Scientists burst into tears as they see the consequences of the climate crisis

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People don’t often appear in Sir David Attenborough documentaries, but in his latest Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet some specimens can be seen with behavior rarely seen in public. The famous British documentary filmmaker examines the consequences of the climate crisis with scientists. Some of them become too much when they try to explain to the public what they are going through. For example, Professor Terry Hughes, a coral reef expert, tells how large parts of the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia were observed in 2016, 2017 and 2020 by bleaching due to temperature change. He had to map the destruction and said: “This is a job that I hope I never have to do because it is really very confronting.” Then his words are swept away by a flood of tears that wells up.

Dr Daniella Teixeira, a biologist specializing in rare species of cockatoo, is also overwhelmed as she traverses the devastation caused by the severe bushfires sweeping through Australia’s wildlife habitats as a result of climate change. She sees the charred nest of a couple of cockatoos, birds that she knows “personally” and notices that the nests that offer protection against predators offered no protection against fire. On Kangaroo Island lives a critically endangered subspecies of the raven brown cockatoo. Ecologists are trying to prevent the extinction of the species.

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Lost Almost Forever is the key concept of the documentary, based on the research of Swedish professor Johan Rockström. He studies the so-called tipping points in the development of the climate crisis. Events that result in an accelerated domino effect, causing sudden changes at a much faster rate. It’s these tipping points that wreak irreparable havoc and Attenborough shows that we are getting closer to those points. The characteristic is that they remain unnoticed for a long time, like an oncoming train. It is still possible to avoid them, but time is running out. That disasters unfold is not the result of fate but of human choices. Ecological systems that have kept planet Earth stable for the past 10,000 years are on the verge of being destroyed by humans, the documentary says.

Ice caps and ocean currents are changing. When these changes reach a certain level, they are not only irreversible, but they will quickly initiate or accelerate many other changes. If CO2 emissions are not sufficiently reduced, these changes are inevitable, explains The Guardian.