Tatiana Schlossberg Quotes

Ice cores, which are long cylinders scientists extract from glaciers, ice sheets or ice caps, contain gas bubbles, pollen, dust particles, or chemical isotopes that give scientists clues about what Earth‘s temperature and atmosphere were like when the ice caps first formed.

Consumers can choose organic cotton grown without pesticides, but it uses more water and requires more land than conventional crops. Organic cotton can also be much more expensive and difficult to find.

In the past, offshore wind farms have faced significant opposition in the United States for a few reasons: high costs, complicated rules about who gets to build on the seafloor and what they build, and complaints from people who do not want their ocean view obstructed.

I’ve taken for granted that we have clean air to breathe in cities, relatively speaking, and most people have access to clean water. But we can’t take these things for granted.

As a nation, we spent eight billion hours sitting in our cars, waiting for lights to change, for the driver ahead to sneak into that parking spot, for an accident to be cleared.

Polyester, one of the most common fibers, is a plastic derived from crude oil. The long fibers that make up polyester thread are woven together to make fabric. Extracting the oil and melting the plastic require energy.

I know that I come from a position of privilege and that my impact on the environment is much bigger than lots of other people who can’t consume in the way that I have been able to.

Most viscose rayon is made from wood pulp, but the process of making it typically uses so many chemicals in such vast quantities that some experts said it shouldn’t really count as a natural plant fiber.

Reducing the damage from waste might require expanding the traditional definition of waste – not just as old-fashioned garbage, but as a result of wild inefficiency in all kinds of systems, which often results in emissions of greenhouse gases, among other problems.

Most Americans support protection of public lands.

The ocean is loud: Ship propellers, sonar, oil and gas drilling and other industrial work make sounds, even if, like the proverbial tree falling in the forest, no one can hear it.

I think people who speak and write about climate change and environmental degradation need to convey how interesting and important this topic is, because I’m not sure people will feel empowered to help if they don’t feel engaged and called to action.

Humpback whales – which can be as long as 60 feet, weigh as much as 40 tons and can live for 50 years – are found in all of the world’s oceans.

Computers and cellphones – which require semiconductors and microchips to work – have become so essential to life all over the world that it’s easy to ignore the problems with building them.

About 6,000 years ago, St. Paul Island, a tiny spot of land in the middle of the Bering Sea, must have been a strange place. Hundreds of miles away from the mainland, it was uninhabited except for a few species of small mammals, like arctic foxes, and one big one: woolly mammoths.

Whales and dolphins have extraordinary hearing and the ability to communicate in widely varying voices.

Excess nitrogen from the fertilizers can cause eutrophication in the ocean, which can lead to harmful algae blooms or hypoxia – reduced levels of oxygen that create conditions in which organisms can’t survive.

And since plastic does not naturally degrade, the billions of tons sitting in landfills, floating in the oceans or piling up on city streets will provide a marker if later civilizations ever want to classify our era.

The coronavirus pandemic and fears about its spread have brought to a screeching halt years of efforts to get Americans to do one small thing: bring their own bags to the grocery store and stop using plastic ones.

The Japanese people, though largely united in recognizing the threat of global warming and rising sea levels, are likely to face hurdles in reforming their energy policy, including some resistance from young people who say the nation faces more pressing problems, like the economy.

Over the vast plains of the open ocean, where wave lines may be the only markers, seabirds, including albatrosses, manage to find food.

Climate refers to the long-term averages and trends in atmospheric conditions over large areas, while weather deals with short-term variations, which is what happens when the polar vortex visits your hometown.

When you buy carbon offsets, you pay to take planet-warming carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in exchange for the greenhouse gases you put in. For example, you can put money toward replanting trees, which absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Unlike the visible and heavily regulated airborne emissions from power plant smokestacks, coal ash is largely unseen unless there is a major spill and, until recently, far less effectively regulated.

