“We have to face the quantitative nature of the challenge,” he told me one day over lunch at the NYU faculty club. “Right now, we’re going to just burn everything up; we’re going to heat the atmosphere to the temperature… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
“the center of the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Biodiversity, there’s an exhibit embedded in the floor. The exhibit is arranged around a central plaque that notes there have been five major extinction events since complex animals evolved,… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
“The size of the greenhouse forcing is estimated, at this point, to be 2.5 w/m2. A miniature Christmas light gives off about four tenths… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
You've got to do everything, everything's got to be pointing in the same direction and you've got to really turn this whole economic engine… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
Well in the scientific there is virtually no debate over certain things. For example, that we are changing the world. Humans are changing the… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
Humans will eventually become extinct. People treat that as a radical thing to say. But the fossil record shows us that everything eventually becomes… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
“A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
We have all this Paleolithic art that suggests that our ancestors really venerated animals and that they depended on wild animals to survive -… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
“Crutzen wrote up his idea in a short essay, “Geology of Mankind,” that ran in Nature. “It seems appropriate to assign the term ‘Anthropocene’… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
“Modern humans arrived in Europe around forty thousand years ago, and again and again, the archaeological record shows, as soon as they made their… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
It seems that the Neanderthal DNA that modern Europeans and Asians (and also Native Americans and basically all non-African people) are carrying around is… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
What are the Chinese doing, what are we doing, what are - so we need, both the developed world and the developing world, really… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
“As the effects of global warming become more and more difficult to ignore, will we react by finally fashioning a global response? Or will… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
As best as can be determined, the world is now warmer than it has been at any point in the last two millennia, and,… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
