14 DAY TRIAL // Despite the dangers posed by the current global warming trend, experts say that things weren't always so gloom when it came to climate change. In the past, some warming events contributed to boosting biodiversity on a global scale, they reveal in a new study.
Over the past 540 million years, since the Great Oxygenation Event, whenever global temperatures increased, biodiversity did as well. But scientists at the University of York found that this did not entail only positive effects, Nature reports.
Biodiversity only increased because the pace of new species formation exceeded that of extinction. But the latter was happening at a wide scale as well. The new study should not be interpreted as to suggest that the current bout of global warming will have positive effects on biodiversity. It won't.
However, the new study “is definitely of interest to evolutionary biologists, palaeontologists and ecologists seeking to understand very broad patterns of diversity,” Smithsonian Institution paleobiologist Scott Wing says.