Quotes About Climate

in England about 60 gigawatts of electricity a year. If our only supply was from wind we might need to cover the whole of England with wind farms. This is the green satanic change I fear. And worse, were we mad enough to do it and rich enough to afford it, we would still be emitting far too much CO2 from the carbon fuel we would burn during the 75 per cent of the time the wind was not set fair for the turbines.

We know that in the depth of the last glaciation carbon dioxide fell to 180 ppm, rose to 280 ppm after the ice age ended, and has risen now to 380 ppm as a result of our pollution.

Abundant life occurs where it is warm and wet on land and where it is quite cool, less then 12°C, in the ocean.

We are like passengers on a large aircraft crossing the Atlantic Ocean who suddenly realize just how much carbon dioxide their plane is adding to the already overburdened air. It would hardly help if they asked the captain to turn off the engines and let the plane travel like a glider by wind power alone. We cannot turn off our energy-intensive, fossil-fuel-powered civilization without crashing; we need the soft landing of a powered descent.

There's no longer any surprise in noting that China has grave environmental problems.

Environmental disaster is the gravest threat to China's continued development. That's according to me, but it is not some wacko view.

In 1979, the clash between the White House's call for climate protection and the federal government's fossil fuel energy policies became stark.

The resulting July 1979 report, now more than four decades old, connected policy with scientific understanding of climate change, and was signed by four of our most distinguished American scientists—David Keeling, Roger Revelle, George Woodwell (lead author), and MacDonald.

temperature increase that, in EPA's assessment, was guaranteed to produce substantial climatic consequences, including disastrous flooding.

One of the volumes, "Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and the Global Carbon Cycle," noted that CO2 levels had varied in the last million years with a high point, during warm, interglacial phases, of 350 ppm.21 An enormous amount had been learned; the "Projecting the Climatic Effects of Increasing Carbon Dioxide" alone was over 400 pages long, and is full of hard evidence of how much the federal government knew about the impacts of burning fossil fuels.

Yet while the Trump administration's record has been deplorable, this historical analysis points out that, in many respects, the Trump administration's record is not much worse on energy or exacerbating the climate crisis than some prior administrations, and generally continues forward the stamp of approval for fossil energy that every president before Trump has likewise backed.

What has become clear from the science is that we cannot burn all of the fossil fuels without creating a very different planet.

Geological change usually takes thousands of years to happen but we are seeing the climate changing not just in our lifetimes but also year by year.

I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change. The inertia of humans is so huge that you can't really do anything meaningful.

The difference between the long-term average of the graph and the ice age, 12,000 years ago, is just over 3°C. The IPCC 2001 report suggests that the line of the hockey stick graph might rise a further 5°C during this century. This is about twice as much as the temperature change from the ice age to pre-industrial times.

We only have two kinds of weather in California, magnificent and unusual.

Few are guided by principle any longer, only by what they prefer. "You have to decide what's right for you," we are told. In such a climate, the only remaining virtue is tolerance, and the only philosophies that are wrong are those that believe in truth.

None of them was entirely satisfactory: either the climate wasn't quite right in the latter part of the afternoon, or the day was half an hour too long, or the sea was exactly the wrong shade of pink.

The modern world is devoted to vanishing species, vanishing weather and vanishing capacity for wonder.

What an awful place to live in England is,... If it isn't snowing or raining or blowing it's misty. And if the sun does shine it's so cold that you can't feel your fingers or toes.

Virtually everyone in the world believes that climate change is real and is caused by human beings, except Republicans in the United States.

The science linking the increased frequency and severity of extreme weather to the climate crisis has matured tremendously in the last couple of years.

As human beings, we are vulnerable to confusing the unprecedented with the improbable. In our everyday experience, if something has never happened before, we are generally safe in assuming it is not going to happen in the future, but the exceptions can kill you and climate change is one of those exceptions.

As I have said for many years throughout this land, we're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the future of human civilization. Every bit of that has to change.