GLOBAL WARMING QUOTES III
quotations about global warming
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There’s enough energy in coal (more than twice oil and gas combined) to run high-tech civilization a few hundred years more; enough for electric power generation by conventional pulverized coal plants; enough for coal-derived synthetic liquid fuel powered motor vehicles and aircraft. Unfortunately, there’s also enough carbon in this coal that burning it is likely to drive climate back a hundred million years, when atmospheric CO2 levels were 3-4 times higher, global temperatures 10 degrees Celsius hotter, sea level 100 meters higher and both poles deglaciated. Dinosaurs and crocodiles roamed the warm polar latitudes of this middle-Cretaceous Earth. We’re well on the path to planet-changing from what Roger Revelle and Hans Seuss called our “grand geophysical experiment:” the transfer of hundreds of billions of tons of carbon in fossil fuels to atmospheric CO2. It’s already started.
MARTIN HOFFERT
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interview, Aug. 22, 2007
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The messages are clear. First, global warming is not a future threat--it's the present reality, a menace not to our grandchildren but to our present civilizations. In a rational world, this is what every presidential debate would focus on.
BILL MCKIBBEN
Boston Globe, March 4, 2016
The danger is that global warming may become self-sustaining, if it has not done so already. The melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps reduces the fraction of solar energy reflected back into space, and so increases the temperature further. Climate change may kill off the Amazon and other rain forests, and so eliminate once one of the main ways in which carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere. The rise in sea temperature may trigger the release of large quantities of carbon dioxide, trapped as hydrides on the ocean floor. Both these phenomena would increase the greenhouse effect, and so global warming further. We have to reverse global warming urgently, if we still can.
STEPHEN HAWKING
ABC News interview, Aug. 16, 2006
We are in a race against time. Newspaper and magazine articles, television specials, and film documentaries all predict a terrible future: global warming will bring to the world melting ice sheets, flooded coastal regions, powerful hurricanes, droughts, and dislocated populations. In a recent study, the Pentagon described the famine, widespread rioting, and even war we can expect as nations defend their dwindling food, water, and energy supplies.
BRIAN DUMAINE
The Plot to Save the Planet
We don't have time to sit on our hands as our planet burns. For young people, climate change is bigger than election or re-election. It's life or death.
ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ
Twitter, December 20, 2018
In 1896, a lonely Swedish scientist discovered global warming--as a theoretical concept, which most other experts declared implausible. In the 1950s, a few scientists in California discovered global warming--as a possibility, a risk that might perhaps come to pass in a remote future. In 2001, an extraordinary organization mobilizing thousands of scientists around the world discovered global warming--as a phenomenon that had measurably begun to affect the weather and was liable to get much worse. That was when we got the report from the termite inspector.
SPENCER R. WEART
preface, The Discovery of Global Warming
One very simple truth about Global Warming is this, that it will spare nobody, however rich, mighty and powerful we think we are.
MICHAEL S. BAROI
"Bishop of London to Lead Climate Change Service", Christian Today, November 3, 2006
There will always be those who challenge disturbing facts no matter how good the science. Many Americans don’t believe in evolution; some geologists don’t accept plate tectonics, and some think the NASA Moon missions were a hoax. Self-interest can also create cogitative dissonance between what one wants to believe and what is. Some smokers kept insisting smoking doesn’t cause cancer or heart disease after the Surgeon General’s Report. An African leader who perhaps can’t afford proper drugs holds that the HIV virus doesn’t cause AIDS. Should people die from disinformation and delusions? So what if some don’t believe in global warming? They’re wrong. Survival of high tech civilization is at stake. Time to stop dithering and get serious about policies that could make a difference.
MARTIN HOFFERT
interview, Aug. 22, 2007
Man has reached the point where his impact on the climate can be as significant as nature's.
JOBY WARRICK
Washington Post, November 12, 1997
It's freezing and snowing in New York--we need global warming!
DONALD TRUMP
Twitter post, November 7, 2012
There are very few objections to the theory as a whole; everyone in the scientific community agrees that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is on the rise, and almost everyone believes that it cannot help having some effect. To declare, as some editorialists have done, that the warming has not yet appeared and therefore the theory is wrong is like arguing that a woman hasn't yet given birth and therefore isn't pregnant.
