A team of British scientists contends that, within 200 years, the Earth’s temperatures may become hot enough to kill off half of all existing plant and animal species. The researchers from the Universities of York and Leeds in Britain base that dire possibility on a new analysis of the 520-million-year-old fossil record, linking past mass extinctions with cycles of high temperatures that occurred at roughly the same time. ‘We could be in the temperature zone in which mass extinctions have occurred by the end of this century, [or] more likely in the next century,’ said Peter Mayhew, the study’s co-author and an ecologist at the University of York. A Strong Link Benton and his colleagues laid out their findings in a paper that appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the chief biological research journal for the British academy of science. Measuring in 10-million-year increments, they found a correlation between high temperatures and four of five mass extinctions in Earth’s fossil record, dating back 520 million years. No other research had examined both the entire globe and the entire fossil record, which begins about 540 million years ago. This analysis makes […]