Knowing how much carbon dioxide the ocean is storing is crucial to modeling future climate changes, and given the prevalence of these creatures around the world and how much water they can filter, it is likely a significant amount.

Because Japan has to import most of its energy, and because of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear plant disaster, the country has an almost obsessive interest in tackling energy issues.

The Google Quad Campus looks way too nice to sit on top of an active Superfund site: There are matching bikes, a pool with primary-colored umbrellas, and a contained universe that looks more like a college or a park than a satellite campus of one of the biggest companies in the world.

I’m a journalist, not an advocate, so I approached researching and writing the book the same way that I do any other reporting. But when you’re writing for yourself, you have a little more room to say what you think.

Textile manufacturers use complicated chemical and industrial processes to make clothing materials, from cotton to synthetic fibers. And while the environmental consequences aren’t always clear, consumption is growing.

Coal is used to generate power almost everywhere, but problems associated with coal ash and coal ash slurry disproportionately affect low-income and minority communities, experts say.

Climate change is not a distant problem. It’s involved in all of our lives through the stuff that we use, buy and eat – which is not to say that individuals like you and me are responsible for climate change.

If you are like many people, flying may be a large portion of your carbon footprint. Over all, the aviation industry accounts for 11 percent of all transportation-related emissions in the United States.

Most legal scholars and historians agree that the Antiquities Act does not give the president the authority to revoke previous national monument designations, but a president can change the boundaries of a national monument.

Nitrogen-based fertilizers, which came into wide use after World War II, helped prompt the agricultural revolution that has allowed the Earth to feed its seven billion people.

Coal ash, the hazardous byproduct of burning coal to produce power, is a particularly insidious legacy of the nation’s dependence on coal.

Climate change, habitat destruction, extinctions – the Earth has seen it all before, thousands of years ago. And humans may have been partly to blame for many of those changes in nature, too.

Sometimes it feels hard to remember that Silicon Valley is an actual place, a collage of parched suburbs, and not just the collective noun for information-technology companies.

Renewable energy, including from offshore wind, is crucial to the effort to avoid some of the worst effects of climate change, according to environmentalists and some elected officials.

Extreme precipitation is likely to increase with rising temperatures because of growing atmospheric humidity, leading to a higher risk of flash flooding nationwide.

In the stable emissions model, in which a rise in global surface temperatures by two degrees Celsius from preindustrial times is more than likely, the Northeast would still see a robust increase in nitrogen loading.

I’ve never met a detail I didn’t like.

When there is this dip in the jet stream that brings cold to the East, there’s usually a countervailing loop that takes warm air into Alaska or the Arctic.

Santa Clara County has 23 active Superfund sites, more than any other county in the United States. All of them were designated as such in the mid to late 1980s, and most were contaminated by toxic chemicals involved in making computer parts. Completely cleaning up these chemicals may be impossible.

Sea mammals, in particular, have evolved to take advantage of how well and far sound can travel under water, and to compensate for poor visibility in the dark deep.

Coal ash gets far less attention than toxic and greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, but it has created environmental and health problems – every major river in the Southeast has at least one coal ash pond – and continuing legal troubles and large cleanup costs for the authority and other utilities.

A less icy Arctic is coming, and generally speaking, that’s not a good thing. Climate change is warming this region twice as fast as the global average, threatening wildlife and indigenous communities.

I think it is important to communicate how serious climate change is – it would be a disservice not to. But I’m not sure that emphasizing how scared we should all be is the best way to get people to care – I know it makes me want to crawl into a dark hole and never come out.

Air quality is already a problem outside of cars: More than 80 percent of people living in cities where pollution is tracked are exposed to air quality levels below World Health Organization limits.

The fact that communities that are relatively powerless often are exposed to more dangerous pollution and the worst effects of climate change: a society like that is one that is less free and less equal for everybody.

I’m very lucky that I got to spend my summers at my grandmother‘s house on Martha’s Vineyard. My brother really loved fishing, and he spent a lot of summers working on a charter fishing boat.