Zalasiewicz is convinced that even a moderately competent stratigrapher will, at the distance of a hundred million years or so, be able to tell that something extraordinary happened at the moment in time that counts for us as today. This is the case even though a hundred million years from now, all that we consider to be the great works of man—the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories—will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.

One of the reasons that people, many people, many environmentalists are critical of President [Barack] Obama's policies towards global warming is on the one hand he says the right things and he says he's committed to trying to reduce our current emissions.

Increasingly developing countries are asking for aid to help deal with the consequences of climate change, which we don't want to give.

Neanderthals were pretty smart, and if we actively killed them off, then probably we did so in the same way that humans kill each other.

You're an animal that needs to move across the landscape, you can't anymore, and that's another way we're just changing the surface of the Earth in very dramatic ways.

Of the many species that have existed on earth - estimates run as high as fifty billion - more than ninety-nine per cent have disappeared. In the light of this, it is sometimes joked that all of life today amounts to little more than a rounding error.

If in your lifetime you watch a species go extinct, or plummet almost to the point of extinction, that is a sign that something really serious is going on.