Louis Vis

“The earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a wiping of the fossil record that it functioned as an evolutionary reset, the planet’s phylogenetic tree first expanding, then collapsing, at intervals, like a lung: 86 percent of all species dead, 450 million years ago; 70 million years later, 75 percent; 125 million years later, 96 percent; 50 million years later, 80 percent; 135 million years after that, 75 percent again.1, 2 Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs involved climate change produced by greenhouse gas.3 The most notorious was 250 million years ago; it began when carbon dioxide warmed the planet by five degrees Celsius, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane, another greenhouse gas, and ended with all but a sliver of life on Earth dead.4 We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster.5”
― David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future

“Nostalgia can have an intoxicating and powerful effect. Looking back through rose-tinted spectacles can create false pasts that cherry-pick only the very best, while ignoring the worst and the mundane. While harking back to a previous golden age often triggers warm memories of supposedly better times, the process can be deceptive, misleading and wrong. In fact, today’s world is better in almost every single way than the world of the past.”
― Peter Frankopan, The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World

“Sedimentary rocks are formed by the deposition and then cementation together of material which either eroded from older rocks or was produced biologically – sandstone, limestone and chalk are all examples. Igneous rocks such as granite, on the other hand, solidify from volcanic lava or magma still deep underground. And when sedimentary or igneous rocks are subjected to high temperatures and pressures – caught in the crunch of continental collisions or when magma intrudes up into them – they are transformed physically and chemically, becoming”
― Lewis Dartnell, Origins: How the Earth Shaped Human History

“Pretty much the entire wind pattern on Earth can therefore be explained by three simple facts: the equator is hotter than the poles, warm air rises, and the world spins.”
― Lewis Dartnell, Origins: How the Earth Shaped Human History