”
There is, however, still time to make a difference, he says. “As a conscious organism, precipitating that type of event isn’t conscionable from my perspective, which is why I would rather do something about it.”
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.