GLOBAL WARMING QUOTES II
quotations about global warming
With all of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phony science, could it be that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it.
JAMES M. INHOFE
speech in U.S. Senate, July 28, 2003
As best as can be determined, the world is now warmer than it has been at any point in the last two millennia, and, if current trends continue, by the end of the century it will likely be hotter than at any point in the last two million years.
ELIZABETH KOLBERT
The New Yorker, Apr. 25, 2005
Most people have very busy lives and simply are not exposed to the real facts about what is happening. It’s much easier to pretend it’s not happening when you can’t see, on very short time scales, the actual impacts. Coupled with this psychological reality is the fact that society ‘is now’ rather than in the future. The inertia in the Earth System means that behavior today will have significant impacts tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, rather than being immediate. The most serious impacts of climate change today are not seen by most people in the western world as few venture into the developing world, or the poles, where most of the action is. This, coupled with the fact that is is rarely possible to directly link climate change to a specific event in a specific place, all helps to seed doubt into many minds. The final ingredient in this story is a tiny minority of people and organizations who deliberately provide disinformation and set out to confuse people, for their own ends. The coal and oil industries among others have repeatedly demonstrated their credentials in this area. The result is that normal intelligent people are confused, and rather than take on what seems to be a daunting challenge, will tend to walk away from the question.
NEIL HAMILTON
interview, Jul. 11, 2009
I want to stress that people have gotten an unfortunately weird view of global warming by listening to various people perhaps purposefully confuse the issue. What was really revelatory to me, as one of those people who was by no means an expert -- and I still don't consider myself a scientific expert -- is that we're not talking about a speculative thing. The notion that you put more CO2 up there and you get a warmer world is not debatable at all. This has been understood for a century now. Global warming is real. The only debatable issue is how warm it will get. That's really the only question. And, yes, it's complicated but everything that we've learned has tended to support the conclusion that the effects will be quite significant. What people ought to know is that there's nothing that's been learned that suggests, "Oh, don't worry about this."
ELIZABETH KOLBERT
NRDC interview
Many scales of climate change are in fact natural, from the slow tectonic scale, to the fast changes embedded within glacial and interglacial times, to the even more dramatic changes that characterize a switch from glacial to interglacial. So why worry about global warming, which is just one more scale of climate change? The problem is that global warming is essentially off the scale of normal in two ways: the rate at which this climate change is taking place, and how different the "new" climate is compared to what came before.
ANTHONY D. BARNOSKY
Heatstroke: Nature in an Age of Global Warming
Global warming is indeed a scam, perpetrated by scientists with vested interests, but in need of crash courses in geology, logic and the philosophy of science.
MARTIN KEELEY
BBC News, Dec. 6, 2004
Some of the scientists, I believe, haven’t they been changing their opinion a little bit on global warming? There’s a lot of differing opinions and before we react I think it’s best to have the full accounting, full understanding of what’s taking place.
GEORGE W. BUSH
presidential debate, Oct. 11, 2000
It's not that the world hasn't had more carbon dioxide, it's not the world hasn't been warmer. The problem is the speed at which things are changing. We are inducing a sixth mass extinction event kind of by accident and we don't want to be the "extinctee", if I may coin this noun.
BILL NYE
interview, Big Think, August 7, 2014
When we marvel at that blue marble in all its delicacy and frailty, and resolve to save the planet, we cast ourselves in a very specific role. That role is of a parent, the parent of the earth. But the opposite is the case. It is we humans who are fragile and vulnerable and the earth that is hearty and powerful, and holds us in its hands. In pragmatic terms, our challenge is less to save the earth from ourselves and more to save ourselves from an earth that, if pushed too far, has ample power to rock, burn, and shake us off completely.
NAOMI KLEIN
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
I have not been one who believed in the global warming. But I tell you, they are making a convert out of me as these blistering summers. They have broken heat records in a number of cities already this year and broken all-time records and it is getting hotter and the ice caps are melting and there is a build up of carbon dioxide in the air. We really need to address the burning of fossil fuels.
PAT ROBERTSON
700 Club, August 3, 2006
We are no longer at the point of preventing climate disaster from happening entirely -- we are now at the point of minimising the damage. And as these floods and storms are here, I think more and more people are going to be willing to stand up for themselves.
ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ
The Guardian, June 29, 2019
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
The climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all.... A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system.... Humanity is called to recognize the need for changes of lifestyle, production and consumption, in order to combat this warming.
POPE FRANCIS
Laudato Si, May 24, 2015
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
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
It is true that there are still some who deny that global warming is taking place, or that it constitutes a serious problem. Others, while recognizing that global warming is occurring, do not accept that it results from human activities and hence effectively deny that action can be taken to combat it. The great majority of atmospheric scientists, however, now accept that man-made emissions--chiefly, but not only, of carbon dioxide--are aggravating the so-called 'greenhouse effect', thereby causing the world to warm up to what amounts to a dangerous extent.
BARRY HOLDEN
introduction, Democracy and Global Warming
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
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
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
For innovators who find safe and workable solutions to global warming, the rewards will be staggering.
FRED KRUPP
Earth: The Sequel