GLOBAL WARMING QUOTES IV
quotations about global warming
one does come across this paradox: that people who are already convinced that the science has been done don't think more research is needed. And people who think that scientists are out not to give objective studies of how nature works but to push a preconceived idea that a climate catastrophe is looming oppose further research. And, so, for many scientists, to whom the need for further research is not simply self-serving but also obvious, because we see so clearly where the holes are in our present knowledge and where the uncertainties are in our model predictions, for us to find natural friends in the political spectrum who will share our sense that research is not only urgently required but actually rather cheap compared with the climate consequences of not doing it makes the political process bewildering and sometimes frustrating.
RICHARD C. J. SOMERVILLE
PBS interview
The planet will continue to cook.
PAUL KRUGMAN
Awake!, November 2011
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 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 warnings about global warming have been extremely clear for a long time. We are facing a global climate crisis. It is deepening. We are entering a period of consequences.
AL GORE
speech at National Sierra Club Convention, Sept. 9, 2005
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
The various processes that lead to the end of nature have been essentially beyond human thought. Only a few people knew that carbon dioxide would warm up the world, for instance, and they were for a long time unsuccessful in their efforts to alert the rest of us. Now it is too late--not too late, as I shall come to explain, to ameliorate some of the changes and so perhaps to avoid the most gruesome of their consequences. But the scientists agree that we have already pumped enough gas into the air so that a significant rise in temperature and a subsequent shift in weather are inevitable.
BILL MCKIBBEN
The End of Nature
The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.
DONALD TRUMP
Twitter post, November 6, 2012
We need to start communicating is that this is a global struggle, and it's not about what is Sweden doing, and what is the U.S. doing -- it's about what are all of us doing, as one movement.
ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ
attributed, Curious Earth, August 19, 2019
I don't mean to imply that we are in imminent danger of being wiped off the face of the earth - at least, not on account of global warming. But climate change does confront us with profound new realities. We face these new realities as a nation, as members of the world community, as consumers, as producers, and as investors. And unless we do a better job of adjusting to these new realities, we will pay a heavy price. We may not suffer the fate of the dinosaurs. But there will be a toll on our environment and on our economy, and the toll will rise higher with each new generation.
EILEEN CLAUSSEN
speech, July 17, 2002
We are our own asteroid. Our consumption of fossil fuels has released--is releasing--a store of carbon into the atmosphere that has been accumulating for hundreds of millions of years. Corals, plankton, predators: everything in the ocean is screaming at us to stop. If we don't listen and take action right now, we could be witnesses to the death of most life on earth. We will be the cause of that death... We will have erased ourselves in a blink of geologic time.
ROB STEWART
Save the Humans
When the ocean starts rising to the level of whatever building they're in and whatever floor they're on as they write their editorials, yeah, then they'll agree that there's a greenhouse effect and we'd better do something about it. Sure, no matter how lunatic people are, at some point or other they're going to realize that these problems exist, and they are approaching fast. It's just that the next thing they'll ask is, "So how can we make some money off it?"
NOAM CHOMSKY
Understanding Power
It's freezing and snowing in New York--we need global warming!
DONALD TRUMP
Twitter post, November 7, 2012
Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.
RACHEL CARSON
Silent Spring
I don't like being called a denier because deniers don't believe in facts. There are no facts linking the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide with imminent catastrophic global warming there are only predictions based on complex computer models.
DAVID BELLAMY
"The Global Warming Myth", Frontier Centre for Public Policy, November 21, 2007
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
The bulk of scientists are pretty straight about saying this is a probability distribution. And right now our best guess is that we're expecting warming on the order of a few degrees in the next century. It's our best guess. We do not rule out the catastrophic 5 degrees or the mild half or one degree. And the special interests, ..... from deep ecology groups grabbing the 5 degrees as if it's the truth, or the coal industry grabbing the half degree and saying, "Oh, we're going to end up with negligible change and CO2's a fertilizer," and then spinning that as if that's the whole story--that's the difference between what goes on in the scientific community and what goes on in the public debate.
STEPHEN H. SCHNEIDER
PBS interview