GLOBAL WARMING QUOTES IV
quotations about global warming
One very simple truth about Global Warming is this, that it will spare nobody, however rich, mighty and powerful we think we are.
MICHAEL S. BAROI
"Bishop of London to Lead Climate Change Service", Christian Today, November 3, 2006
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
One disappointment I would raise is if you look at the understanding of climate change by scientists -- let's be generous -- 95 percent of scientists say we understand the process and we are convinced there is global warming. The media reports it, like a lot of other stories, as 50-50. They want to always show the other side. That's good, but I'm disappointed that the media does not reflect that there is a 95-5 percent discussion. It sounds like it's 50-50. The public reads this and they can't make up their mind usually.
KONRAD STEFFEN
interview, May 18, 2007
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
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
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
Last night I watched the weather channel, as is my habit. Elsewhere in the world there are floods: roiling brown water, bloated cows floating by, survivors huddled on rooftops. Thousands have drowned. Global warming is held accountable: People must stop burning things up, it is said. Gasoline, oil, whole forests. But they won't stop. Greed and hunger lash them on, as usual.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Blind Assassin
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
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
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 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 danger is that global warming may become self-sustaining, if it has not done so already. The melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps reduces the fraction of solar energy reflected back into space, and so increases the temperature further. Climate change may kill off the Amazon and other rain forests, and so eliminate once one of the main ways in which carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere. The rise in sea temperature may trigger the release of large quantities of carbon dioxide, trapped as hydrides on the ocean floor. Both these phenomena would increase the greenhouse effect, and so global warming further. We have to reverse global warming urgently, if we still can.
STEPHEN HAWKING
ABC News interview, Aug. 16, 2006
A focus on technology development is actually one of the most prominent emerging ways to delay action on climate change, and it is being used widely on the national stage. Climate policy expert Joe Romm calls it "the technology trap": Using the mirage of new and better clean energy technology to stall, rather than foster, action on climate change. What's so dangerous about this trap is that it's based in a very wily approach promoted by Frank Luntz and other Republican strategists who point out that focusing on technology is the best way to sound like you care about global warming without actually doing anything about it.
AUDEN SCHENDLER
Getting Green Done
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
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
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