Best 292 quotes in «global warming quotes» category

Faced with an ecological crisis whose roots lie in this disengagement, in the separation of human agency and social responsibility from the sphere of our direct involvement with the non-human environment, it surely behoves us to reverse this order of priority. I began with the point that while both humans and animals have histories of their mutual relations, only humans narrate such histories. But to construct a narrative, one must already dwell in the world and, in the dwelling, enter into relationships with its constituents, both human and non-human. I am suggesting that we rewrite the history of human-animal relations, taking this condition of active engagement, of being-in-the-world, as our starting point. We might speak of it as a history of human concern with animals, insofar as this notion conveys a caring, attentive regard, a 'being with'. And I am suggesting that those of us who are 'with' animals in their day-to-day lives, most notably hunters and herdsmen, can offer us some of the best possible indications of how we might proceed.

Facts count. Conspiracy theories, usually the refuge of the bitter or disempowered, range from factually challenged to wildly hallucinogenic. Conspiracy theories are not harmless entertainment, or a laudable facet of the freedom of speech. Conspiracy theories do both overt and tacit harm. Dangerous when they deal with public health issues, at a minimum, almost all are insults to the integrity of thousands of hard-working and honest people. In the extreme, conspiracy theories slander entire races, nations, or cultures.

f we view climate changes as our enemy we will always be defeated, for climate will always change. Natural climate change is frequent, often extreme, and sometimes rapid. Industrial CO2 is a real problem just as you have heard, but it’s only a fragment of the whole story of climate. In other words, I’m not a global warming denier – I want to add to the discussion of climate change from the point of view of geology and natural change. What may matter most is not our carbon policies, but whether we invest in adaptive strategies that can serve us well when change inevitably arrives on our doorstep.

Global warming is by its very nature a threat, but it is a deadly threat only because it fails to trigger the brain's alarm. It leaves us sleeping in a burning bed.

I argued against the view that the only obligation we have to strangers is to avoid harming them; but even if we were to take that view, the facts of climate change would demonstrate clearly that we are harming hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of the world's poor.

global warming: (n.) result of excessive hot-air emissions by climate scientists.

Greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, absorb infrared energy and help warm the planet. So they're absolutely crucial. The problem is that their concentration in the atmosphere needs to be regulated as the sun slowly brightens. Otherwise, the Earth would not be able to stabilize its surface temperature, which would be disastrous. Plate tectonics cycles fragments of the Earth's crust -- including limestone, which is made up of calcium, carbon dioxide, and oxygen atoms -- down into the mantle. There, the planet's internal heat releases the carbon dioxide, which is then continually vented to the atmosphere through volcanoes. It's quite an elaborate process, but the end result is a kind of thermostat that keeps the greenhouse gases in balance and our surface temperature under control. --Guillermo Gonzalez, Ph.D. (astronomer & physicist)

he writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated lo neliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.

Humans aren’t going to do anything in time to prevent the planet from being destroyed wholesale. Poor people are too preoccupied by primary emergencies, rich people benefit from the status quo, and the middle class are too obsessed with their own entitlement and the technological spectacle to do anything. The risk of runaway global warming is immediate. A drop in the human population is inevitable, and fewer people will die if collapse happens sooner.

I am opposed to animal welfare campaigns for two reasons. First, if animal use cannot be morally justified, then we ought to be clear about that, and advocate for no use. Although rape and child molestation are ubiquitous, we do not have campaigns for “humane” rape or “humane” child molestation. We condemn it all. We should do the same with respect to animal exploitation. Second, animal welfare reform does not provide significant protection for animal interests. Animals are chattel property; they are economic commodities. Given this status and the reality of markets, the level of protection provided by animal welfare will generally be limited to what promotes efficient exploitation. That is, we will protect animal interests to the extent that it provides an economic benefit.

I believe in a world in which science is the key for supporting the development of a happy future for humanity. So, I advocate for such a situation in which scientists would speak louder. If science is silent, there is no way to solve high priority problems at a global level, such as: the gap between developed and undeveloped countries, poverty, limited energy resources, limited food and even drinking water (especially related to the population growth phenomenon), global warming and rapid climate changes.

Global warming will not end by Earth finding a shade under the trees but under our hands joined together

Helping is not, as conventionally thought, a charitable act that is praiseworthy to do but not wrong to omit. It is something that everyone ought to do.

Humankind was a disease. The earth was the body. Climate change was the fever.

Hurricanes, tornadoes and volcanoes are all Natural Disasters. We can't fit Global Warming into that category. We have only us to blame

I beg you my dear sibling – please act – don’t stay silent and indifferent any more, to the agonies of Nature, because the agonies of Nature are getting worse and they’ll destroy the very elements of wellness and joy in the life of your own children and grandchildren.

I have been speaking to you all of your life. In the gurgle of a tide pool, I breathed myself into you. I drew you down from the trees and I lifted you onto your feet. I freed your hands to become your tools so that you would cradle me in my old age, but you have turned on me. My strongest warrior for life, you have been transformed into an insatiable messenger of death. Only a few of my children are still listening when I howl to them, crying in the night, sending the oceans in great surges to cleanse my land -- to cleanse, and to warn you who no longer listen. I WILL BE HEARD.

