Quotes from Tatiana Schlossberg

If there's one vital, but underappreciated, subject in the conversation about climate change, it's waste: how to define it, how to create less of it, how to deal with it without adding more pollution to the planet or the atmosphere.

When there is this dip in the jet stream that brings cold to the East, there's usually a countervailing loop that takes warm air into Alaska or the Arctic.

The Japanese people, though largely united in recognizing the threat of global warming and rising sea levels, are likely to face hurdles in reforming their energy policy, including some resistance from young people who say the nation faces more pressing problems, like the economy.

Plastic debris in the ocean was thought to accumulate in big patches, mostly in subtropical gyres - big currents that converge in the middle of the ocean - but scientists estimate that only about 1 percent of plastic pollution is in these gyres and other surface waters in the open ocean.

Over the vast plains of the open ocean, where wave lines may be the only markers, seabirds, including albatrosses, manage to find food.

During fire season and heat waves, power can go out or electric utilities may shut off power to avoid sparking fires or creating systemwide blackouts, both of which mean that hospitals have to run on their generators.

The features that have made plastic so important in the global market are the same ones that make it such a pervasive pollutant: durability and resistance to degradation.

If human civilization were to be destroyed and its cities wiped off the map, there would be an easy way for future intelligent life-forms to know when the mid-20th century began: plastic.

I don't think I could have - and I wouldn't have wanted to - write a book about climate change that wasn't about justice and equality.

Excess nitrogen from the fertilizers can cause eutrophication in the ocean, which can lead to harmful algae blooms or hypoxia - reduced levels of oxygen that create conditions in which organisms can't survive.

New data suggests contamination in rivers and streams, as well as on land, is increasingly common, with most of the pollution in the form of microscopic pieces of synthetic fibers, largely from clothing.

In the Garden of Eden, figuring out what to wear was easy and the fig leaves were environmentally friendly. Today, it's much harder to find clothes that don't have some kind of negative impact on the planet.

Almost everyone I spoke with in Maine who's involved with the Arctic told me that Mainers have more in common with people from Iceland and Norway than they do with people from New York or California - they all live in relatively small communities with fairly extreme weather, and mainly depend on the ocean and other natural resources.

Climate refers to the long-term averages and trends in atmospheric conditions over large areas, while weather deals with short-term variations, which is what happens when the polar vortex visits your hometown.

When policymakers, financiers and scientists describe the world decades from now, in the throes of climatic changes that we now only model, they emphasize what might be lost.

Air quality is already a problem outside of cars: More than 80 percent of people living in cities where pollution is tracked are exposed to air quality levels below World Health Organization limits.

If you are like many people, flying may be a large portion of your carbon footprint. Over all, the aviation industry accounts for 11 percent of all transportation-related emissions in the United States.

Because Japan has to import most of its energy, and because of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear plant disaster, the country has an almost obsessive interest in tackling energy issues.

I've taken for granted that we have clean air to breathe in cities, relatively speaking, and most people have access to clean water. But we can't take these things for granted.

I've never met a detail I didn't like.

When whales die, their bodies sink to the bottom of the ocean and over time become part of the marine sediment layer, where they can sequester the carbon dioxide they have accumulated during their life span, an average of 33 tons for a great whale species, keeping it out of the atmosphere for hundreds or thousands of years.

Humpback whales - which can be as long as 60 feet, weigh as much as 40 tons and can live for 50 years - are found in all of the world's oceans.

Ocean plastic in particular has captured the public imagination, and seems to be a jumping-off point for several companies developing plastic alternatives, both in source material and in the pollution they are trying to prevent.

Most legal scholars and historians agree that the Antiquities Act does not give the president the authority to revoke previous national monument designations, but a president can change the boundaries of a national monument.