Quotes About Crisis

In situations of crisis, it was always best to rely on routine.

My career started young and I was really ambitious, and then I had success and I hung out with people who were much older. I think I might have been temporally misplaced, so I thought I was 40. It was a premature midlife crisis.

Part of running a good business is not letting anyone know how bad things have really become.

We're seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human beings.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

within the next fifty years or so "all coral reefs will cease to grow and start to dissolve.

Under business as usual, by mid-century things are looking rather grim," he told me a few hours after I had arrived at One Tree. We were sitting at a beat-up picnic table, looking out over the heartbreaking blue of the Coral Sea. The island's large and boisterous population of terns was screaming in the background. Caldeira paused: "I mean, they're looking grim already.

the crisis Cuvier discerned just beyond the edge of recorded history was us.

Right now we are in the midst of the Sixth Extinction, this time caused solely by humanity's transformation of the ecological landscape.

The anthropologist Richard Leakey has warned that "Homo sapiens might not only be the agent of the sixth extinction, but also risks being one of its victims.

a third of them to be in danger of extinction, largely as a result of rising ocean temperatures.

it's estimated the population has shrunk by sixty percent just in the last two decades.

sea ice covers just half the area it did thirty years ago

Here I was, trying to finish a book about the world spinning out of control, only to find the world spinning so far out of control that I couldn't finish the book.

generating enough heat to, in effect, broil the surface of the planet.

Ocean acidification is sometimes referred to as global warming's "equally evil twin.

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

ninety percent of all species on earth had been eliminated.