“background extinction.” In ordinary times—times here understood to mean whole geologic epochs—extinction takes place only very rarely, more rarely even than speciation, and it occurs at what’s known as the background extinction rate. This rate varies from one group of… — 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
