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People sometimes say we need to be really almost on a wartime footing if you want to change. Our whole economy is based on burning fossil fuels, which is taking CO2 out of the ground and putting it up into the air.
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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 of the Earth in very dramatic ways.
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Erwin estimated that the tropics were home to as many as thirty million species of arthropods.
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Zalasiewicz is convinced that even a moderately competent stratigrapher will, at the distance of a hundred million years or so, be able to tell that something extraordinary happened at the moment in time that counts for us as today. This is the case even though a hundred million years from now, all that we consider to be the great works of man—the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories—will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.
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Among the many lessons that merge from the geologic record, perhaps the most sobering is that in life, as in mutual funds, past performance is no guarantee of future results.
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The permafrost is still warmest at the very bottom, but instead of being coldest at the top, it is coldest somewhere in the middle, and warmer again toward the surface. This is a sign—and an unambiguous one—that the climate is heating up.
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Amphibians—the word comes from the Greek meaning ‘double life.'
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A group of scientists led by Bärbel Hönisch, of Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, recently reviewed the evidence for changing CO2 levels in the geologic past and concluded that, although there are several severe episodes of ocean acidification in the record, “no past event perfectly parallels” what is happening right now, owing to “the unprecedented rapidity of CO2 release currently taking place.” It turns out there just aren’t many ways to inject billions of tons of carbon into the air very quickly.
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In a poll commissioned by Time and CNN, two-thirds of American parents said they think that their children are spoiled.
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No matter what Donald Trump says, it's clear that global warming is rapidly changing conditions on our planet.
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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 are burning twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, year in and year out.
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Once the Funk Island birds had been salted, plucked, and deep-fried into oblivion, there was only one sizable colony of great auks left in the world, on an island called the Geirfuglasker, or great auk skerry, which lay about fifty kilometres off southwestern Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula. Much to the auk’s misfortune, a volcanic eruption destroyed the Geirfuglasker in 1830. This left the birds one solitary refuge, a speck of an island known as Eldey. By this point, the great auk was facing a new threat: its own rarity. Skins and eggs were avidly sought by gentlemen, like Count Raben, who wanted to fill out their collections. It was in the service of such enthusiasts that the very last known pair of auks was killed on Eldey in 1844.
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Basically, if you were a triceratops in Alberta, you had about two minutes before you got vaporized - is how one geologist put it to me.
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The planet has undergone change so wrenching that the diversity of life has plummeted. Five of these ancient events were catastrophic enough that they’re put in their own category: the so-called Big Five. In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, but is probably no coincidence at all, the history of these events is recovered just as people come to realize that they are causing another one.
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Increasingly developing countries are asking for aid to help deal with the consequences of climate change, which we don't want to give.
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It doesn’t much matter whether people care or don’t care. What matters is that people change the world.
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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 quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion. The losses are occurring all over: in the South Pacific and in the North Atlantic, in the Arctic and the Sahel, in lakes and on islands, on mountaintops and in valleys.
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Roth pulled a second glove over the first and grabbed what looked like a video game remote.
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The 'incredible frog hotel'—really a local bed and breakfast—...the frogs stay in their tanks in a block of rented rooms.
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Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it’s not clear that he ever really did.
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These days every wild place has, to one degree or another, been cut into and cut off.
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Where the kids routinely outscored the apes was in tasks that involved reading social cues.
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We have all this Paleolithic art that suggests that our ancestors really venerated animals and that they depended on wild animals to survive - as opposed to domesticated animals that we depend on. Would it radically change things if we had more rhinos in our midst? I kind of suspect it would.
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I did not mean to suggest that autism could be traced to Neanderthal genes. The point is that some genes that have been implicated in autism changed pretty significantly between the time Neanderthal line and human line split.