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 … - Elizabeth Kolbert

I think what all nonfiction writers are aiming for is to make people think about things differently — to tell you a story from somewhere that, if you’re vaguely familiar with it, challenges what you think you know about it, or, if it’s a story you’ve never heard before, introduces you to a whole new place or a whole new idea. I’m basically trying to tilt your worldview a little bit.

you have a situation where we really need to be taking serious action on climate change, and we’re still having this surreal—I guess I would use the word—debate over whether it’s happening or not. And I think a clip like that shows that, you know, people are really speaking entirely different languages. We’re just not even speaking to each other using—you know, we’re using English, but we’re not really speaking the same language. We’re not looking at the same—well, some people are looking at scientific data, and some people are not, let me just put it that way. And it’s very, very hard to carry on, you know, a reasonable and sort of post-Enlightenment conversation.

Looking out your window today, the weather you see doesn’t really tell you what’s going on. The earth is big and complicated — and there’s a big time lag in the system. People need to understand that. You know, many people, many scientists, many journalists keep trying to impress that upon the public. It obviously isn’t working very well, but we keep trying.