Quotes About Impact

If all the ice sheets melted, sea levels would rise by 60 metres.

Nobody knows quite how destructive human beings are, but it is a fact that over the last fifty thousand years or so, wherever we have gone animals have tended to vanish, often in astonishingly large numbers. In

the main expressed goal for oceanographers during International Geophysical Year, 1957/8, was to study "the use of ocean depths for the dumping of radioactive wastes." This wasn't a secret assignment, you understand, but a proud public boast. In

Before this dumping was halted in the 1990s, the United States had dumped many hundreds of thousands of drums into about fifty ocean sites—almost fifty thousand of them in the Fallarones alone.

the people who were most intensely interested in the world's living things were the ones most likely to extinguish them. No-one

It is a truly astounding fact that for the longest time the people who were most intensely interested in the world's living things were the ones most likely to extinguish them.

Mars-sized object slammed into Earth, blowing out enough material to create the Moon from the debris.

In 1964, the largest earthquake ever recorded in North America rocked Alaska with 200,000 megatons of concentrated might, the equivalent of 2,000 nuclear bombs. Almost 3,000 miles away in Texas, water sloshed out of swimming pools. A street in Anchorage fell twenty feet. The quake devastated 24,000 square miles of wilderness, much of it glaciated. And what effect did all this might have on Alaska's glaciers? None.

very should be made to pay its way in sentences. Too often it is used where it adds nothing to sense ('It was a very tragic death'), or is inserted in a futile effort to prop up a weak word that would be better replaced by something with more punch ('The play was very good').

If everybody else in the world became the size of Americans, it would be equivalent to adding one billion people to the world's population.

A person who smokes cigarettes regularly (about a pack a day) is fifty times more likely than a nonsmoker to get cancer. In

Antibiotics are about as nuanced as a hand grenade. They wipe out good microbes as well as bad. Increasing evidence shows that some of the good ones may never recover, to our permanent cost.

I can tell you at once that nothing you touch today will have more bloodshed, suffering, and woe attached to it than the innocuous twin pillars of your salt and pepper set.

The one positive to come out of the experience is that opioid fatalities have led to a rise in organ donations.16 In 2000, according to the Washington Post, fewer than 150 organ donors were opioid addicts; today the number is over 3,500.

Since 2008, 150 local papers have closed in England, including some once major ones like the Surrey Herald and Reading Post. That's not good. Without local newspapers there's no one to tell you when somebody's been fined for having rats in their kitchens.

Over a lifetime, we eat about sixty tons of food, which is equivalent, notes Carl Zimmer in Microcosm, to eating sixty small cars. In 1915, the average American spent half his weekly income on food. Today it's just 6 percent

If it was his goal in life to make as little impression as possible upon history, he achieved it gloriously.

If everybody else in the world became the size of Americans, it would be equivalent to adding one billion people to the world's population.

1921, America had about 200,000 cases of diphtheria; by the early 1980s, with vaccination, that had fallen to just 3. In roughly the same period, whooping cough and measles infections fell from about 1.1 million cases a year to just 1,500. Before vaccines, 20,000 Americans a year got polio. By the 1980s, that had dropped to 7 a year.

Think how much more rewarding it would be if we all came to work every day asking, "Who can we help today and how can we do it?" instead of "Who can I hurt and how much coverage can I get for it?

Think of how much more rewarding it would be if we all came to work every day asking, Who can we help today and how can we do it? instead of Who can I hurt and how much coverage can I get for it?

everyone knows—that if you blow the opener, nobody remembers anything else.

The Internet is like Hitler they think they are getting rid of the problem but they're not

There are two numbers you need to know about climate change. The first is 51 billion. The other is zero. Fifty-one billion is how many tons of greenhouse gases the world typically adds to the atmosphere every year.