Extinction Quotes
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If climate change drove the megafauna extinct, then this presents yet another reason to worry about what we are doing to global temperatures. If, on the other hand, people were to blame—and it seems increasingly likely that they were—then the import is almost more disturbing. It would mean that the current extinction event began all the way back in the middle of the last ice age. It would mean that man was a killer—to use the term of art an “overkiller”—pretty much right from the start.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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During a mass extinction, vast swathes of the tree are cut short, as if attacked by crazed, axe-wielding madmen.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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We can't say that when x happens we get a mass extinction. To the extent we understand mass extinction, one has been caused by glaciation event, one has been caused by a massive climate change, and one has been caused by an asteroid. These events turn out to have no precedent.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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The fate of hundreds of thousands of species on this planet may be decided in the next decade. To slow the rush to extinction, we need to achieve real, substantive political power, and we need to get there fast.
Eban Goodstein
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America has faced much more difficult times, including potential national extinction, without flinching.
Nick Clooney
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The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but "one weedy species.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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People shop and learn in a whole new way compared to just a few years ago, so marketers need to adapt or risk extinction.
Brian Halligan
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The end-Permian extinction also seems to have been triggered by a change in the climate. But in this case, the change went in the opposite direction. Right at the time of extinction, 252 million years ago, there was a massive release of carbon into the air—so massive that geologists have a hard time even imagining where all the carbon could have come from. Temperatures soared—the seas warmed by as much as eighteen degrees—and the chemistry of the oceans went haywire, as if in an out-of-control aquarium. The water became acidified, and the amount of dissolved oxygen dropped so low that many organisms probably, in effect, suffocated.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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If warming were held to a minimum, the team estimated that between 22 and 31 percent of the species would be “committed to extinction” by 2050. If warming were to reach what was at that point considered a likely maximum—a figure that now looks too low—by the middle of this century, between 38 and 52 percent of the species would be fated to disappear.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.
Thomas Hardy
