Quotes About Climate

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.

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.

everyone knows, at some level, that the sharp line between "good weather" and "bad weather" is a fiction, that we need rain as surely as we need sun.

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

Climate change is happening, humans are causing it, and I think this is perhaps the most serious environmental issue facing us.

Just a little climate change. Nothing to worry about.

Hydroelectric dams remain the way many poor countries gain access to reliable electricity, and both solar and wind might be worthwhile in some circumstances. But there is nothing in either their history or their physical attributes that suggests solar and wind in particular could or should be the centerpiece of efforts to deal with climate change.

I see these people in Princeton, my home town, as they go marching for control of climate. It is a wonderful thing. I love their enthusiasm, their energy, their devotion to something very worthwhile.

I saw 'Wild,' and I thought, 'Wow, this is a lot of things, but one of the things is it's a therapist's dream and a climate-change denier's nightmare.'

We have to wrap this imperative of addressing climate change in a prosperity framework, and secondly we have to do a much better job of putting forward an American jobs agenda that's a match for the climate challenge.

There's a snobbery at work in architecture. The subject is too often treated as a fine art, delicately wrapped in mumbo-jumbo. In reality, it's an all-embracing discipline taking in science, art, maths, engineering, climate, nature, politics, economics.

We really need to kick the carbon habit and stop making our energy from burning things. Climate change is also really important. You can wreck one rainforest then move, drain one area of resources and move onto another, but climate change is global.

I always thought we had an environmental problem, but I hadn't realized how urgent it was. James Lovelock writes that by the end of this century there will be one billion people left.

One hectare of land burned equals the emissions from more than six thousand cars, but they continue to burn more than a billion hectares in Africa per year.

Cabin and cosmos, sun and home, and a garden full of radishes and Swiss chard. So much I hadn't had for a long time, yet I missed Jens and the dogs and the feel of sea ice under me; I missed lions roaring and picking thorns from my feet in Africa. In both Africa and Greenland, I'd seen the two root causes of climate change: degraded and desertified earth caused by ineffectual rainfall, and the loss of albedo because of the disappearance of snow and ice.

Here, on a hellishly ancient table-land fully twenty thousand feet high, and in a climate deadly to habitation since a pre-human age not less than five hundred thousand years ago, there stretched nearly to the vision's limit a tangle of orderly stone which only the desperation of mental self-defense could possibly attribute to any but a conscious and artificial cause.

Louisiana is a delightful country, and though the climate too often proves fatal to a foreigner, yet generally we ascribe to the climate what is the effect of our imprudence. I have been severely attacked this summer, and had nearly died, but at length I am acclimated." The author of these words was John Windship, a Bostonian who migrated to Louisiana not long after his graduation from Harvard in 1809.

Regulations about environments are going to get tougher and tougher.