MEXICO: If increases in greenhouse gases stay on pace, species will go extinct at an ever-increasing rate, according to a study published last week (May 1) in Science. In the worst-case scenario, global warming will contribute to wiping out one of every six species.
“Perhaps most surprising is that extinction risk does not just increase with temperature rise, but accelerates, curving upward as the Earth warms,” Mark Urban, a University of Connecticut ecologist and the author of the study, told Smithsonian.com.
Models have produced widely varying estimates of extinctions to come, so Urban pulled together 131 studies to generate a “global mean extinction rate.” His meta-analysis found that, overall, the studies predicted 7.9 percent of species will go extinct due to climate change. That number varied depending on the severity of the warming; limiting the rise in temperatures to 2°C (35°F) wipes out 5.2 percent of species, while carrying on with current trajectories and rising 4.3°C (40°F) would kill off 16 percent of species.
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