"The earth was very hot four billion years ago… The atmosphere was unbreathable. Methane, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide…"

"Nature hadn’t learned to break down cellulose. When a tree fell, it lay on the ground and got buried by the next tree that fell. This was the Carboniferous. The earth a lush riot. And in the course of millions and millions of years of trees falling on trees, almost all the carbon got taken from the air and buried underground. And there it stayed until yesterday, geologically speaking… What happens to a log that falls today is that funguses and microbes digest it, and all the carbon goes back into the sky. There can never be another Carboniferous. Ever. Because you can’t ask Nature to unlearn how to biodegrade cellulose…. Mammals came along when the world cooled off. Frost on the pumpkin. Furry things in dens. But now we have a very clever mammal that’s taking all the carbon from underground and putting it back into the atmosphere…. Once we burn up all the coal and oil and gas… we’ll have an antique atmosphere. A hot, nasty atmosphere that no one’s seen for three hundred million years. Once we’ve let the carbon genie out of its lithic bottle...."

Says a secondary character in "The Corrections" by Jonathan Franzen. It's actually someone other people are finding boring — a windbag. He's gassing the social atmosphere. A fiction writer is free of the obligation to get anything right. He can waft theories with utter irresponsibility. It's up to you the reader to figure out when a character is blowing hot air and when he's getting to the heart of the matter. This little speech has virtually nothing to do with the various elaborate plot threads in this novel. It's just tipped in there.