The claim is true, Both the Mongabay and UConn Today articles, reporting on scientific consensus and specific studies, confirm that climate change is a major driver of species loss, with the extent of extinctions directly correlated to the degree of global warming.
https://news.mongabay.com/2025/05/climate-change-now-threatens-thousands-of-species-on-earth/
the threat of climate change to biodiversity is not a future prediction, but a present reality, impacting an incredibly vast number of species. The article's title itself, mentioning "thousands of species," immediately conveys the sheer scale of the problem, suggesting that the impact is widespread across different ecosystems and taxonomic groups. It communicates that climate change acts as a pervasive stressor, altering habitats, disrupting ecological processes, and pushing species beyond their adaptive capacities. I understood that this source serves to synthesize broader scientific findings and the general consensus within the conservation community, highlighting that rising global temperatures are fundamentally changing the conditions under which species have evolved to survive. It implicitly explains that these changes manifest in various ways, such as shifts in geographic ranges, altered breeding cycles, increased susceptibility to disease, and the breakdown of interdependent ecological relationships, all contributing to elevated extinction risks. Essentially, Mongabay provides the crucial context that the biodiversity crisis is already here and is driven by anthropogenic climate change, affecting an immense number of life forms globally.
https://today.uconn.edu/experts/expert-spotlight/10331/new-study-shows-alarming-rate-of-potential-species-extinction-due-to-climate-change/
The UConn Today article provided a more granular and quantitative understanding of the claim, focusing on the direct correlation between the degree of global warming and the rate of species extinction. It reports on a specific new study, likely from researchers at the University of Connecticut, which moves beyond general statements to offer concrete projections. What I learned most significantly from this source is that the "alarming rate" of potential extinctions is not a fixed maximum, but rather a variable outcome directly proportional to how much the planet warms. This implies that scientists are using sophisticated ecological models and climate projections to simulate different future scenarios. For instance, a 1.5°C warming scenario might lead to X number of extinctions, while a 2°C or 3°C warming scenario would lead to significantly higher numbers (Y and Z, respectively). This article underscores the scientific methodology that allows researchers to make these predictions, by examining species' physiological tolerances, habitat requirements, and dispersal abilities in the face of changing temperatures, precipitation patterns, and extreme weather events. It powerfully reinforces the "depending on how hot it gets" part of your claim by showing that every fraction of a degree of warming has measurable and escalating consequences for biodiversity, making the future of thousands of species a direct function of our climate actions.
