Quotes from Dale Jamieson

We know the "great men" and a handful of heavily cited papers in our specialization. When there is a historical frame around a paper it's often a caricature that has become canonical.

We think of history as another specialization, like philosophy of language, rather than as something that informs everything we do and think.

It is probably true that the economic benefits of being in the EU are a net positive to the UK, but a large number of people do not share in these benefits and the result is increasing inequality.

Since we're not very good at something as basic as controlling our reproduction, life is really bad for more people than ever before.

In the last few centuries we've managed to reduce how much we kill each other, we've learned some basic lessons about public health, and life is relatively good for more people than ever before.

One of the real dangers of our time is people's indifference to history.

Climate change involves fundamental choices about how we want to live and what kind of world we want.

On my reading of history people who want to bring us the best are usually the people we ought to be afraid of.

We live in a world in which everyone wants solutions. But we can't find solutions if we don't understand the problems, and we can't understand the problems without knowing how we got here.

We also face psychological obstacles in responding to climate change. Evolution built us to respond to rapid movements of middle-sized objects, not to the slow buildup of insensible gases in the atmosphere. Most of us respond dramatically to what we sense, not to what we think. As a result, even those of us who are concerned about climate change find it difficult to feel its urgency and to act decisively.

As the late climate scientist Jerry Mahlman used to say, "There is no need to exaggerate the problem of climate change; it is bad enough as it is.

The challenge we face is not (only) to reduce or stabilize concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide, but to live in productive relationship with the dynamic systems that govern a changing planet. This is a new challenge because humanity is young and now constitutes an important planetary force in a way that is unprecedented. Anthropogenic climate change is the harbinger of a new world in which humans have become a dominant force on Earth's natural systems.

w]e should not think that we can do enough simply by buying fuel-efficient cars, insulating our houses, and setting up a windmill to make our own electricity. That is all wonderful, but it does little or nothing to stop global warming and also does not fulfill our real moral obligations, which are to get governments to do their job to prevent the disaster of excessive global warming.

The fires that medieval peasants huddled around in order to keep warm affect our climate today. Our CO2 emissions, caused by such apparently innocent actions as driving to the farmer's market or the recycling center, will affect the lives of people in the next millennium.

Eighty percent of global carbon emissions come from only 10 countries. Their leaders, along with the executives of the world's most powerful corporations, have disproportionate influence on the decisions that affect emissions

Imagine that after reaching an atmospheric concentration of 450 ppm sometime in the next decade, we immediately stop all carbon dioxide emissions. By the year 3000, neither atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide nor global mean surface temperature would have returned to their pre-industrial baselines, and sea levels would still be rising.

Climate change is occurring and is effectively irreversible on timescales that are meaningful to us. Our failure to prevent or even to respond significantly reflects the impoverishment of our systems of practical reason, the paralysis of our politics, and the limits of our cognitive and affective capacities.

Research has shown that frequent viewers of Fox News, a network that writes skepticism about climate change into its scripts, are less likely to accept the scientific consensus than those who do not watch Fox News.

Since the signing of the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, abating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions has been regarded as an urgent global responsibility.2 GHGs linger in the atmosphere for decades, centuries, and even longer. When this is coupled with the fact that their impacts are mediated through various complex systems, the result is that climate change is practically irreversible on the timescales that most of us care about.

Several candidates for the Republican nomination for president in 2012 had previously accepted the climate science consensus, and in some cases actively worked toward climate change solutions (e.g., Huntsman, Pawlenty, Gingrich, and Romney). After becoming presidential candidates, they retreated from their previous positions in every case.

By the 1960s scientists had expressed concerns about the possibility of an anthropogenic climate change to presidents of both parties. At the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 the industrialized countries seemed to agree that by 2000 they would stabilize their GHG emissions at 1990 levels. Yet global emissions are still increasing, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is now almost 10% greater than it was in 1992, we have already experienced a warming of .8°C,

spending money to slow global warming should not be conceptualized primarily as being about optimal consumption smoothing so much as an issue about how much insurance to buy to offset the small chance of a ruinous catastrophe that is difficult to compensate by ordinary savings.

Early in the nineteenth century, Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier was investigating what determines the temperature of terrestrial bodies such as the earth. He speculated that part of the answer was that atmospheric gases might inhibit heat from escaping, thereby warming the earth's surface.

An extreme, rapid forcing may suddenly drive the climate system into some unanticipated, radically different state to which it is virtually impossible to adapt. Such a catastrophic climate surprise could occur through a changing climate setting off a series of positive feedbacks—for