At the end of the day, we’re humans and we have emotions.” She told the Guardian: “There are days when I still get overwhelmed. With the iron buckled from the heat and the nest melted, Texeira says: “They weren’t enough to save them.” She finds one of the nests erected to help the birds on a fallen tree with an iron plate around the trunk to stop possums climbing up and attacking the young. Texeira, from the University of Queensland, is filmed in February 2020 returning to sites on Kangaroo Island off the South Australian coast where she was studying endangered glossy black cockatoos. He describes Australia’s 2019/20 summer as “a summer from hell, fuelled by record-breaking temperatures and drought”. In the documentary, Attenborough says: “We are heading for a future where the Great Barrier Reef is a coral graveyard.” Hughes, of James Cook University’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, said the black summer bushfires and coral bleaching “points to Australia’s vulnerability”. “You can easily transgress a tipping point and not notice it for a couple of decades,” he said, adding he thought the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere had probably reached a tipping point for coral reefs in the 1980s. Photograph: Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images He said Rockström’s research, which he has collaborated on, was “simple and powerful” and showed how the world was on a “trajectory that is not sustainable”.Īustralian scientist Daniella Teixeira revisits Kangaroo Island after the devastating black summer bushfires in Sir David Attenborough’s new Netflix documentary. “But it’s still deeply saddening,” he said. Hughes told the Guardian that “if anything I think the emotional response has lessened over time” and that the 2016 bleaching event in the north of the reef “was the most confronting”. “In big thermal extremes like we’ve been seeing during mass bleaching events in recent decades can actually die very very quickly. Hughes has become a high-profile scientific figure in Australia for his research on the complex impacts of global heating on the world’s biggest reef system and his monitoring flights to document mass bleaching. Netflix says the film documents “the most important scientific discovery of our time – that humanity has pushed Earth beyond the boundaries that have kept Earth stable for 10,000 years, since the dawn of civilisation.” The documentary, fronted by Attenborough, is centred on the research of Swedish scientist Prof Johan Rockström, whose work looks at the concept of tipping points and boundaries in different systems around the planet, such as the polar regions, the Earth’s biodiversity and the climate.

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