Quotes About Climate

The chapters written by the natural scientists were broadly consistent with what other natural scientists had already said. No one challenged the basic claim that warming would occur, with serious physical and biological ramifications.

some people have been attacking not just the message, but the messenger. Ever since scientists first began to explain the evidence that our climate was warming—and that human activities were probably to blame—people have been questioning the data, doubting the evidence, and attacking the scientists who collect and explain it. And no one has been more brutally—or more unfairly—attacked than Ben Santer.

Scientists had been saying for a long time that human activity was a likely cause of warming. They were now saying that it was demonstrated.

key attribute of the period was that power did not reside in the hands of those who understood the climate system, but rather in political, economic, and social institutions that had a strong

It wasn't the Sierra Club that tried to pressure the National Academy of Sciences over the 1983 Carbon Dioxide Assessment; it was officials from the Department of Energy under Ronald Reagan. It wasn't Environmental Defense that worked with Bill Nierenberg to alter the Executive Summary of the 1983 Acid Rain Peer Review Panel; it was the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. And it was the Wall Street Journal spreading the attack

This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through … a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. —Lyndon Johnson Special Message to Congress, 1965

Santer and his colleagues have shown that the troposphere is warming and the stratosphere is cooling. In fact, because the boundary between these two atmospheric layers is in part defined by temperature, that boundary is now moving upward. In other words, the whole structure of our atmosphere is changing. These results are impossible to explain if the Sun were the culprit. It shows that the changes we are seeing in our climate are not natural.

As a person of faith, I do believe that we are stewards of Creation (see Genesis 2: 15), that we are called to care for our planet, to curb our over-consumption, to reduce pollution and waste, to speak up for and act on behalf of the people who are most vulnerable to our changing climate, and to offer greater opportunities for all people to choose healthier lives.

The relationship between those who have burned the most fossil fuels and those who will suffer the most from a warming climate is perversely inverted. The inversion is both chronological (younger generations pay for their elders' emissions) and socioeconomic (the poor suffer what the rich deserve).

Nearly everything we understand about global warming was understood in 1979.

We're in such a volatile climate right now politically. I think they didn't want Assassins to not succeed due to popular opinion and politics, versus on its own merits. I can respect that.

When its 100 degrees in New York, it's 72 in Los Angeles. When its 30 degrees in New York, in Los Angeles it's still 72. However, there are 6 million interesting people in New York, and 72 in Los Angeles.

We're an easy target for remarks about crossing the border and turning the clock back fifteen years, or a hundred. We're a state that's known for pineapples and cane toads, old bad attitudes and the brain-addling heat that comes from the Tropic of Capricorn sitting right across our middle. We're that kind of state - hot and steamy, unlovely and unloved, far too much fodder here for metaphors about festering and putrefaction.

The air was humid, so thick with moisture that she felt it like spider-webs across her face and kept wanting to hush it away, wipe it from her skin.

Either we prevent 1.5 degrees [Celsius] of warming or we don't.

As Gregg Easterbrook points out, "Many environmentalists consider the mere mention of adaptation Ito climate change) heretical because it implies that humanity can overcome global warming rather than be overcome by it, thus shifting the emphasis away from green guilt."37

Nonspecialist science education has to pass along a general sense of the content, methods, efficacy, and authority of science. Yet it must do so without evoking the complex of resentments and anxieties that so ominously besiege science in contemporary society. At best this would be a daunting task. In the current climate, where our various social and political mechanisms are pulling in a dozen different directions at once, it may be an impossible one.

Start with the observation that megathreats are structural. Income and wealth inequality, massive private and public debts, financial instability, climate change, global pandemics, artificial intelligence, and geopolitical rivalries have deep roots in worldwide systems and cultures. We cannot attack their causes without risking unintended consequences.

People have changed the climate of the world. Now they're waiting for the old days to come back.

Thanks to malnutrition, climate change, poverty, and ignorance, a lot of old diseases are back, and some of them are contagious

The fear of bad outcomes motivates both climate activists and their foes, but the precise details don't matter. Both sides see themselves as averting a future that they don't like more than creating one that they do.

There is a growing consensus in the investment world that climate change presents a group of risks that will, if unmitigated, have a profound impact on economic performance and financial returns.

We've known about climate change for at least six decades. But not until the most recent one was it possible to say that most people believe that climate change is happening and that we need to do something about it.

There are plenty of problems in the world, and doubtless climate change - or whatever the currently voguish phrase for it all is - certainly is one of them. But it's low on my list.