Quotes About Environment

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.

Other calculations of his show that to keep pace with the present rate of temperature change, plants and animals would have to migrate poleward by thirty feet a day, and 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

It's absolutely obvious that global warming has started," France's president, Jacques Chirac, said after attending the 2004 summit of leaders of the world's major industrial powers—the Group of 8. "And so we have to act responsibly, and, if we do nothing, we would bear a heavy responsibility. I had the chance to talk to the United States president about this. To tell you that I convinced him would be a total exaggeration, as you can imagine.

These days every wild place has, to one degree or another, been cut into and cut off.

As the effects of global warming become more and more difficult to ignore, will we react by finally fashioning a global response? Or will we retreat into ever narrower and more destructive forms of self-interest? 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 process of doing.

If we assume, very conservatively, that there are two million species in the tropical rainforests, this means that something like five thousand species are being lost each year. This comes to roughly fourteen species a day, or one every hundred minutes.

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.

As a general rule, the variety of life is most impoverished at the poles and richest at low latitudes.

Every hour and a half, Louisiana sheds another football field's worth of land.

Unfortunately, the biggest tipping point, the one at which the ecosystem starts to crash, is mean pH 7.8, which is what we're expecting to happen by 2100," Hall-Spencer tells me, in his understated British manner. "So that is rather alarming.

When all of these were considered together, a pattern emerged: mass extinctions seemed to take place at regular intervals of roughly twenty-six million years.

We have to face the quantitative nature of the challenge," he told me one day over lunch at the NYU faculty club. "Right now, we're going to just burn everything up; we're going to heat the atmosphere to the temperature it was in the Cretaceous, when there were crocodiles at the poles. And then everything will collapse.

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.

coral cover in the Caribbean has in recent decades declined by close to eighty percent.

The way corals change the world—with huge construction projects spanning multiple generations—might be likened to the way that humans do, with this crucial difference. Instead of displacing other creatures, corals support them.

The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but "one weedy species". (...) We're seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human beings.

every year more non-indigenous species of mammals, birds, amphibians, turtles, lizards, and snakes are brought into the U.S. than the country has native species of these groups.

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.

Since the 1930s, Louisiana has shrunk by more than two thousand square miles.

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.

on Easter Island concluded that it wasn't humans who deforested the landscape; rather, it was the rats

oceans' surface waters has already dropped, from an average of around 8.2 to an average of around 8.1. Like the Richter scale, the pH scale is logarithmic, so even such a small numerical difference represents a very large real-world change. A decline of .1 means that the oceans are now thirty percent more acidic than they were in 1800.

The whole new layer on top of what I was thinking about in the nineteen-seventies is climate change," Lovejoy told me. He has written that "in the face of climatic change, even natural climatic change, human activity has created an obstacle course for the dispersal of biodiversity," the result of which could be "one of the greatest biotic crises of all time.

Assuming that humans continue to burn fossil fuels, the oceans will continue to absorb carbon dioxide and will become increasingly acidified.