GLOBAL WARMING QUOTES III
quotations about global warming
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 planet will continue to cook.
PAUL KRUGMAN
Awake!, November 2011
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
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
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
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 size of our global warming problem requires a large-scale solution. To meet that challenge, a small group of scientists and entrepreneurs is pursuing what they call geoengineering.... Ideas include seeding the oceans in order to increase algae uptake of CO2, injecting chemicals into the upper atmosphere to cool the poles, blocking sunlight by making clouds more reflective, and stationing heat-deflecting mirrors in space. These schemes, however, are the scientific equivalent of a Hail Mary pass--to be pursued only after all other earth-bound solutions have failed. After all, tinkering with a complex system such as the biosphere can generate unintended consequences, and not necessarily positive ones.
BRIAN DUMAINE
The Plot to Save the Planet
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
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 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
Despite the array of groups and organizations working on global warming, we are still missing a key element: the movement. Along with the hard work of not-for-profit lobbyists, environmental lawyers, green economists, sustainability-minded engineers, and forward-thinking entrepreneurs, it's going to take the inspired political involvement of millions of Americans to get our country on track to solving this problem.
BILL MCKIBBEN
Fight Global Warming Now
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
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
I don't like being called a denier because deniers don't believe in facts. There are no facts linking the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide with imminent catastrophic global warming there are only predictions based on complex computer models.
DAVID BELLAMY
"The Global Warming Myth", Frontier Centre for Public Policy, November 21, 2007
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
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
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
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