Quotes About Climate

Weather is a physical manifestation of the earth's power.

In other words, the Anthropocene and its companion concept of climate change should not be seen merely as meteorological and geological events but as a set of political and conceptual disturbances that emerged in the 1960s—the radical environmental movement, Indigenous opposition to mining, the concept of Gaia and the whole earth—and these disturbances are now accelerating the problem of how late liberalism will govern difference and markets globally.

As a general rule, the variety of life is most impoverished at the poles and richest at low latitudes.

We have to face the quantitative nature of the challenge," he told me one day over lunch at the NYU faculty club. "Right now, we're going to just burn everything up; we're going to heat the atmosphere to the temperature it was in the Cretaceous, when there were crocodiles at the poles. And then everything will collapse.

The permafrost is still warmest at the very bottom, but instead of being coldest at the top, it is coldest somewhere in the middle, and warmer again toward the surface. This is a sign—and an unambiguous one—that the climate is heating up.

The size of the greenhouse forcing is estimated, at this point, to be 2.5 w/m2. A miniature Christmas light gives off about four tenths of a watt of energy, mostly in the form of heat, so that, in effect (as Sophie supposedly explained to Connor), we have covered the earth with tiny bulbs, six for every square meter. These bulbs are burning twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, year in and year out.

that a molecule of CO2 generated by burning fossil fuels will, in the course of its lifetime in the atmosphere, trap a hundred thousand times more heat than was released in producing it.

this will, in turn, trigger a variety of world-altering events, including the disappearance of most remaining glaciers, the inundation of low-lying islands and coastal cities, and the melting of the Arctic ice cap.

Assuming that humans continue to burn fossil fuels, the oceans will continue to absorb carbon dioxide and will become increasingly acidified.

within the next fifty years or so "all coral reefs will cease to grow and start to dissolve.

Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication—these are just some of the by-products of our species's success. Such is the pace of what is blandly labeled "global change" that there are only a handful of comparable examples in earth's history, the most recent being the asteroid impact that ended the reign of the dinosaurs, sixty-six million years ago.

Under business as usual, by mid-century things are looking rather grim," he told me a few hours after I had arrived at One Tree. We were sitting at a beat-up picnic table, looking out over the heartbreaking blue of the Coral Sea. The island's large and boisterous population of terns was screaming in the background. Caldeira paused: "I mean, they're looking grim already.

some 365 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere.

The paper concluded that if current emissions trends continue, within the next fifty years or so "all coral reefs will cease to grow and start to dissolve.

As best as can be determined, the world is now warmer than it has been at any point in the last two millennia, and, if current trends continue, by the end of the century it will likely be hotter than at any point in the last two million years.

The record from the Vostok core shows that CO2 levels and temperatures have varied in tandem. Current CO2 levels are unprecedented in the last 420,000 years. Credit: J.R. Petit et al, Nature, vol. 399 (1999).

Warming today is taking place at least ten times faster than it did at the end of the last glaciation, and at the end of all those glaciations that preceded it. To keep up, organisms will have to migrate, or otherwise adapt, at least ten times more quickly.

To stay under 2°C, global emissions would have to fall nearly to zero within the next several decades. To stave off 1.5°C, they'd have to drop most of the way toward zero within a single decade. This would entail, for starters: revamping agricultural systems, transforming manufacturing, scrapping gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles, and replacing most of the world's power plants.

We live in a world," he has said, "where deliberately dimming the fucking sun might be less risky than not doing it.

We're no at about 1.1, 1.2 Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and the conclusion is that this is already too much. The Arctic sea ice, for example, has been melting far more rapidly than was predicted. We're seeing the Greenland ice sheet beginning to melt more quickly that was predicted. So how do we with this? Sir David King, chief science adviser to British prime minister Tony Blair.

ante el cambio climático, aunque fuera un cambio climático natural, la actividad humana ha creado una carrera de obstáculos para la dispersión de la biodiversidad

a third of them to be in danger of extinction, largely as a result of rising ocean temperatures.

Deforestation has contributed another 180 billion tons.

Each year, we throw up another nine billion tons