Quotes from James Balog

Science by itself is about numbers, and it's about measuring things. It's very important but it's very dry.

At the age of 60, you see how short the runway is in front of you and how long the runway is behind you, and that you don't have much time left.

When my daughers, Simone and Emily look at me 25 or 30 years from now and say 'what were you doing, when global warming was happening? And when you guys knew what was coming down the road?' I want to be able to say, 'guys, I was doing everything I knew how to do.

I've always believed that photography is a way to shape human perception.

The scientist-community guy may get a $500,000 grant, and if his equipment works or doesn't work, he still gets a gold star for doing the science experiment. For me, there is no merit in anything for doing an experiment; I have to go home with pictures.

You can't divorce civilization from nature - we totally depend on it.

Climate change is a really abstract thing in most of the world.

I grew up in suburban New Jersey in a transitional area that was surrounded by farmland that wasn't being cultivated.

We still carry this old caveman-imprint idea that we're small, nature's big, and it's everything we can manage to hang on and survive. When big geophysical events happen - a huge earthquake, tsunami, or volcanic eruption - we're reminded of that.

I'm quite fond of Switzerland. I love Switzerland.

The cumulative effect of each person making a change in his or her own life will make a difference.

Glacial pace is actually an incorrect concept. The glaciers move a lot faster and they react a lot faster than people imagine.

There is a glacier in Iceland, Solheimar, which has retreated a great deal, and every time I go back there and see what's not there any more, it does something to the heart. It makes you realise it's possible for a gigantic natural element to just disappear.

Hindsight can be merciless. People of any given era often look back in time and wonder how their predecessors could have been so dimwitted.

You know, we humans are programmed to think that big changes on the Earth happened a long time ago, or will happen a long time in the future. What we don't realize is that they actually can happen right now. Right here, right now, while we're alive, in our own hours and days and months and years.

It's important to recognise that humans are not the measure of all things... The Earth is the measure of all things.

When I worked with wildlife a lot in the Eighties and Nineties, I learnt the meaning of patience. And when I worked with trees, I learned the meaning of humility.

I personally spend the majority of my time by far on outreach and education and fundraising and administration.

Once upon a time, I was a climate-change skeptic.

The 'New Yorker' asked me to shoot a story on climate change in 2005, and I wound up going to Iceland to shoot a glacier. The real story wasn't the beautiful white top. It ended up being at the terminus of the glacier where it's dying.

You know, I've read Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' about fifteen times.

We are now beyond nature's normal variation in terms of how the atmosphere is composed. Nature did something for a million years. It actually goes back a lot further than that, but the ice core records show a million years. So, nature has this normal oscillation within this zone, and all of a sudden, we're forty percent outside that zone.

Climate change is real. Climate change is being substantially increased by humans and the carbon we put into the atmosphere. And it appears to be speeding up. If science has made any mistakes, science has been underestimating it.

This air we breathe is precious, and the glaciers helped me understand that and stay focused on that.