Life on Earth mostly made it through 500 million years of asteroids and supervolcanoes only to be wiped out by a half a degree temperature rise. This really will be unprecedented.
Climate change could destroy half of Earth’s animal and plant species in the next 50 years, disturbing study says
Despite animals surviving temperature rises of 20 degrees every day, a half a degree of warming in 50 years will kill off half the species on Earth.
A disturbing new study suggests that climate change could wipe out half of the planet’s animal and plant species by 2070.
The research notes that if temperatures rise 0.5 degrees Celsius around the globe, approximately half of the world’s species would become locally extinct. If temperatures were to rise 2.9 degrees Celsius, 95 percent of the species would become locally extinct.
Note the scale on the graph of the last 500 million years. I marked half a degree in the red box.
Image by Glen Fergus Wikimedia.
I’m not too concerned about life on Earth surviving the next 50 years. But at this rate of decay, science is cactus.
These researchers think Earth is a simulation:
“By analyzing the change in 19 climatic variables at each site, we could determine which variables drive local extinctions and how much change a population can tolerate without going extinct,” study co-author Cristian Román-Palacios added.
No meaningless study is complete without overly detailed meaningless numbers. Let’s take that ten year trend and run with it:
Wiens and the other researchers looked at data from 538 species in 581 different parts of the globe. The focus was on “plant and animal species that were surveyed at the same sites over time, at least 10 years apart,” the statement said, adding that 44 percent of the 538 species had already gone extinct at one or more of the sites.
“Surprisingly, extinctions occurred at sites with smaller changes in mean annual temperatures but larger increases in hottest yearly temperatures,” the study’s authors wrote.
And here was me thinking the only mammal extinction due to climate change was a brown rat that accidentally lived on a sand dune in the coral sea.
One down, and 3,199 to go.