Elizabeth Kolbert

“amphibian fossils are so rare.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

I don't think there are too many places left that humans haven't pretty thoroughly explored.

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“Ocean acidification is sometimes referred to as global warming’s “equally evil twin.”

— 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

“During a mass extinction, vast swathes of the tree are cut short, as if attacked by crazed, axe-wielding madmen.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

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

— Elizabeth Kolbert

Parents want their kids’ approval, a reversal of the past ideal of children striving for their parents’ approval.

— Elizabeth Kolbert

It doesn’t much matter whether people care or don’t care. What matters is that people change the world.

— Elizabeth Kolbert

No matter what Donald Trump says, it's clear that global warming is rapidly changing conditions on our planet.

— 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

“Another expert, David Jablonski, characterizes mass extinctions as “substantial biodiversity losses” that occur rapidly and are “global in extent.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

What are the Chinese doing, what are we doing, what are - so we need, both the developed world and the developing…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

Most of the world's major waterways have been diverted or dammed or otherwise manipulated - in the United States, only two per…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“Meanwhile, an even stranger and more radical transformation is under way. Having discovered subterranean reserves of energy, humans begin to change the…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

I traveled really to amazing places. I went to the Great Barrier Reef, I went to the Amazon, I went to the…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

I did not mean to suggest that autism could be traced to Neanderthal genes. The point is that some genes that have…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“Only in a place where the rules of the game remain fixed is there time for butterflies to evolve to feed on…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

We have all this Paleolithic art that suggests that our ancestors really venerated animals and that they depended on wild animals to…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“The size of the greenhouse forcing is estimated, at this point, to be 2.5 w/m2. A miniature Christmas light gives off about…

— 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

Humans will eventually become extinct. People treat that as a radical thing to say. But the fossil record shows us that everything…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“As the effects of global warming become more and more difficult to ignore, will we react by finally fashioning a global response?…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

Well in the scientific there is virtually no debate over certain things. For example, that we are changing the world. Humans are…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“The Neanderthals lived in Europe for more than a hundred thousand years and during that period they had no more impact on…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

Several decades ago, a detachment of the American right cut itself loose from reason, and it has been drifting along happily ever…

— 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

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

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“A recent study of common frogs living near Ithaca, New York, for example, found that four out of six species were calling—which…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

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

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“Adding carbon dioxide, or any other greenhouse gas, to the atmosphere by, say, burning fossil fuels or leveling forests is, in the…

— 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

“Trees are obviously a lot less mobile than, say, trogons—tropical birds common in Manú—or even ticks. But in a cloud forest, trees…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

We're talking really huge global-scale change, and I did not feel that I had the prescription for that kind of action, so…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

People sometimes say we need to be really almost on a wartime footing if you want to change. Our whole economy is…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

If you're a conservation biologist in many fields, you're seeing your study subject disappear. People are in the position where they're chronicling…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

[On the birther movement:] Here we are, quadrillions of bytes deep into the Information Age. And yet information, it seems, has never…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

People tend to focus on the here and now. The problem is that, once global warming is something that most people can…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION,…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

There are a lot of things that we could do to minimize what we're doing, but we're not getting back those frogs…

— Elizabeth Kolbert