GLOBAL WARMING QUOTES III
quotations about global warming
It's quite amazing to me. I don't mind talking about skeptics, but there are a very small number of them, and I sometimes wonder why the media, in some perverse sense of fair play, seem compelled to give the same amount of air time or newspaper space to half a dozen skeptics as to thousands of scientists who would essentially agree with the consensus. But although this will contribute to that imbalance, I'm willing to talk a little bit about skeptics. Most skeptics don't actually do research. They comment in a highly selective way on research that other people do. Their own research tends to be very limited, and limited to a very few processes. You don't get anything like a balanced view from skeptics. They tend, as a group, to approach the problem rather like lawyers, making the best case for a client who has a preconceived position, rather than like scientists, which is to examine the climate system with the idea of figuring out how nature works, not to substantiate a preconception that one comes in the door with.
RICHARD C. J. SOMERVILLE
PBS interview
It is true that there are still some who deny that global warming is taking place, or that it constitutes a serious problem. Others, while recognizing that global warming is occurring, do not accept that it results from human activities and hence effectively deny that action can be taken to combat it. The great majority of atmospheric scientists, however, now accept that man-made emissions--chiefly, but not only, of carbon dioxide--are aggravating the so-called 'greenhouse effect', thereby causing the world to warm up to what amounts to a dangerous extent.
BARRY HOLDEN
introduction, Democracy and Global Warming
In 1896, a lonely Swedish scientist discovered global warming--as a theoretical concept, which most other experts declared implausible. In the 1950s, a few scientists in California discovered global warming--as a possibility, a risk that might perhaps come to pass in a remote future. In 2001, an extraordinary organization mobilizing thousands of scientists around the world discovered global warming--as a phenomenon that had measurably begun to affect the weather and was liable to get much worse. That was when we got the report from the termite inspector.
SPENCER R. WEART
preface, The Discovery of Global Warming
We need to start communicating is that this is a global struggle, and it's not about what is Sweden doing, and what is the U.S. doing -- it's about what are all of us doing, as one movement.
ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ
attributed, Curious Earth, August 19, 2019
We certainly are seeing some of the consequences of a changing climate.... California’s major part of its water storage system is in the Sierra Mountains. It snows there, and then we have dams, but it’s the snow and the slow melting of the snow and the forests in the watershed area that helps store the water in California. And much of the Central Valley is desert. Los Angeles, San Diego -- it’s all desert. Without water -- right now, California spends about 20 percent of its electricity moving water. What is being predicted in climate change, there are two bracketed scenarios. The more optimistic one -- that we will really control carbon emissions, that we will get a handle on this, and we’re talking the end of this century -- even by mid-century, in the optimistic scenario, we will have decreased our snow pack by 20 percent on an average basis. And our forests are going to begin to die, because of parasites and such. At the end of this century, optimistic scenario, you will have decreased [snow pack] by 47 percent. In the pessimistic scenario, the snow pack will decrease by 70 to 90 percent.... You’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California. When you lose 70 percent of your water in the mountains, I don’t see how agriculture can continue. California produces 20 percent of the agriculture in the United States. I don’t actually see how they can keep their cities going.
STEVEN CHU
interview, Feb. 9, 2009
There’s enough energy in coal (more than twice oil and gas combined) to run high-tech civilization a few hundred years more; enough for electric power generation by conventional pulverized coal plants; enough for coal-derived synthetic liquid fuel powered motor vehicles and aircraft. Unfortunately, there’s also enough carbon in this coal that burning it is likely to drive climate back a hundred million years, when atmospheric CO2 levels were 3-4 times higher, global temperatures 10 degrees Celsius hotter, sea level 100 meters higher and both poles deglaciated. Dinosaurs and crocodiles roamed the warm polar latitudes of this middle-Cretaceous Earth. We’re well on the path to planet-changing from what Roger Revelle and Hans Seuss called our “grand geophysical experiment:” the transfer of hundreds of billions of tons of carbon in fossil fuels to atmospheric CO2. It’s already started.
MARTIN HOFFERT
interview, Aug. 22, 2007
The planet will continue to cook.
PAUL KRUGMAN
Awake!, November 2011
The messages are clear. First, global warming is not a future threat--it's the present reality, a menace not to our grandchildren but to our present civilizations. In a rational world, this is what every presidential debate would focus on.
