Top 100 Elizabeth Kolbert Quotes
#1. (The desolate post-impact sea has been dubbed the "Strangelove ocean.")
Elizabeth Kolbert
#3. The history of life thus consists of 'long periods of boredom interrupted occasionally by panic.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#4. If there's been epidemic extinction and ecospace opens up, rats may be best placed to take advantage of that.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#5. 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
#6. Warming today is taking place at least ten times faster than it did at the end of the last glaciation, and at the end of all those glaciations that preceded it. To keep up, organisms will have to migrate, or otherwise adapt, at least ten times more quickly.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#7. With the exception of humans, all the great apes today are facing oblivion.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#8. The birds do not like this camera," Sveinsson said. "So they fly over it and shit on it.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#11. 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
#12. We're seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human beings.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#13. There's this idea of shifting baselines. It was coined by a guy named Jeremy Jackson. It's the idea that every generation takes what it sees, and says, "Okay, well, that's the norm."
Elizabeth Kolbert
#14. 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
#15. No matter what Donald Trump says, it's clear that global warming is rapidly changing conditions on our planet.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. One of the reasons that people, many people, many environmentalists are critical of President [Barack] Obama's policies towards global warming is on the one hand he says the right things and he says he's committed to trying to reduce our current emissions.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#21. Assuming that humans continue to burn fossil fuels, the oceans will continue to absorb carbon dioxide and will become increasingly acidified.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#22. On land, every animal larger than a cat seems to have died out.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#23. The 'incredible frog hotel' - really a local bed and breakfast - ... the frogs stay (in their tanks) in a block of rented rooms.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#24. 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
#25. According to Lamarck, there was a force - the 'power of life' - that pushed organisms to become increasingly complex.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#26. 9Among 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.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#27. 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
#28. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. After the initial heat pulse, the world experienced a multiseason "impact winter.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#33. Roth pulled a second glove over the first and grabbed what looked like a video game remote.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#34. 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
#35. A single-continent world would be expected to contain only about a third as many mammalian species as currently exist.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#36. Parents want their kids' approval, a reversal of the past ideal of children striving for their parents' approval.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#37. By a pair of herpetologists. It was titled Are We in the Midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction?
Elizabeth Kolbert
#39. 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
#40. T. Rex and the Crater of Doom, shows an angry-looking tyrannosaurus reacting with horror to the impact.)
Elizabeth Kolbert
#41. [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
#42. It doesn't much matter whether people care or don't care. What matters is that people change the world.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#43. In a poll commissioned by Time and CNN, two-thirds of American parents said they think that their children are spoiled.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#44. Number of chimpanzees in the wild has dropped to perhaps half of what it was fifty years ago,
Elizabeth Kolbert
#46. A hundred years ago, in Africa, the population of black rhinos approached a million;
Elizabeth Kolbert
#47. 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
#48. vaccinated every single condor - today there about four hundred
Elizabeth Kolbert
#49. I don't think there are too many places left that humans haven't pretty thoroughly explored.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#50. 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
#54. Where the kids routinely outscored the apes was in tasks that involved reading social cues.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#55. 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
#56. generating enough heat to, in effect, broil the surface of the planet.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#57. 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
#58. The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but one weedy species.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#60. 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.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. This thing of venturing out on the ocean where you don't see land.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#66. 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
#67. Another expert, David Jablonski, characterizes mass extinctions as "substantial biodiversity losses" that occur rapidly and are "global in extent.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#69. 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
#70. By transporting Asian species to North America, and North American species to Australia, and Australian species to Africa, and European species to Antarctica, we are, in effect, reassembling the world into one enormous supercontinent - what biologists sometimes refer to as the New Pangaea.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#71. How to perform an ultrasound with one arm up a rhino's rectum.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#72. within the next fifty years or so "all coral reefs will cease to grow and start to dissolve.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#73. By the end of this century, CO2 levels could reach a level not seen
Elizabeth Kolbert
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. higher than at any other point in the last eight hundred thousand years.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#77. Amphibians - the word comes from the Greek meaning 'double life.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#78. 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
#80. (One of Crutzen's fellow Nobelists reportedly came home from his lab one night and told his wife,
Elizabeth Kolbert
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen. - JORGE LUIS BORGES
Elizabeth Kolbert
#86. 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
#88. It's owing to Roth and the handful of others like her who know
Elizabeth Kolbert
#89. Since the Antarctic palms of the Eocene, some fifty million years ago.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#90. 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
#91. His interest, after all, was not in the origin of species but in their demise.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#92. 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
#94. 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
#95. Lyell became something of a celebrity - the Steven Pinker of his generation - and
Elizabeth Kolbert
#96. 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
#97. The windowless room where the po'ouli cells are kept alive - sort of - is called the Frozen Zoo.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#98. 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
#99. have become even more sought-after as a high-end party "drug"; at clubs in southeast Asia,
Elizabeth Kolbert
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