The CO 2 that is released has certain geophysical properties that make it a greenhouse gas, trapping heat in the atmosphere and causing rapid temperature increases, she said, noting that the effects of this resulting climate change are more extreme at the poles, but will in the end be more severe in the tropics - where the highest density of a wide variety of species live. In so doing, Kolbert explained, we are in a sense rewinding the geological clock at an incredible speed by taking carbon that was buried in the earth for hundreds of millions of years and returning it to the atmosphere. First, we are altering the atmosphere, she said, noting that human beings add 10 billion metric tons of fossil fuels to the atmosphere each year. She went on to explain that there are three main ways humans are driving this extinction process on such a massive scale.

However, she noted, many scientists believe that humankind has begun a sixth extinction, because people are changing the world in such a drastic way and in an incredibly quick time frame that it is just as destructive as, say, an asteroid. Kolbert points out that extinction is not a new process: In the Earth’s history, there have been five previous mass extinctions. But even the Alala are dying out and are now extinct in the wild, she said.Ĭrows are known to mimic human sounds, and Kolbert told the audience that when Oli is fed, he repeats the phrase “I know, I know, I know” over and over again - which the writer said she interprets as a greater knowledge by the animal kingdom of the destruction human kind is inflicting on their very existence. Before humans arrived on the Hawaiian archipelago, she noted, there were several species of crow, but with the human-wrought habitat destruction, avian malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and introduction of new predators, all species but the Alala disappeared. For example he has a larger beak and longer legs. Like the crows of New Haven, Oli is a large black bird, but there are some distinctions, Kolbert pointed out. Kolbert began by introducing her audience to a bird named Oli, an Alala, a species of endangered crow native to Hawaii. 11 event co-sponsored by the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism and the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities. hence the title of her talk, “The Sixth Extinction,” which she presented at a Nov. The scientific language that Kolbert has most recently “translated” relates to current extinction research. “Science tends to be written in a very different language, one that non-scientists can’t relate to, a language that isn’t even English.” Elizabeth Kolbert “I see myself as a translator who translates science into a language that someone like me, a literature major, can understand,” said New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert during a recent talk on campus.

Kolbert the sixth extinction