Quotes About Climate

Human beings are often at their best when responding to immediate crises — car accidents, house fires, hurricanes. We are less effective in the face of enormous but slow-moving crises such as the loss of biodiversity or climate change.

In today's media-saturated climate, the word "cult" is an instant road sign for the audience: WARNING: WEIRDOS AHEAD.

We can't even convince the public that global warming is dangerous. Why? Because carbon dioxide happens to be invisible.

In 2018, scientists learned that Antarctica's ice sheet is melting far faster than previously thought, with more than 200 billion tons of ice flooding into oceans annually, according to new research published in the prestigious science journal Nature.

For instance, one thing we'll need to do is create a climate of questioning ideas without evidence. This is not being "mean" or "bashing" or "unprofessional." It's what' professional scientists do. It needs to become our norm.

we are all aware of the consequences of climate change.

Geoengineering - the deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the earth's climate to offset global warming - is a nightmare fix for climate change.

Have we failed to slow global warming pollution in part because climate and environmental activists have been too polite and well behaved?

In the U.S. alone, weather disasters caused $50 billion in economic damages in 2010.

Climate change is a global issue - from the point of view of the Earth's climate, a molecule of CO2 emitted in Bejing is the same as a molecule emitted in Sydney.

One of the big questions in the climate change debate: Are humans any smarter than frogs in a pot? If you put a frog in a pot and slowly turn up the heat, it won't jump out. Instead, it will enjoy the nice warm bath until it is cooked to death. We humans seem to be doing pretty much the same thing.

If you are interested enough in the climate crisis to read this post, you probably know that 2 degrees Centigrade of warming (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is the widely acknowledged threshold for "dangerous" climate change.

Among all the tests President Obama faced in his first term, his biggest failure was climate change.

With nine degrees of warming, computer models project that Australia will look like a disaster movie. Habitats for most vertebrates will vanish. Water supply to the Murray-Darling Basin will fall by half, severely curtailing food production.

Ever since the collapse of cap and trade legislation and the realization that President Obama is unlikely to ever utter the words 'climate change' in public again, much less use the bully pulpit to prepare the nation for the catastrophic risks of inaction, the movement has been in a funk.

Maybe more climate activists will think about the climate change not as an international problem to be resolved in an air-conditioned meeting hall, but as a guerilla war to be fought in the streets.

Will we welcome people who flee submerged coastlines and sinking islands—or will we imprison them?

The warming of the planet is not waiting for consensus-building.

Globally, about 145 million people live three feet or less above the current sea level. As the waters rise, millions of these people will be displaced, many of them in poor countries, creating generations of climate refugees that will make today's Syrian war refugee crisis look like a high school drama production.

the climate is warming, the world's great ice sheets are melting, and the water is rising. This is not a speculative idea, or the hypothesis of a few wacky scientists, or a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. Sea-level rise is one of the central facts of our time, as real as gravity. It will reshape our world in ways most of us can only dimly imagine.

If we burn all the known reserves of coal, oil, and gas on the planet, seas will likely rise by more than two hundred feet in the coming centuries, submerging virtually every major coastal city in the world.

We are already engineering the Earth's operating system by dumping billions of tons of greenhouse gases into it every year. We're just doing it badly. Why not get good at it?

Most of the water that will drown Miami and New York and Venice and other coastal cities will come from two places: Antarctica and Greenland. Often you hear about the disappearance of the snows on Mount Kilimanjaro or the glaciers in Patagonia, but in the context of drowning cities, land-based glaciers won't contribute much. What really matters is what happens on the two big blocks of ice at either end of the Earth.

In the end, the most enduring legacy of air-conditioning may be the divide it has created between the cool and the damned.