Part One / How Climate Works

1.4 Civilization and Extinction

Online sources accessed on , and

  1. humans carried with them tropical diseases Greenbaum, G., et al.,‘Disease transmission and introgression can explain the long-lasting contact zone of modern humans and Neanderthals’,Nature Communications, 10, 2019: Article 5003, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-12862-7.

  2. ‘We live in a zoologically impoverished world’ Wallace, A. R., The Geographical Distribution of Animals with a Study of the Relations of Living and Extinct Faunas as Elucidating the Past Changes of the Earth’s Surface (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876), vol. 1, 150.

    ‘a geologically instantaneous ecological catastrophe’ Alroy, J., ‘A multispecies overkill simulation of the end-Pleistocene megafaunal mass extinction’, Science, 292 (5523), 2001: 1893–6, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1059342.

  3. A recent study published in the journal Current Biology Valente, L., et al., ‘Deep macroevolutionary impact of humans on New Zealand’s unique avifauna’, Current Biology, 29 (15), 2019: 2563–9, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2019.06.058.

    ‘thicker than … stars in the firmament’ Parrish, E. E., The Oregon Trail Diary of Rev. Edward Evans Parrish in 1844: The Unabridged Diary, ed. B. Webber (Medford, OR: Webb Research Group, 1988).

    the marine fish catch increased sevenfold International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, ‘Great Acceleration’, 15 January 2015, www.igbp.net/globalchange/greatacceleration.4.1b8ae20512db692f2a680001630.html.

    ‘Sometimes differences in quantity can become’ McNeill, J. R., Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-century World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), 4.

  4. more than 15 million square kilometres were under cultivation Ibid., 213.

    ‘Certainly, our knowledge of their past response’ Coope, G. R., ‘The paleoclimatological significance of Late Cenozoic Coleoptera: familiar species in very unfamiliar circumstances’, in Culver, S. J., and Rawson, P. F., eds., Biotic Response to Global Climate Change: The Last 145 Million Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

    a detailed survey of Bramble Cay Purtill, J., ‘An Australian rodent has become the first climate change mammal extinction’, ABC News, 20 February 2019, https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/bramble-cay-melomys-first-climate-change-mammal-extinction/10830080.

  5. coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef has declined by half Dietzel, A., et al., ‘Long-term shifts in the colony size structure of coral populations along the Great Barrier Reef’, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 287 (1936), 2020: Article 20201432,http://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2020.1432.

    transformed into habitats dominated by algae and sponges Cramer, K. L., et al., ‘Widespread loss of Caribbean acroporid corals was underway before coral bleaching and disease outbreaks’, Science Advances, 6 (17), 2020, Article eaax9395, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aax9395.

    ‘vulnerable to ecosystem collapse’ Obura, D., et al., ‘Vulnerability to collapse of coral reef ecosystems in the Western Indian Ocean’, Nature Sustainability, 5 (2), 2021: 104–13, https://doi:10.1038/s41893-021-00817-0.