Does Global Warming Lead to Mass Extinction? 

We know when mass extinctions have happened; we know the sea surface temperature for many millions of years. Is there a connection?

THIS ARTICLE, based on THIS PAPER, looks at this. And the news is not good!

Data for the two sets is usually not presented in similar ways. Extinction data usually comes as number of disappearances per geological stage; sea surface temperature is more nearly continuous.

To make correlations the authors put the data into 10 million year time bins and this is what you see below.

Changes since the end of the Ordovician: red = extinction rate in time bins; green = the greatest magnitude of change in temperature in each bin; blue- the greatest rate of temperature change in each bin. Grey bars show mass extinctions (Credit: Song et al., Fig 1)

The data shows that there is a good correlation between the two data sets. When the sea surface temperature rises quickly, mass extinctions happen. 

And the sea surface temperature is rising very fast indeeed.