tea.

The day had started off innocently enough - smoke alarms cheering me on as I tried to cook breakfast, the dog running crazy circles around me as I tried to pull together coat and keys and papers and shit shit shit where did I put my phone and "Bye Mum, love you!"

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It had carried on in the same inconspicuous manner. I hit four red lights on my way to work which was a record. I braked for two birds and a squirrel. It was completely, totally, ordinary. It was dull, some might say. I know my sister would. She's married to a guy who runs online casinos, lives in Gibraltar, and says things like "Methinks." and "Mayhaps." Last Christmas, he'd cornered me and was busy investigating his own psyche. "Am I a spiritual man?" He'd mused, alcohol heavy on his breath and Christmas hat lying limp over a balding scalp. "Not in the strictest sense, but mayhaps that isn't the way that it was intended. Am I an academic man? Methinks yes - Maybe not in the same fashion as Aristotle, but without a doubt-"

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But during lunch, everything changed. The lights flickered. The sky went from it's cheerful, periwinkle, blue to an ominous grey; Clouds swirled, the wind picked up. Rain fell in heavy droplets - rain that changed to sleet, which changed to hail. Cracks and thuds sounded as these balls of ice hurtled from a sky which had been so still just moments before. A cacophony of noise reverberated as the wind howled down the high street, cars screeched to a halt as they were blinded by the onslaught of weather and a child started to scream. And scream. And scream.
Inside the office, madness struck.
Every monitor in the small floor space flickered into life; TV coverage started spewing out of them in a magnitude of languages. They merged. Gibberish filled the room, each reporter telling the tale of the same anarchy, competing, trying to make it more impressive, more spectacular. Oh my God, I thought, what the hell is going on?!

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"Shit. Fuck, fuck, fuck, SHIT."
"Boss, breathe."
"Don't 'Boss' me - who the FUCK left that there?!"
"Boss - the Earth is smoking. Look. And here, it's iced over. And you've just - okay, you've just reactivated Vesuvius, Boss. Boss."
"Did you know it was there? Shit. I think I'm bleeding. I'm am KILLING Gabriel."
"Boss."

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• Jordan. It's been a favourite of mine since I was a young child, and I'd love to go back again. I haven't been able to make it to Petra so far - the weather was working against me on the occasions I found myself down that way - and I'd love to see it.

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• The Galapagos Islands. Ecology and evolution fascinates me, and these Islands are somewhere spectacular.

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• India, especially Jaipur. My grandfather grew up there, and it keeps drawing him back. I'd just like to understand why, and India has always seemed beautiful to me.

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• Venice. I love the photos of the festivals and the canals. I've been to Italy numerous times, but I've never wound up in Venice.

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• Tibet. Not that there's very much of Tibet left, but if it's there then I'd like to try and find it.

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• Iceland. You can actually swim in between two divergent plates. Can we just think about how fucking awesome that is.

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• Australia. Last time I was there, my friend was complaining about Australian stereotypes. And then a kangaroo appeared in their garden. I died.

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So I joint forces with a couple of my friends over this one, and we had a couple of unanimous choices;

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1. Stairway to Heaven | Led Zeppelin
2. Bohemian Rhapsody | Queen
3. Imagine | John Lennon

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And then we argued over The Beatles because I genuinely don't believe that they're that great, but they monopolised the industry for a long, long time. We compromised with a Beatles song that I actually like, but probably didn't change the world that much.

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4. She's Leaving Home | The Beatles
5. The Pirates of The Caribbean theme. If that counts.
6. Smells Like Teen Spirit | Nirvana
7. Sweet Child O' Mine | Guns N Roses
8. Blowin' In The Wind | Bob Dylan (The guy can't sing, but he can write.)
9. Bridge over Troubled Water | Simon and Garfunkel
10. Anaconda | Nicki Minaj

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Alternatively,

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10. Another Brick In The Wall, Part 2 | Pink Floyd.

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Scientists world over have agreed that humans are the cause of the Holocene Extinction. I was learning about it in the first year of my degree course back in 2012-3, so I don't honestly get why it's just hit headlines.

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The Ordovician mass extinction was blamed on an ice age - a huge ice sheet in the southern hemisphere which caused climate change and a fall in sea level, which messed with the chemistry of the oceans. The late-Devonian extinction blamed on practically anything, all focus around a loss of oxygen at the seabed. Options are asteroid impacts, sea-level change, climate change, invasive plant species, Shia LaBeouf. The Permian extinction killed off a colossal 96% of species. Blamed on asteroids, basaltic lava floods, sea level changes etc. etc. Triassic extinction - 50% of all life - sea levels, oxygen levels, some combination of both. Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction. Famous for the death of the dinosaurs, commonly believed to have been caused by an asteroid or comet.

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At root, all of these extinctions have diverse geological causes. They all came about due to circumstances outside of the Earth's inhabitant's control. You cannot blame a single celled organism for an ice-age, you really can't.

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Which brings us to the sixth mass extinction. The sixth mass extinction in less than half-billion years. The only extinction that has caused scientists to put their hands up and go "We fucked up." Sure, we aren't single celled - but we aren't far off. Not in the grand scheme of things.

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The question isn't "Did we?" the question is "How did we?" and the answer is pretty obvious, unfortunately.

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Humans have altered the composition of the atmosphere to such an extent that everything is out of whack, and a significantly larger amount of the sun's energy is reaching the Earth's surface and isn't being reflected back into space.The Earth's albedo is decreasing as the sun's energy causes the ice to melt, which causes the albedo to decrease, which causes the ice to melt, which causes the albedo to decrease - We've introduced a positive feedback loop which is altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere, sea levels, ocean acidification and energy levels. The Earth is heating up like the bottom of your laptop on a Friday night.

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So okay, that's one cause of extinction.

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The total number of vertebrate species that went extinct in the last century would have taken about 800 to 10,000 years to disappear under natural extinction rates. These numbers alone, without the long-term change to the Earth's albedo, make the Holocene extinction the most aggressive since the C-T extinction, 65Ma. If you ask a child, they could list at least a couple of reasons why this is the case. Humans are destroying habitats either for agricultural purposes or for settlements. We're pollutants. We hunt and kill when we don't need to. We've overpopulated and overconsumed.

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Put simply - Yes. I believe entirely that humans are the cause.

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