My granddaughter will be 35 in 2050. I grieve that she will know silent and empty places | Christine Milne

Australia’s white lemuroid possum became my symbol for habitat loss and global warming that will send one-third of species to extinction by mid-century

It was 8 November, 2011 and I had just had one of the best days of my parliamentary career. We had made history when the Senate adopted legislation to implement an emissions trading scheme to address global warming. I was both exhausted and excited, having negotiated and shepherded the legislation through the senate for the Greens. It had been a long haul over many years.

Then an email landed in my inbox; after some preliminary congratulations, the writer and vice-chancellor of James Cook University, Sandra Harding, asked why I was wearing a polar bear badge in the newspaper photographs and not one representing an Australian animal.

Related: Revealed: first mammal species wiped out by human-induced climate change

Much has been written about how global warming will affect the colder parts of the planet – the polar and boreal regions, glaciers, and alpine mountains. In fact, some of the warmest places on Earth, especially tropical rainforests, could also be intensely vulnerable to climate change … many people are unaware that tropical species – particularly those specialised for cool, cloudy mountaintops – are often sensitive to hot weather … as temperatures rise mountaintop specialists have nowhere to go. Their populations will wither and shrink and potentially disappear altogether.

The fruit bats normally just doze in the treetops through the day but on this afternoon they were fanning themselves, panting frantically, jostling for shady spots and licking their wrists in a desperate effort to cool down. Suddenly when the thermometer hit 42C the bats began falling from the trees. Most quickly died. The research team led by Justin Welbergen counted 1,453 dead from one colony alone.

Just how empty and silent the seas and those landscapes become depends on us

Related: The Earth stands on the brink of its sixth mass extinction and the fault is ours