BILL MCKIBBEN
Boston Globe, March 4, 2016
Man has reached the point where his impact on the climate can be as significant as nature's.
JOBY WARRICK
Washington Post, November 12, 1997
If we go back 20,000 years, a fair fraction of the world in the Arctic regions was covered by huge ice masses. That was the last glacial period. The temperature during that last glacial period was about four or five degrees Celsius less than today. And yet the environment was just radically different. Not that we're expecting such massive cooling to occur in the future. Quite the contrary. We expect warming of that order of magnitude to occur over the next few hundred years. If the difference between the Ice Age and the present was so large in terms of the physical environment, the vegetation, the amount of ice, the areas where people could live, the amount of rainfall, and so on, if there were such large differences between 20,000 years ago and now, and we anticipate similar differences--but in a different direction, the opposite direction--might occur over the next few hundred years, then I think that is cause for concern.
TOM M. L. WIGLEY
PBS interview
I don't mean to imply that we are in imminent danger of being wiped off the face of the earth - at least, not on account of global warming. But climate change does confront us with profound new realities. We face these new realities as a nation, as members of the world community, as consumers, as producers, and as investors. And unless we do a better job of adjusting to these new realities, we will pay a heavy price. We may not suffer the fate of the dinosaurs. But there will be a toll on our environment and on our economy, and the toll will rise higher with each new generation.
EILEEN CLAUSSEN
speech, July 17, 2002
Global warming -- at least the modern nightmare vision -- is a myth. I am sure of it and so are a growing number of scientists. But what is really worrying is that the world's politicians and policy makers are not.
DAVID BELLAMY
Daily Mail, July 9, 2004
Climate change is real, it is happening right now. It is the most urgent threat facing our entire species, and we need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating.
LEONARDO DICAPRIO
Oscar acceptance speech, 2016
Avoiding a planet-changing global warming catastrophe is why we urgently need to transform the global energy system to a carbon-neutral one. The clock is ticking. Absent the fossil fuel greenhouse this transformation could be deferred to the 22nd century or later.
MARTIN HOFFERT
interview, Aug. 22, 2007
When the ocean starts rising to the level of whatever building they're in and whatever floor they're on as they write their editorials, yeah, then they'll agree that there's a greenhouse effect and we'd better do something about it. Sure, no matter how lunatic people are, at some point or other they're going to realize that these problems exist, and they are approaching fast. It's just that the next thing they'll ask is, "So how can we make some money off it?"
NOAM CHOMSKY
Understanding Power
We have many advantages in the fight against global warming, but time is not one of them. Instead of idly debating the precise extent of global warming, or the precise timeline of global warming, we need to deal with the central facts of rising temperatures, rising waters, and all the endless troubles that global warming will bring. We stand warned by serious and credible scientists across the world that time is short and the dangers are great. The most relevant question now is whether our own government is equal to the challenge.
JOHN MCCAIN
speech, May 12, 2008
We are our own asteroid. Our consumption of fossil fuels has released--is releasing--a store of carbon into the atmosphere that has been accumulating for hundreds of millions of years. Corals, plankton, predators: everything in the ocean is screaming at us to stop. If we don't listen and take action right now, we could be witnesses to the death of most life on earth. We will be the cause of that death... We will have erased ourselves in a blink of geologic time.
ROB STEWART
Save the Humans
There will always be those who challenge disturbing facts no matter how good the science. Many Americans don’t believe in evolution; some geologists don’t accept plate tectonics, and some think the NASA Moon missions were a hoax. Self-interest can also create cogitative dissonance between what one wants to believe and what is. Some smokers kept insisting smoking doesn’t cause cancer or heart disease after the Surgeon General’s Report. An African leader who perhaps can’t afford proper drugs holds that the HIV virus doesn’t cause AIDS. Should people die from disinformation and delusions? So what if some don’t believe in global warming? They’re wrong. Survival of high tech civilization is at stake. Time to stop dithering and get serious about policies that could make a difference.
MARTIN HOFFERT
interview, Aug. 22, 2007
The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor.
POPE FRANCIS
Laudato Si, May 24, 2015
The goal, the urgent necessity, is to reduce global warming pollution in the atmosphere enough to pull us back from the precipice before the changes in earth's ecosystems and weather patterns become so rapid and so vast that we will no longer be able to reverse the catastrophe.
FRED KRUPP
Earth: The Sequel