Anthropogenic Effects Quotes

Human beings are definitely changing the planet, but how much impact they are having on climate, I don't know and I don't care.

It's man's impact on our world that appeals to me more than just nature running wild.

I don't know if human activity is the only cause, but mostly, in great part, it is man who has slapped nature in the face, we have in a sense taken over nature.

Mankind has probably done more damage to the Earth in the 20th century than in all of previous human history.

We do not know how much of the environmental change is due to human activities and how much [is due] to long-term natural processes over which we have no control.

The climate is changing, and human activity contributes to that in some manner.

Some time this century, the day will arrive when the human influence on the climate will overwhelm all natural factors.'

When the first humans reached Australia about 45,000 years ago, they quickly drove to extinction 90% of its large animals. This was the first significant impact that Homo sapiens had on the planet's ecosystem. It was not the last.

Injecting CO2 into an underground reservoir would certainly change the local environment and thus affect the organisms that live there. Some will thrive, and others will suffer. While we should minimize such impacts, they cannot be avoided completely. The same happens when one plows a field, builds a house or a road, or waters a lawn.

Nature stopped being natural decades ago.

I'm working in this very complex set of issues having to do with who we are as a species and how much we can do to the Earth before it starts to buckle under. My work can easily read as an indictment, but I don't see it as that simple a problem.

If there's horrible flooding in Pakistan or a horrible heat wave in Texas, we're no longer able to call it an act of God, or a natural disaster, or something like that, the way we could have through all of human history until 35 or 40 years ago.

With our evolved busy hands and our evolved busy brains, in an extraordinarily short period of time we've managed to alter the earth with such geologic-forcing effects that we ourselves are forces of nature. Climate change, ocean acidification, the sixth mass extinction of species.

We have the capacity to alter the nature of nature. No, we don't have just the capacity - we are altering the nature of nature, the natural systems that cause the planet to function in our favor.

During the Holocene, we undoubtedly altered our environment significantly, clearing land, diverting water and building great cities.