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Elizabeth Kolbert

Tuesday 3rd of March 2026

By the numbers In 2012, melt was recorded at the very top of the [Greenland] ice sheet. The pace of change has surprised even the modellers. In just the past four years, more than a trillion tons of ice have been lost. This is four hundred million Olympic swimming pools' worth of water, or enough to fill a single pool the size of of New York State to a depth of twenty-three feet. Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker, October 24, 2016 © 2016 Kwiple.com
Evolution In a world of synthetic gene drives, the  border between the human and the natural, between the laboratory and the wild, already deeply blurred, all but dissolves. In such a world, not only do people determine the conditions under which evolution is taking place, people can — again, in principle — determine the outcome.  Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky  © 2024 Kwiple.com
Global warming Climate change isn't a problem that can be solved by summoning the “will.” It isn't a problem that can be “fixed” or “conquered,” though these words are often used. It isn't going to have a happy ending, or a win-win ending, or, on a human timescale, any ending at all. Whatever we might want to believe about our future, there are limits, and we are up against them. Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, November 28, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Global warming The climate operates on a time delay. When carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere, it takes decades –in a technical sense, millennia– for the earth to equilibrate. This summer's fish kill was a product of warming that had become inevitable twenty or thirty years ago, and the warming that's being locked in today won't be fully felt until today's toddlers reach middle age. In effect, we are living in the climate of the past, but already we've determined the climate's future. Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker, October 24, 2016 © 2016 Kwiple.com
Global warming In 2016, the United Nations High Com- missioner for Refugees estimated that, globally, an average of twenty-one million people were being displaced by weather- related events every year. The U.N.’s International Organization for Migration has projected that by 2050 as many as a billion people may be on the move. In the coming decades, “huge populations will need to seek new homes,” Gaia Vince, a British journalist, has written. Either “you will be among them, or you will be receiving them.” Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, November 28, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Global warming In early July [2022], at a time when much of the country was baking in ninety-five-degree-plus heat, the [New York] Times took a poll of registered voters. Asked to name the most important problem facing the nation, twenty per cent of the respondents said the economy, fifteen per cent said inflation, and eleven per cent said partisan divisions. Only one per cent said climate change. Among registered Republicans, the figure was zero per cent. Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, November 28, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Global warming In the past thirty years, humans have added as much CO2 to the atmosphere as they did in the previous thirty thousand. … In the words of the Stern Review, a report commissioned by the British government in 2005, climate change “is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen.” Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, November 28, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Global warming To put this in terms of power, Americans are consuming roughly eleven thousand watts every moment of every day. A string of incandescent Christmas lights uses about forty watts. It's as if each of us had two hundred and seventy-five of these strings draped around our homes, burning 24/7. … This means that an American household of four is responsible for the same emissions as sixteen Argentineans, six hundred Ugandans, or a Somali village of sixteen hundred. Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, November 28, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Nature The issue, at this point,  is not whether we're going to alter nature, but to what end?  Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky  © 2024 Kwiple.com
Nature The Louisiana delta is now often referred to by hydrologists as a “coupled human and natural system,” or, for short, a CHANS. It's an ugly term  — another nomenclatural hairball — but there's no simple way to talk about the tangle we've created. A Mississippi that's been harnessed, straightened, regularized, and shackled can still exert a godlike force; it's no longer exactly a river, though. It's hard to say who occupies Mount Olympus these days, if anyone.  Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky  © 2024 Kwiple.com
 
Nature [N]ow what's got to be managed is not a nature that exists — or is imagined to exist — apart from the human. Instead, the new effort begins with a planet remade and spirals back on itself — not so much the control of nature as the control of  the control of nature. First you reverse a river, then you electrify it. Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky  [The flow of the Chicago River was reversed to prevent waste from flowing into Lake Michigan.  Years later, portions of it had to be electrified to  prevent carp from invading the Mississippi Basin.] © 2024 Kwiple.com