I found this while debating a climate change topic on Dvorak Uncensored. It's two years old. I knew of the link from the book Under a Green Sky, but had not heard of this particular study showing the link more strongly. Though I'm sure to continue to be called an alarmist over climate change (and overpopulation and ocean acidification), I think this does actually lend a bit of credence to the so-called alarmist viewpoint. Perhaps the sky really is falling.

As is common with peer-reviewed work, the abstract may be enough for us lay people. Or, this popular press version, History of mass extinction is a grim lesson on climate change, may be enough if the abstract is not.

A long-term association between global temperature and biodiversity, origination and extinction in the fossil record

Ah yeah. Thought all knew that. It is magnitude that gets yah. A slow cooling or heating is no biggie. FAST: snowball earth study. How did life continue with ice over 90% of earth? Well, it finds a way. Millions of years is a long time to us but MotherNature does not blink at that scale. We only worry about 10s of years -- we are replaceable by the Mark III intelligence (Maybe Mark IV).

I think, and it is just a thought experiment, we are Mark II. My 2-cents.

One way life survived snowball earth was the same way that life will survive humanity, by being unicellular. The vast majority of species on the planet today are bacteria. They are so numerous both as species and individuals that more than 50% of the mass of the biosphere is made of bacteria. Both instances of snowball earth were before the Cambrian explosion. So, bacteria survived that. Bacteria will survive us too.

So will many but not most multicellular creatures. We've already killed off a greater percentage of multicellular species on the planet than the comet that killed the non-avian dinosaurs. Now, we're trying to compete with the Permian/Triassic extinction, a time when the planet was just 6 degrees Celsius warmer than today. That number is at the high range, but still in the range, of predictions for earth's temperature due to anthropogenic climate change.

We would not survive that.