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" "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.
Elizabeth Kolbert (born July 6, 1961) is an American journalist, author, and visiting fellow at Williams College.
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The definition, I suppose, would be many, many organisms across many, many different groups. And that is, really, what we are seeing and that is what makes scientists fear ... that we're in a mass extinction. ... About a quarter of all mammals are considered endangered. ... About 40 percent of all amphibians are considered endangered. But we're also seeing organisms, invertebrates, for example, are endangered ... many species of reef-building corals are now considered very, very endangered. So you're seeing extinctions across a wide variety of groups, and that, I think, would have to be one of the defining characteristics of a mass extinction.
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.
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massive things need to be done. Obviously we need to start transitioning our whole economy off of fossil fuels. That’s not—that’s not a small thing. That’s a big thing. And if you were going to ask, you know, policy experts what we should do, they would say, “Well, we need some kind of price on carbon.” Now, that is—that requires legislative action. In the absence of that, in the absence of putting a price on putting CO2 into the atmosphere, there are things the administration can do and that they are supposedly working on—you know, power plant regulations that would reduce CO2 emissions. But it’s very difficult to get the kind of action that we need without any hope of getting anything through Congress.