Tohoku University climate scientist Kunio Kaiho calculated the next mass extinction timing, and according to the Japanese, whose work was published in the journal Biogeosciences, this won’t happen before the year 2500.
Over the past 540 million years, the Earth has experienced five mass extinctions, often accompanied by climate change.
According to Kaiho, he assessed the stability of the Earth’s surface’s average temperature and the planet’s biodiversity. As a result, he found that the more significant the temperature change, the greater the extent of extinction.
“In terms of global cooling, the largest mass extinctions occurred when temperatures dropped by about 7°C. If we are talking about warming, mass extinctions occurred when the temperature rose by 9 ° C,” says Kaiho.
Global temperatures are expected to rise by an average of 4.4°C by the end of the century, which is likely to be one of the causes of the next mass extinction.
“Global warming of 9°C will not occur until at least 2500 under the worst-case scenario,” Kaiho predicts.
According to Kaiho, the climate is changing much faster for anthropogenic reasons. This could lead to the fact that the sixth mass extinction will take away with it many more species than before.
“Perhaps this time more species will die out on Earth, not because the scale of warming is so great, but because the changes have happened so quickly that many species have not been able to adapt,” the scientist explained.