Comments by "Old Scientist" (@OldScientist) on "PBS Eons"
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Warming events in the Cenozoic do not correlate to mass extinction, whether the warming is correlated to CO2 or not. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum PETM (55mya), a time when the Earth warmed rapidly to temperatures far in excess of today's, only resulted in a noticeable extinction of some benthic foraminifera. That was so small of an event it doesn't even show up on a marine extinction intensity chart for the Phanerozoic. There was, in fact, a more general flourishing of life at that point, especially terrestrial. Many major mammal groups appeared and spread around the globe including hyaenodontids, artiodactyls, perissodactyls, and primates. So if the Earth is warming, we've got that to look forward to. The next largest extinction event, since the dinosaurs bit the big one, is the Eocene-Oligocene transition ("Grande Coupure" = The Great Rupture). This seems to have been connected with cooling (rapid Antarctic glaciation), not warming.
If i can quote from a paper by Aze (2022) "the PETM is not classified as a mass extinction event, as significant levels of extinction are limited to just a handful of taxonomic groups, and overall extinction rates do not increase beyond background levels".
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