It seems that the Neanderthal DNA that modern Europeans and Asians (and also Native Americans and basically all non-African people) are carrying around is random. This means there are different bits and pieces in different populations, but it doesn't seem to amount to much that's significant.

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

People tend to focus on the here and now. The problem is that, once global warming is something that most people can feel in the course of their daily lives, it will be too late to prevent much larger, potentially catastrophic changes.

There's this idea of shifting baselines. It was coined by a guy named Jeremy Jackson. It's the idea that every generation takes what it sees, and says, "Okay, well, that's the norm."

Even very smart people can try to shoehorn new information that just doesn't fit into an existing paradigm.For a long time the story that we've been telling ourselves is that humans are just another animal. We evolved from other animals and our place in the universe isn't particularly special. What I'm trying to convey in my book [The Sixth Extinction] is that we are unusual.

Most of the world's major waterways have been diverted or dammed or otherwise manipulated - in the United States, only two per cent of rivers run unimpeded - and people now use half the world's readily accessible freshwater runoff.

Humans will eventually become extinct. People treat that as a radical thing to say. But the fossil record shows us that everything eventually becomes extinct.