now the sort of general theory is, you know, yes, the Earth changes very slowly, except for these extraordinary moments. And I’d say the whole point … - Elizabeth Kolbert

I think that people are aware of the potential impacts of climate change on Arctic species. You know, everyone has seen the pictures of the poor polar bears, you know, as the sea ice shrinks. But really, where climate change could have an even more devastating impact is in the tropics, both because most species live in the tropics—that’s just where the abundance of life is—and also because these species tend to have a very, very narrow tolerance for climatic change. They’re used to a lot of climatic stability.

After a mass extinction, it has generally tended to take many millions of years for life to recover. It's not something that you bounce back from, from one day to the next.

We are effectively undoing the beauty and the variety and the richness of the world which has taken tens of millions of years to reach... We're sort of unraveling that. ... We're doing, it's often said, a massive experiment on the planet, and we really don't know what the end point is going to be.