Jonathon Weiner

Jonathon Weiner is also the author of Planet Earth.

Here are two of the most fundamental processes of life on Earth, and they run in opposite directions. Photosynthesis takes in carbon dioxide and releases oxygen; respiration takes in oxygen and releases carbon dioxide. The Next One Hundred Years, 1990.

The ozone hole and the greenhouse effect are two faces of a single crisis. For chlorofluorocarbons are not only ozone-eaters but greenhouse gasses. Ibid.

By putting more and more carbon monoxide into the air, we are overwhelming the atmosphere's immune system, exhausting the antibodies of the atmosphere. Ibid.

In a few heads, the evidence began to snap together: the rise in temperatures, the rise in more and more greenhouse gasses, the story in the ice cores, the story on Mars and Venus, the confirmations in the computers. Climate experts began to realize that the long-term trend on Planet Earth would almost certainly be upward and unpleasant. Ibid.

We don't respond to process. We respond to events. Ibid.

No Earth scientist doubts that the greenhouse effect is real . . . It is not controversial. Ibid.

Today, many Earth scientists feel that the study of the planet is on the verge of a second revolution. The first was characterized by the discovery of turbulence; this revolution is marked by the discovery of connections. Ibid.

. . . our species does not know its own strength. Ibid.

Earth is swinging around the chill of outer space, and the atmosphere is its only clothing. Ibid.

The whole circulation of air currents and sea currents in this hemisphere, the circulation that brings each country in the hemisphere its endless pageants of weather, can be described from the cosmic point of view as a Sisyphean effort to warm the North Pole. Ibid.

A pore in a leaf is a delicate compromise. The leaf must take in carbon dioxide, so it must be open to the air. But the more air that circulates through it, the more water it loses to evaporation. So the cells around each pore open and close in a fascinating optimization of sunlight, humidity, temperature, and carbon dioxide, following strategies that botanists are learning to study as if they were part of sophisticated game theory. Ibid.

. . . new studies suggest that Darwin did not know the strength of his own theory. He vastly underestimated the power of natural selection. Its action is neither rare nor slow. It leads to evolution daily and hourly, all around us, and we can watch. The Beak of the Finch, 1994.

Linné, who wrote under the Latin name Carolus Linnaeus, divided life on earth into kingdoms, kingdoms into classes, classes into orders, orders into genera, and genera into species. It was a system so beautiful and so convenient that all Western naturalists adopted it, although as they discovered more and more species they had to add categories. Ibid.

(Today the major headings are kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species.) Ibid.

Linnaeus had brought order to the riotous diversity of the natural world. He had done for life on earth what Newton had done for the stars, planets, moons, and comets in the heavens. Ibid.

Since breeders called the art of choosing "selection," they called any changes in a breed that did not take place because of their conscious efforts - all of the casual, frustrating, and inexplicable changes in their flocks and herds behind their backs - "natural selection." Ibid.