GLOBAL WARMING QUOTES III
quotations about global warming
Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.
RACHEL CARSON
Silent Spring
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
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
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
The planet will continue to cook.
PAUL KRUGMAN
Awake!, November 2011
A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location. I'm not one though who would attribute it to being man-made.
SARAH PALIN
Newsmax, Sep. 2008
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
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
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
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
For innovators who find safe and workable solutions to global warming, the rewards will be staggering.
FRED KRUPP
Earth: The Sequel
Global warming must be seen as an economic and security threat.
KOFI ANNAN
interview, Jun. 23, 2009
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
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
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
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
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
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 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 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