Elizabeth Kolbert

“The permafrost is still warmest at the very bottom, but instead of being coldest at the top, it is coldest somewhere in…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

In a poll commissioned by Time and CNN, two-thirds of American parents said they think that their children are spoiled.

— Elizabeth Kolbert

Letting things slide is always the easiest thing to do, in parenting no less than in banking, public education, and environmental protection.…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“Birds were also hard-hit; perhaps three-quarters of all bird families, perhaps more, went extinct.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“Tony Blair, who held the presidency of the G8 in 2005, spent the months leading up to that year’s summit trying to…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

The Earth is big. There are huge natural forces that have worked over geological time. But it turns out, when you look…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“the added expense of carbon capture and storage for all the new coal plants expected to be built in all of the…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“(A recent study of pollen and animal remains on Easter Island concluded that it wasn’t humans who deforested the landscape; rather, it…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

Mitochondrial DNA, which is a sort of abridged version of DNA, is passed directly from mother to child, so it's something that…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“Today, amphibians enjoy the dubious distinction of being the world’s most endangered class of animals; it’s been calculated that the group’s extinction…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“Perovich said that he also liked a regional analogy. “The way I’ve been thinking about it, riding my bike around here, is,…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“Data that did not fit the commonly accepted assumptions of a discipline would either be discounted or explained away for as long…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“It’s absolutely obvious that global warming has started,” France’s president, Jacques Chirac, said after attending the 2004 summit of leaders of the…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“One consequence, presumably unintended, of America’s failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol has been the emergence of a not-quite-grassroots movement. In February…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“One way to try to answer the question “What makes us human?” is to ask “What makes us different from great apes?”…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

Some of these species that are now no longer with us were killed off by a fungal disease that was moved around…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“Alroy has described the megafauna extinction as a "geologically instantaneous ecological catastrophe too gradual to be perceived by the people who unleashed…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

You're an animal that needs to move across the landscape, you can't anymore, and that's another way we're just changing the surface…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

It is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“background extinction.” In ordinary times—times here understood to mean whole geologic epochs—extinction takes place only very rarely, more rarely even than speciation,…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“at 378 parts per million, current CO2 levels are unprecedented in recent geological history. (The previous high, of 299 parts per million,…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

Zalasiewicz is convinced that even a moderately competent stratigrapher will, at the distance of a hundred million years or so, be able…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

Somewhere in our DNA must lie the key mutation (or, more probably, mutations) that set us apart—the mutations that make us the…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

As soon as you acknowledge that we're changing the planet on this scale, that it has very potentially massive repercussions and very…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

We can't say that when x happens we get a mass extinction. To the extent we understand mass extinction, one has been…

— Elizabeth Kolbert