paleontologists-from-australia

"In the limestone ranges of Western Australia’s Kimberley region, near the town of Fitzroy Crossing, you’ll find one of the world’s best-preserved ancient reef complexes."

"Here lie the remnants of myriad prehistoric marine animals, including placoderms, a prehistoric class of fish that represents some of our earliest jawed ancestors."

"If all jawed vertebrates, including humans, are nothing more than highly evolved placoderms, then key features of ourselves should be traceable to structures that first appeared in our fishy placoderm ancestors. This would include particular jaw and skull bones and the proportions of our face and brain."

"Imagine trying to identify and compare equivalent bits of anatomy shared between an oyster, a beetle and a blue whale. That is essentially the problem we face with early vertebrate fossils."

"This problem may not occur for several hundred years, but by the time we see the first signs, it will be far too late to do anything about it."

"If humans pursue a business-as-usual course for the first half of this century, I believe the collapse of civilization due to climate change becomes inevitable."

"It is imperative to get the smelters to pay a fair price for their power; otherwise, market forces can never induce them to limit their emissions."

"Coal fires are a notorious risk for coalmines. In North America whole towns have had to be relocated because of fires that have been uncontrollable.”"

"At the time the Danes decided to back wind power, the cost of electricity produced this way was many times greater than that produced by fossil fuels. The Danish government, however, could see its potential and supported the industry until costs came down. Today Denmark leads the world in both wind power production and the building of turbines; and wind now supplies 21 percent of the country’s electricity. One striking aspect of the way that wind power has developed there is that some 85 percent of the capacity is owned by individuals or wind cooperatives, and so power lies in the hands of the people."

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

"Kyoto questions the philosophies underpinning societies such as America and Australia, which cling to the myth of limitless growth."

"The golden toad was the first documented victim of global warming. We had killed it with our profligate use of coal-fired electricity and our oversize cars just as surely as if we had flattened its forest with bulldozers. It was as if, having experienced it, we did not recognize what happiness was."

"In our Gaian world, everything is connected to and influences everything else."

"Nothing in predictive climate science is more certain than the extinction of many of the world’s mountain-dwelling species."