Top 100 Elizabeth Kolbert Quotes
#1. Since the Antarctic palms of the Eocene, some fifty million years ago.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#2. As Rachel Carson once observed, referring to a very different but at the same time profoundly similar problem: "Time is the essential ingredient, but in the modern world there is no time.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#3. As best as can be determined, the world is now warmer than it has been at any point in the last two millennia, and, if current trends continue, by the end of the century it will likely be hotter than at any point in the last two million years.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#4. By the end of this century, CO2 levels could reach a level not seen
Elizabeth Kolbert
#5. within the next fifty years or so "all coral reefs will cease to grow and start to dissolve.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#7. Living in four parks in the state of Assam. A hundred years ago, in Africa, the population of black rhinos approached a million; it has since been reduced to around five thousand animals.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#9. Another expert, David Jablonski, characterizes mass extinctions as "substantial biodiversity losses" that occur rapidly and are "global in extent.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#10. Beginnings, it's said, are apt to be shadowy. So it is with this story, which starts with the emergence of a new species maybe two hundred thousand years ago.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#11. This thing of venturing out on the ocean where you don't see land.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#13. With the capacity to represent the world in signs and symbols comes the capacity to change it, which, as it happens, is also the capacity to destroy it. A tiny set of genetic variations divides us from the Neanderthals, but that has made all the difference.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#14. You've got to do everything, everything's got to be pointing in the same direction and you've got to really turn this whole economic engine from one that's based on fossil fuels to one that isn't.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#16. The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but one weedy species.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#17. 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 rate could be as much as forty-five thousand times higher than the background rate.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#18. generating enough heat to, in effect, broil the surface of the planet.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#19. The record from the Vostok core shows that CO2 levels and temperatures have varied in tandem. Current CO2 levels are unprecedented in the last 420,000 years. Credit: J.R. Petit et al, Nature, vol. 399 (1999).
Elizabeth Kolbert
#20. Where the kids routinely outscored the apes was in tasks that involved reading social cues.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#23. People tend to focus on the here and now. The problem is that, once global warming is something that most people can feel in the course of their daily lives, it will be too late to prevent much larger, potentially catastrophic changes.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#24. have become even more sought-after as a high-end party "drug"; at clubs in southeast Asia,
Elizabeth Kolbert
#25. 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.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#26. Neanderthals were pretty smart, and if we actively killed them off, then probably we did so in the same way that humans kill each other.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#27. Lyell became something of a celebrity - the Steven Pinker of his generation - and
Elizabeth Kolbert
#28. Even now, at least thirty thousand years after the fact, the signal is discernible: all non-Africans, from the New Guineans to the French to the Han Chinese, carry somewhere between one and four percent Neanderthal DNA.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#30. 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.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#31. His interest, after all, was not in the origin of species but in their demise.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#32. 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
#33. Given a shave and a new suit, the pair wrote, a Neanderthal probably would attract no more attention on a New York City subway than some of its other denizens.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#35. If EVACC is a sort of ark, Griffith becomes its Noah, though one on extended duty, since already he's been at things a good deal longer than forty days.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#36. It seems that the Neanderthal DNA that modern Europeans and Asians (and also Native Americans and basically all non-African people) are carrying around is random. This means there are different bits and pieces in different populations, but it doesn't seem to amount to much that's significant.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#38. One of the defining features of the Anthropocene is that the world is changing in ways that compel species to move, and another is that it's changing in ways that create barriers - roads, clear-cuts, cities - that prevent them from doing so.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#39. Amphibians - the word comes from the Greek meaning 'double life.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#40. The Earth is big. There are huge natural forces that have worked over geological time. But it turns out, when you look carefully at the geological time, you can't find anything like us.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#41. According to Lamarck, there was a force - the 'power of life' - that pushed organisms to become increasingly complex.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#42. 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.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#43. The 'incredible frog hotel' - really a local bed and breakfast - ... the frogs stay (in their tanks) in a block of rented rooms.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#44. On land, every animal larger than a cat seems to have died out.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#45. Assuming that humans continue to burn fossil fuels, the oceans will continue to absorb carbon dioxide and will become increasingly acidified.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#48. Somewhere in our DNA must lie the key mutation (or, more probably, mutations) that set us apart - the mutations that make us the sort of creature that could wipe out its nearest relative, then dig up its bones and reassemble its genome.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#49. Increasingly developing countries are asking for aid to help deal with the consequences of climate change, which we don't want to give.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#50. No matter what Donald Trump says, it's clear that global warming is rapidly changing conditions on our planet.