Question: how long till climate change is irriversable

Pete Webb answered on 9 Jul 2025:

We don’t really know because this has never happened in our living memory, so we have nothing to compare it to. Some species are already in decline and might become extinct in our lifetimes. That would be a great shame but geological history shows us that after mass extinctions (and there were 5 in the last 500 million years, the most recent being 65 million years ago) new species evolved very rapidly to fill the recently vacated ecological niches. Yes, dinosaurs became extinct, but mammals rapidly evolved to fill every terrestrial niche and now we dominate Earth.