GLOBAL WARMING QUOTES IV
quotations about global warming
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
Yes, there is still much about global warming we have to learn and research should continue. But the longer we delay, the more CO2 will build up in the atmosphere. It stays there a long time. If we wait too long before acting, we will pass a point of no return and lock ourselves into centuries of global warming. We could pass one of those dangerous tipping points that could make life very difficult. It's a risk we shouldn't take.
JIM DIPESO
speech, May 1, 2003
The warnings about global warming have been extremely clear for a long time. We are facing a global climate crisis. It is deepening. We are entering a period of consequences.
AL GORE
speech at National Sierra Club Convention, Sept. 9, 2005
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
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
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
one does come across this paradox: that people who are already convinced that the science has been done don't think more research is needed. And people who think that scientists are out not to give objective studies of how nature works but to push a preconceived idea that a climate catastrophe is looming oppose further research. And, so, for many scientists, to whom the need for further research is not simply self-serving but also obvious, because we see so clearly where the holes are in our present knowledge and where the uncertainties are in our model predictions, for us to find natural friends in the political spectrum who will share our sense that research is not only urgently required but actually rather cheap compared with the climate consequences of not doing it makes the political process bewildering and sometimes frustrating.
RICHARD C. J. SOMERVILLE
PBS interview
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
We don't have time to sit on our hands as our planet burns. For young people, climate change is bigger than election or re-election. It's life or death.
ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ
Twitter, December 20, 2018
There are very few objections to the theory as a whole; everyone in the scientific community agrees that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is on the rise, and almost everyone believes that it cannot help having some effect. To declare, as some editorialists have done, that the warming has not yet appeared and therefore the theory is wrong is like arguing that a woman hasn't yet given birth and therefore isn't pregnant.
BILL MCKIBBEN
The End of Nature
The various processes that lead to the end of nature have been essentially beyond human thought. Only a few people knew that carbon dioxide would warm up the world, for instance, and they were for a long time unsuccessful in their efforts to alert the rest of us. Now it is too late--not too late, as I shall come to explain, to ameliorate some of the changes and so perhaps to avoid the most gruesome of their consequences. But the scientists agree that we have already pumped enough gas into the air so that a significant rise in temperature and a subsequent shift in weather are inevitable.
BILL MCKIBBEN
The End of Nature
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
Several people have said: 'Well, isn't it a good thing that our industrial progress has produced not just carbon dioxide but sulfur aerosols, which cool us back down?' And I've always said I didn't like the idea of using acid rain to solve global warming, because those aerosols are not only bad for ecosystems when they rain acids into the lakes and streams and soils, but they're also part of the air pollutants which, when we breathe, we know from statistical tests, leads to increased lung and respiratory disease and what we call excess deaths, which sounds very clinical unless somebody in your family happens to be susceptible to that kind of air pollution. Some people want to shove it in the stratosphere--what we call geo-engineering. That at least wouldn't have health effects. But the aerosol offset is only partial. And even if it would offset the global warming almost completely, it's not going to leave the world's climate unchanged, because there'll be pockets in the world that'll actually be cooler, then other pockets much warmer, so you'll have blobs of warming and blobs of cooling. And that's a change, because our water supplies, our agriculture, and our ecosystems, they live locally, not globally. They don't care about 2 degree global mean change. They care about what happens in their region. And having regional aerosols offsetting some of the global effects is not going to prevent regions from still being disturbed. And we're still going to have climate disturbance if we try to solve global warming by regional air pollution, to say nothing of the health effects and the environmental effects of that air pollution.
STEPHEN H. SCHNEIDER
PBS interview
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
It's freezing and snowing in New York--we need global warming!
DONALD TRUMP
Twitter post, November 7, 2012
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
The bulk of scientists are pretty straight about saying this is a probability distribution. And right now our best guess is that we're expecting warming on the order of a few degrees in the next century. It's our best guess. We do not rule out the catastrophic 5 degrees or the mild half or one degree. And the special interests, ..... from deep ecology groups grabbing the 5 degrees as if it's the truth, or the coal industry grabbing the half degree and saying, "Oh, we're going to end up with negligible change and CO2's a fertilizer," and then spinning that as if that's the whole story--that's the difference between what goes on in the scientific community and what goes on in the public debate.
STEPHEN H. SCHNEIDER
PBS interview