Of the many species that have existed on earth - estimates run as high as fifty billion - more than ninety-nine per… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
For a long time, science has gone in the direction of sort of putting people in their place. We learned that the… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
If in your lifetime you watch a species go extinct, or plummet almost to the point of extinction, that is a sign… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
Some of these species that are now no longer with us were killed off by a fungal disease that was moved around… — 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 of a watt of energy, mostly in the form of heat, so that, in effect (as Sophie supposedly explained to Connor), we have covered the earth with tiny bulbs, six for every square meter. These bulbs… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share
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 extinct. It depends what "eventually" means. But the idea that were going to be around for the rest of global history...I don't think there's any scientist who would suggest that is true. It could be millions… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share
“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’ to the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch,” he observed. Among the many geologic-scale changes people have effected, Crutzen cited the following: • Human activity has transformed between a third and a half of the… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share
“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 random. This means there are different bits and pieces in different populations, but it doesn't seem to amount to much that's significant. — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share
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
