Quote of the Day (David Remnick, on the Pentagon and Climate Change)

“In 2010, the Pentagon declared, in its Quadrennial Defense Review, that changes in the global climate are increasing the frequency and the intensity of cyclones, droughts, floods, and other radical weather events, and that the effects may destabilize governments; spark mass migrations, famine, and pandemics; and prompt military conflict in particularly vulnerable areas of the world, including the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. The Pentagon, that bastion of woolly radicals, did what the many denialists in the House of Representatives refuse to do: accept the basic science.”—David Remnick, “Comment: No More Magical Thinking,” The New Yorker, November 19, 2012

(Photo of David Remnick taken by Martin Schneider at the New Yorker Conference, May 9, 2008.)