Quotes About Climate

Too often, when politicians introduce climate policies divorced from a broader agenda of economic justice, the policies they introduce are actively unjust.

Global reinsurance companies are making billions in profits, in part by selling new kinds of protection schemes to developing countries that have done almost nothing to create the climate crisis, but whose infrastructure is intensely vulnerable to its impacts.8

This perception of fairness—that one set of rules applies to players big and small—has been entirely missing from our collective responses to climate change thus far. For decades, regular people have been asked to turn off their lights, put on sweaters, and pay premium prices for nontoxic cleaning products and renewable energy—and then watched as the biggest polluters have been allowed to expand their emissions without penalty.

if we chart the locations of the most intense conflict spots in the world right now—from the bloodiest battlefields in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Iraq—what becomes clear is that these also happen to be some of the hottest and driest places on earth.

Droughts and floods create all kinds of business opportunities besides a growing demand for men with guns.

just as bombs follow oil, and drones follow drought—so, now, boats follow both. Boats filled with refugees fleeing homes ravaged by war and drought in the driest parts of the planet.

Even climate action at home looks suspiciously like socialism to them; all the calls for high-density affordable housing and brand-new public transit are obviously just ways to give backdoor subsidies to the undeserving poor.

In truth, the intergovernmental body entrusted to prevent "dangerous" levels of climate change has not only failed to make progress over its twenty-odd years of work (and more than ninety official negotiation meetings since the agreement was adopted), it has overseen a process of virtually uninterrupted backsliding.

there has been a dramatic decrease in birth and survival rates of caribou calves. It seems that rising temperatures have changed the growing patterns of plants that are the source of critical energy for caribou calves, as well as for their mothers during reproduction and lactation.

we will not win the battle for a stable climate by trying to beat the bean counters at their own game—arguing, for instance, that it is more cost-effective to invest in emission reduction now than disaster response later. We will win by asserting that such calculations are morally monstrous, since they imply that there is an acceptable price for allowing entire countries to disappear, for leaving untold millions to die on parched land

They mean, quite simply, that climate change has become an existential crisis for the human species.

The future looks rosy for West Nile virus and other mosquito-borne viruses that follow it to the New World. That's because the future is going to be warm and wet. Carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are raising the average temperature in the United States.

Meritocracy and the Mediterranean climate are by necessity incompatible. I suppose it's the price we pay for having the best olive oil in the world.

It might be late September, but is was hot as the six shades of hell.

Letting the tundra melt is the equivalent to burning all of the forests in all of the world and their roots two and a half times over.

The main message we want to get out there is that climate change is caused by the rotten economic system.

I feel like Miami is way, way too hot.

Meat is a mighty contributor to climate change and other environmental problems. The amount of meat we're eating is one of the leading causes of climate change. It's as important as the kind of car you drive - whether you eat meat a lot or how much meat you eat.

The seas are rising, and millions of people are going to be affected by that - and already are. We have to make sure there's enough food, water, and air.

Many feel that in today's climate some of those in authority are exercising, in effect, a self-serving, 'ends justify the means' mindset as well, and that, in turn, empowers them to do the same.

Ever since I was defense minister, I have participated in global meetings on the issue of climate and security.

We are literally releasing the carbon dioxide that nature had locked up over a hundred million [years] down below the Earth. And we're releasing all that carbon dioxide now at a rate a million times faster [than it accumulated].

There is no evidence when we look to the past for any precedent for the rate of change in atmospheric composition that we're causing, and the rates of change in climate that we can expect, as we continue to burn fossil fuels and elevate these greenhouse gas concentrations.

It's estimated that the Arctic, within seven years and maybe as soon as 2015, will have its first ice-free summer in the last 700,000 years (keep in mind that humans have only been on this planet for 165,000 years). Earlier projections predicted ice-free summers as far out in the future as 2080.