BILL MCKIBBEN
The End of Nature
Most meteorological research is funded by the federal government. And boy, if you want to get federal funding, you better not come out and say human-induced global warming is a hoax because you stand the chance of not getting funded.
WILLIAM GRAY
interview, Sept. 12, 2005
We certainly are seeing some of the consequences of a changing climate.... California’s major part of its water storage system is in the Sierra Mountains. It snows there, and then we have dams, but it’s the snow and the slow melting of the snow and the forests in the watershed area that helps store the water in California. And much of the Central Valley is desert. Los Angeles, San Diego -- it’s all desert. Without water -- right now, California spends about 20 percent of its electricity moving water. What is being predicted in climate change, there are two bracketed scenarios. The more optimistic one -- that we will really control carbon emissions, that we will get a handle on this, and we’re talking the end of this century -- even by mid-century, in the optimistic scenario, we will have decreased our snow pack by 20 percent on an average basis. And our forests are going to begin to die, because of parasites and such. At the end of this century, optimistic scenario, you will have decreased [snow pack] by 47 percent. In the pessimistic scenario, the snow pack will decrease by 70 to 90 percent.... You’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California. When you lose 70 percent of your water in the mountains, I don’t see how agriculture can continue. California produces 20 percent of the agriculture in the United States. I don’t actually see how they can keep their cities going.
STEVEN CHU
interview, Feb. 9, 2009
Several people have said: 'Well, isn't it a good thing that our industrial progress has produced not just carbon dioxide but sulfur aerosols, which cool us back down?' And I've always said I didn't like the idea of using acid rain to solve global warming, because those aerosols are not only bad for ecosystems when they rain acids into the lakes and streams and soils, but they're also part of the air pollutants which, when we breathe, we know from statistical tests, leads to increased lung and respiratory disease and what we call excess deaths, which sounds very clinical unless somebody in your family happens to be susceptible to that kind of air pollution. Some people want to shove it in the stratosphere--what we call geo-engineering. That at least wouldn't have health effects. But the aerosol offset is only partial. And even if it would offset the global warming almost completely, it's not going to leave the world's climate unchanged, because there'll be pockets in the world that'll actually be cooler, then other pockets much warmer, so you'll have blobs of warming and blobs of cooling. And that's a change, because our water supplies, our agriculture, and our ecosystems, they live locally, not globally. They don't care about 2 degree global mean change. They care about what happens in their region. And having regional aerosols offsetting some of the global effects is not going to prevent regions from still being disturbed. And we're still going to have climate disturbance if we try to solve global warming by regional air pollution, to say nothing of the health effects and the environmental effects of that air pollution.
STEPHEN H. SCHNEIDER
PBS interview
A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location. I'm not one though who would attribute it to being man-made.
SARAH PALIN
Newsmax, Sep. 2008
It's quite amazing to me. I don't mind talking about skeptics, but there are a very small number of them, and I sometimes wonder why the media, in some perverse sense of fair play, seem compelled to give the same amount of air time or newspaper space to half a dozen skeptics as to thousands of scientists who would essentially agree with the consensus. But although this will contribute to that imbalance, I'm willing to talk a little bit about skeptics. Most skeptics don't actually do research. They comment in a highly selective way on research that other people do. Their own research tends to be very limited, and limited to a very few processes. You don't get anything like a balanced view from skeptics. They tend, as a group, to approach the problem rather like lawyers, making the best case for a client who has a preconceived position, rather than like scientists, which is to examine the climate system with the idea of figuring out how nature works, not to substantiate a preconception that one comes in the door with.
RICHARD C. J. SOMERVILLE
PBS interview
The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor.
POPE FRANCIS
Laudato Si, May 24, 2015
The planet will continue to cook.
PAUL KRUGMAN
Awake!, November 2011
Avoiding a planet-changing global warming catastrophe is why we urgently need to transform the global energy system to a carbon-neutral one. The clock is ticking. Absent the fossil fuel greenhouse this transformation could be deferred to the 22nd century or later.
MARTIN HOFFERT
interview, Aug. 22, 2007
Last night I watched the weather channel, as is my habit. Elsewhere in the world there are floods: roiling brown water, bloated cows floating by, survivors huddled on rooftops. Thousands have drowned. Global warming is held accountable: People must stop burning things up, it is said. Gasoline, oil, whole forests. But they won't stop. Greed and hunger lash them on, as usual.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Blind Assassin