Elizabeth Kolbert Quotes
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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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That a molecule of CO2 generated by burning fossil fuels will, in the course of its lifetime in the atmosphere, trap a hundred thousand times more heat than was released in producing it.
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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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Erwin estimated that the tropics were home to as many as thirty million species of arthropods.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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For a long time, science has gone in the direction of sort of putting people in their place. We learned that the sun doesn't revolve around the Earth, the Earth revolves around the sun; we learned that we're just another species, evolved, like all other species, so we're just another animal, really.
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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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No matter what Donald Trump says, it's clear that global warming is rapidly changing conditions on our planet.
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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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I like to think or say, some madness there.
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All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body nature is, and God the soul.
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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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It doesn’t much matter whether people care or don’t care. What matters is that people change the world.
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Where the kids routinely outscored the apes was in tasks that involved reading social cues.
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This particular species, though, had never been seen before; indeed, it was so unusual that an entire genus had to be created to accommodate it. It was named Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis—batrachos is Greek for “frog”—or Bd for short.
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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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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.
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Some of these species that are now no longer with us were killed off by a fungal disease that was moved around the planet by people.
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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.