MIT professor warns humanity will hit 'mass extinction' event — here's why

A geophysics professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says that he's run the numbers on humanity facing a "mass extinction event," and the numbers are not good.

According to Digital Trends, a mass extinction event is an event "in which a large number of species become extinct at once — as was the case with the death of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

What does he predict?

Daniel Rothman told the publication that we are approaching a “threshold of catastrophe” in the carbon cycle similar to that of the five previous periods of mass extinction over the last 540 million years.

“The study identifies two thresholds for major carbon cycle change,” Rothman said. “One is a critical rate of change, corresponding to the rate at which CO2 is added to the ocean/atmosphere system. The other, a critical size or mass, corresponds to the total carbon added to the oceans."

"Exceeding the critical rate at slow time scales — much greater than about 10,000 years — or exceeding the critical size at fast time scales — much less than about 10,000 years — is associated with mass extinction," he explained.

"[The MIT research paper] predicts that the critical mass, about 300 gigatons of carbon," he concluded, "will likely be exceeded sometime this century. If so, following the paper’s logic, the marine carbon cycle would proceed to follow a trajectory which could excite a mass extinction over a period of about 10,000 years.”

Rothman goes on to explain that the tipping point of "unknown territory" won't take that long - he predicts it will come as soon as 2100, or sooner.

Does he say how we can prevent this?

Rothman says that “decreasing carbon emissions," would be the best way to try to avoid the catastrophe.

What do global warming skeptics say?

Those who point to discrepancies in the global warming narrative have also noted that many of the solutions offered by climate change advocates do very little to actually stop carbon emissions and turn back the clock. They also cite previous "doomsday" scenarios offered by alarmist scientists that didn't come to fruition, including acid rain and global cooling.