A Japanese researcher predicted the date of human extinction after studying known mass extinctions in the past and confirmed that a similar event awaits the Earth.
The Interesting Engineering website reported that calculations by Tohoku University climate scientist Kunio Kayo indicate that the next “end of the world” will come in 2500 AD.
He added that the Earth goes through temperature cycles again and again, and as the cycle progressed from peak extreme cold to extreme heat, there were times when a large number of living species disappeared in a relatively short period, and this is called a mass. extinction.
It is scientifically known that the Earth has experienced five cycles of mass extinctions over the past 540 million years, the largest of these events occurred 250 million years ago and claimed the lives of 95% of living organisms on the planet.
This Japanese scientist was trying to predict when the next extinction would happen. To do this, he compared the stability of the average temperature of the Earth’s surface with the stability of biodiversity. It turns out that if the planet is in the process of “cooling”, then the largest extinctions occur when the average temperature drops by about 7 degrees Celsius. However, when the Earth warms up, this happens when the temperature rises by 9°C.
And since our planet is currently undergoing a stage of global warming, that is, it is in the stage of “warming”, the next mass extinction, according to scientists, will occur when the temperature rises by 9 degrees Celsius.
The worst-case scenario assumes that such a catastrophe will occur by the year 2500, and previous projections have shown that even a 5.2 °C increase in average temperature will lead to a sharp reduction in the diversity of plants and animals on Earth.
Climate scientists warn that the planet’s temperature – at current levels of greenhouse gas emissions – could rise by as much as 4.4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.
Global warming will lead to flooding in cities, as the non-profit team Climate Central previously predicted how famous cities will change after sea levels rise due to global warming and melting ice.