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#51. We're seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human beings.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#52. It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the processnof doing.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#55. The birds do not like this camera," Sveinsson said. "So they fly over it and shit on it.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#56. With the exception of humans, all the great apes today are facing oblivion.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#57. If in your lifetime you watch a species go extinct, or plummet almost to the point of extinction, that is a sign that something really serious is going on.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#58. If there's been epidemic extinction and ecospace opens up, rats may be best placed to take advantage of that.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#59. The history of life thus consists of 'long periods of boredom interrupted occasionally by panic.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#61. Mitochondrial DNA, which is a sort of abridged version of DNA, is passed directly from mother to child, so it's something that can be looked at to trace matrilineal descent.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#62. 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.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#63. I don't think there are too many places left that humans haven't pretty thoroughly explored.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#64. vaccinated every single condor - today there about four hundred
Elizabeth Kolbert
#65. We're talking really huge global-scale change, and I did not feel that I had the prescription for that kind of action, so I'm going to leave it to the reader.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#67. Number of chimpanzees in the wild has dropped to perhaps half of what it was fifty years ago,
Elizabeth Kolbert
#68. It doesn't much matter whether people care or don't care. What matters is that people change the world.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#69. [On the birther movement:] Here we are, quadrillions of bytes deep into the Information Age. And yet information, it seems, has never mattered less.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#70. T. Rex and the Crater of Doom, shows an angry-looking tyrannosaurus reacting with horror to the impact.)
Elizabeth Kolbert
#72. By a pair of herpetologists. It was titled Are We in the Midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction?
Elizabeth Kolbert
#73. Parents want their kids' approval, a reversal of the past ideal of children striving for their parents' approval.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#74. 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.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#75. Roth pulled a second glove over the first and grabbed what looked like a video game remote.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#76. 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 radical decline, and that is not a position that conservation biologists want to be in.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#77. Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#79. Most of the world's major waterways have been diverted or dammed or otherwise manipulated - in the United States, only two per cent of rivers run unimpeded - and people now use half the world's readily accessible freshwater runoff.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#80. What are the Chinese doing, what are we doing, what are - so we need, both the developed world and the developing world, really need to be moving, once again, getting all your arrows in the same direction if you want to have any impact.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#81. Well in the scientific there is virtually no debate over certain things. For example, that we are changing the world. Humans are changing the world very radically, very dramatically. Climate change, which I assume is one of the points you're alluding to, is at the heart of this.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#83. Coral cover in the Great Barrier Reef has declined by fifty percent just in the last thirty years.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#84. Ocean acidification played a role in at least two of the Big Five extinctions (the end-Permian and the end-Triassic) and quite possibly it was a major factor in a third (the end-Cretaceous). There
Elizabeth Kolbert
#87. (Female African clawed frogs, when injected with the urine of a pregnant woman, lay eggs within a few hours.)
Elizabeth Kolbert
#88. It is expected that such an increase will produce an eventual average global temperature rise of between three and a half and seven degrees Fahrenheit,
Elizabeth Kolbert
#89. stored inside of them, in frigid clouds of nitrogen, are cell lines representing nearly a thousand species.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#90. By burning through coal and oil deposits, humans are putting carbon back into the air that has been sequestered for tens - in most cases hundreds - of millions of years. In the process, we are running geologic history not only in reverse but at warp speed.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#91. Most of us live in parts of the world where we don't expect to see much, and we wouldn't necessarily notice things that are crashing.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#92. As soon as you acknowledge that we're changing the planet on this scale, that it has very potentially massive repercussions and very damaging repercussions, then the next question is okay, what are we going to do about it?
Elizabeth Kolbert
#93. Of the many species that have existed on earth
estimates run as high as fifty billion
more than ninety-nine per cent have disappeared. In the light of this, it is sometimes joked that all of life today amounts to little more than a rounding error.
more than a rounding error.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#94. 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.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#95. There are a lot of things that we could do to minimize what we're doing, but we're not getting back those frogs that I saw that no longer exist.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#96. Recent estimates suggest there are at least two million tropical insect species and perhaps as many as seven million.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#97. Any event that has occurred just five times since the first animal with a backbone appeared, some five hundred million years ago, must qualify as exceedingly rare.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#98. An amount that's been increasing by as much as six percent annually.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#100. Erwin estimated that the tropics were home to as many as thirty million species of arthropods.
Elizabeth Kolbert
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top