Quotes About Environment

In fact, total global rainfall is now increasing 1.5 percent a decade.

When the peak temperature in leafy suburbs can be lower by as much as fifteen degrees, "landscape is a predictor for mobidity in heatwaves," in the words of one study, which found that African Americans were "52% more likely than white people to live in areas of unnatural 'heat risk-related land cover.'" Imagine what it's like in a refugee camp, or a prison. It's hell, is what it is.

we really do live on an unbearably beautiful planet. We don't think of it often as a planet - - we live our daily lives on flat and often prosaic ground, and when we're in the air, the flight attendant usually makes us lower the window shade so as not to interfere iwth the movie.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, signing new energy legislation: "I want to make California No. 1 in the fight against global warming. This is something we owe our children and grandchildren." And Arnold at the United Nations: "We hold the future in our hands. Together we must ensure that our grandchildren will not have to ask why we failed to do the right thing, and let them suffer the consequences.

the world in 2100 would have about 600 parts per million carbon dioxide. That is, we'd live if not in hell, then in some place with a very similar temperature.

It's as if we'd conjured up out of nowhere a second human population that's capable of burning coal and oil and gas nearly as fast as we do.

We hebben een vijand en zijn naam is Shell.

I think the system has met its match. We no longer possess the margin we'd require for another huge leap forward, certainly not fast enough to preserve the planet we used to live on.

Taken together, he said, these two lines of inquiry made it clear that the safe number was, at most, 350 parts per million.

The planet has nearly 390 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We're too high. Forget the grandkids; it turns out this was a problem for our parents.

changes in surface temperature, rainfall, and sea level are largely irreversible for more than a thousand years after carbon dioxide emissions are completely stopped.

Calculations by Plass (1956) indicate that a ten percent increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide would increase the average temperature by 0.36 degrees Celsius. But, amplifying or feed-back processes may exist such that a slight change in the character of the back radiation might have a more pronounced effect.

The Keeling Curve Courtesy the NASA Earth Observatory. NASA graph by Robert Simmon, based on data provided by the NOAA Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory.   If the scientific story of global warming has one great hero, he is James Hansen, and not only because he is the most important climatologist of his era, whose massive computer models were demonstrating by the early 1980s that increased CO2 posed a dire threat.

In the Sea of Japan, 500 million Nomurai jellyfish—each more than two meters in diameter—are clogging fishing nets; a region of the Bering Sea is so full of jellies that it's been renamed "Slime Bank." "Jellyfish grow faster and produce more young in warmer waters," one researcher explained.

But we are here to tell you, in this postcard from the former paradise, that it won't happen next year, or somewhere else. It will happen right where you live and it could happen today. No one will be spared.

Britain's Exeter University, a scientist named Kevin Anderson took the podium for a major address. He showed slide after slide, graph after graph, "representing the fumes that belch from chimneys, exhausts and jet engines, that should have bent in a rapid curve towards the ground, were heading for the ceiling instead." His conclusion: it was "improbable" that we'd be able

short of 650 parts per million, even if rich countries adopted "draconian emissions reductions within a decade." That number, should it come to pass, would mean that global average temperatures would increase something like seven degrees Fahrenheit, compared to the degree and a half they've gone up already.

in fact American carbon dioxide emissions were expected to fall nearly 5 percent in 2009.47 Which is good news. Just not good enough. To give you an idea of how aggressively the world's governments are willing to move, in July 2009 the thirteen largest emitters met in Washington to agree on an "aspirational" goal of 50 percent cuts in carbon by 2050, which falls pretty close to the category of "don't bother.

Abbey would, proudly, toss beer cans out the car window as he finished them, arguing that if the government was going to graze and mine the land into oblivion, worrying about litter was sentimental camouflage, especially along those linear landfills called roads).

When you are in a hole, stop digging!

increasingly we live in a world filled with the equivalents of deadly garage-door openers, unnecessary items that offer us mild and insipid comfort at the price of a dangerous and uncomfortable planet, and at the price of any real relationship to the physical world. if you live in a suburban home and commute to a parking garage somewhere, that ten seconds of opening the garage door(manually) might be nearly the only rain you ever feel.

For two hundred years, human economic activity has largely consisted of digging up fossil fuels and setting them alight

Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.

Sitting at our back doorsteps, all we need to live a good life lies about us. Sun, wind, people, buildings, stones, sea, birds and plants surround us. Cooperation with all these things brings harmony, opposition to them brings disaster and chaos.