Quotes & Sayings About Mass Extinctions

The extinctions ongoing worldwide promise to be at least as great as the mass extinction that occurred at the end of the age of dinosaurs. — E. O. Wilson

In a sense, the earth is mounting an immune response against the human species. It is beginning to react to the human parasite, the flooding infection of people, the dead spots of concrete all over the planet, the cancerous rot-outs in Europe, Japan, and the United States, thick with replicating primates, the colonies enlarging and spreading and threatening to shock the biosphere with mass extinctions. — Richard Preston

We tell our children they're trapped like rats on a doomed, bankrupt, gangster-haunted planet with dwindling resources, with nothing to look forward to but rising sea levels and imminent mass extinctions, then raise a disapproving eyebrow when, in response, they dress in black, cut themselves with razors, starve themselves, gorge themselves, or kill one another. — Grant Morrison

With respect to phenomena like mass extinction, somebody might say why worry about it because in a geological perspective mass extinctions aren't so bad, they wipe out some things and then 10 million years down the road we get new and interesting objects.But I tell you mass extinctions are really awful for folks caught in the midst of them. — Richard Lewontin

If we don't cut carbon's money pipeline, we will pay for their gasoline with floods, droughts, fires, super storms, drowned cities, mass extinctions, wars, and collapsing civilizations. — Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In the history of the world, all five mass extinctions have been accompanied by massive climate change, so we are facing an incredibly serious threat. In fact, we are technically in the sixth mass extinction right now, and it is the first mass extinction being attributed to humans. — Cameron Russell

Of the four billion life forms which have existed on this planet, three billion, nine hundred and sixty million are now extinct. We don't know why. Some by wanton extinction, some through natural catastrophe, some destroyed by meteorites and asteroids. In the light of these mass extinctions it really does seem unreasonable to suppose that Homo sapiens should be exempt. Our species will have been one of the shortest-lived of all, a mere blink, you may say, in the eye of time. — P.D. James

If we return abruptly to a Miocene-like climate, it's reasonable to think that we would experience a lot of extinctions, and maybe even a mass extinction in the long term. Would the life on Earth be radically different? Of course we can't say for sure, but I think a lot of it would look familiar. Like a lot of people, I worry a lot about whether marine mammals would survive, especially whales. Ocean acidification is one of the major killers in climate change events, and that makes the ocean a very inhospitable place. — Annalee Newitz

Mass extinctions may not threaten distant futures, but they are decidedly unpleasant for species caught up in the throes of their power. — Stephen Jay Gould

Ours is an overpopulated, under educated, shithole in the throes of mass extinctions - it's a wonderful world. — Grant Morrison

It generally does not take long before a radiation researcher realizes that they are studying the fundamentals of life, death and mass extinctions. — Steven Magee

There is one living organism, called a tardigrade, that has survived the five great mass extinctions on Earth, and it can survive in vacuums in space and boiling hot water and freezing subzero temperatures. — Alycia Debnam Carey

Another expert, David Jablonski, characterizes mass extinctions as "substantial biodiversity losses" that occur rapidly and are "global in extent. — Elizabeth Kolbert

It's] pretty clear that times of high carbon dioxide - and especially times when carbon dioxide levels rapidly rose - coincided with the mass extinctions," writes University of Washington paleontologist and End-Permian mass extinction expert Peter Ward. "Here is the driver of extinction. — Peter Brannen