When I see people holding ‘stop climate change’ placards, I wish for a new environmental movement. One that understands and accepts planet earth. An environment movement that understand, whether or not we do something about carbon dioxide emissions, there will be climate change. There has always been climate change on planet earth.
Interestingly, a Queensland University of Technology study released today has concluded that climate change during the latter part of the Pleistocene, not the arrival of aboriginals, drove the extinction of Australia’s megafauna.
“That culprit is climate,” Mr Price said. “It does appear that climate change was the major factor in driving the megafauna extinct.”
Mr Price says the dig has revealed dramatic changes in habitat – and consequently fauna – during the latter part of the Pleistocene epoch, which stretched from 1.8 million to 10,000 years ago.
“It tends to be the case that over the entire period of the deposition, the faunas and the habitats were changing so it reflected the contraction and possibly local extinction of different sorts of habitats, mainly the woodland and vine-thicketed habitat,” he said.
“That’s associated with different species going at least locally extinct over that same period.”
He says that in the oldest sections of the dig, which date back about 45,000 years, species that depended on woodland and vine thickets dominated.
In the mid-section, there was a mix of species that were either “habitat generalists” or preferred open areas, which Mr Price says suggests the environment was evolving toward grasslands.
“By the latest Pleistocene, species dependent on wetter conditions disappear from the fossil record, while animals such as long-nosed bandicoots that aren’t habitat-specific remain,” he said.
And I say,Greenpeace and WWF may be rich, may be multinational corporations, but the bottomline is, they can not stop climate change.
And at last, a new progressive and evidence-based environmental organisation, the Australian Environment Foundation (the AEF), will be launched this Sunday and almost has a website.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.