If the earth is a mother then rivers are her veins.

If we are ever going to see a paradigm shift, we have to be clear about how we want the present paradigm to shift. We must be clear that veganism is the unequivocal baseline of anything that deserves to be called an “animal rights” movement. If “animal rights” means anything, it means that we cannot morally justify any animal exploitation; we cannot justify creating animals as human resources, however “humane” that treatment may be. We must stop thinking that people will find veganism “daunting” and that we have to promote something less than veganism. If we explain the moral ideas and the arguments in favor of veganism clearly, people will understand. They may not all go vegan immediately; in fact, most won’t. But we should always be clear about the moral baseline. If someone wants to do less as an incremental matter, let that be her/his decision, and not something that we advise to do. The baseline should always be clear. We should never be promoting “happy” or “humane” exploitation as morally acceptable.

If you don't act against climate change, then no matter how much money you leave for your children, it'll not even cover their healthcare bills, due to living in an unhealthy planet.

Ignoring global warming is like crossing a road blindfolded.

If a problem is irreversible, is there still an ethical obligation to try to reverse it?

If I believed a giant Platypus was coming to liberate humanity and save us all, it would still make more sense than the climate denial people do......

I find it very sad that by the time corporate science realizes the value of nature, that it may be too late

If there was an observer on Mars, they would probably be amazed that we have survived this long. There are two problems for our species' survival - nuclear war and environmental catastrophe - and we're hurtling towards them. Knowingly. This hypothetical Martian would probably conclude that human beings were an evolutionary error.

If there were an intergalactic gardener, he would conclude that the earth had fallen prey to an infestation of human beings.

In four months we could actually have an administration that believes in science.

Intellectually we know all we need to know, technologically we could remedy our plight starting today, but inertia and vested interests rule.

In late-2006, the most publicised government-commissioned report on the economics of climate change was released. Soon to be widely known as the Stern Review, the report concluded that it would be necessary to invest at least one per cent of Gross World Product (GWP) every year to avoid climate change damage costs equivalent to the annual loss of 5–20 per cent of GWP (Stern 2007). The Stern conclusions were soon supported in 2007 with the publication of the fourth series of IPCC reports declaring that the cost of reducing emissions would be significantly less than the cost of climate change damages (IPCC 2007a). Also stressed by the IPCC was that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal” and that it was “very likely that global warming is the result of human activities

In Reagan's world, we have to be geared up to fight a foe that could barely feed its own people. And meanwhile, our real troubles have to be mocked. Global warming. Nuclear proliferation. Corrupt governments supported by my tax dollars and everyone's complacency.

In some parts of the world, what you are doing is already apparent. According to the World Health Organization, the warming of the planet caused an additional 140,000 deaths in 2004, as compared with the number of deaths there would have been had average global temperatures remained as they were during the period 1961 to 1990. This means that climate change is already causing, every week, as many deaths as occurred in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

I thought that you would be frozen in awe when you found the sequence, when you heard a bird's song repeating my Morse code, my cry for help, my S.O.S, when you saw the same numbers in the petals of a flower and the structure of a pine cone, when you saw with your own eyes the interconnectedness of all things. But I was wrong. You searched for a male god, a creator, an intelligent designer, or you banished the beauty and mystery of the world beneath the cold concrete grave of closed-eye skepticism. The few of you who could still hear my music felt tortured and misunderstood; you reached out for any conspiracy theory large enough to explain your alienated despair, your sense that the Earth was dying and no one cared. But listen to me -- you are not alone. Run your fingers through the grass and grab it in your fists, feel my pulse echoing through your blood. You. Are. Not. Alone. And I -- I am not dead yet.

It's hot in here but that's just you, Michelle, for when I see you it's like the sun comes out in my head. You are the reason for global warming but in a good way.

It's a team, really: the wilderness and us.

It's the last great free-for-all robbery of everybody's earth.

It’s the fish I feel sorry for, in all this global warming. They don’t even have a carbon footprint.

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had. Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.

Many of the interdependent mammals, birds, and corals may be vulnerable, living precariously close to the extinction cliff, but nature is also wild and robust, and swings back if given the smallest crack in the concrete. Witness the dandelions.

I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.

Mother Nature is challenging enough, let's keep oil drilling out of the picture.

Marx called Darwin a plagiarist and Malthus a fraud. Now all Marxists are Malthusian Darwinists.

Meteorologists agree that our planet is heating up! Now I know that many people disagree with this or just think that it is part of a natural cycle. It doesn’t really matter what we think, because the Earth’s climate will do what it is doing with or without our influence. As part of my profession, I took classes related to the weather and I would just like to share some of my thoughts on this important topic. First, if I know something is heading in the wrong direction, I’ll try to do something about it and if I’m partially to blame, I’ll try a little harder! For years we have been putting carbon up into the atmosphere and now the chickens are coming home to roost! It doesn’t matter what we think about this, however here in Florida the hurricanes have been becoming more violent… as we saw last summer! Statistically the high tides have been just a little higher with each passing year. In fact the average tides have been going up by an inch for every 10 years. That’s an inch per decade! In the Miami area the water has been coming up through the sewer pipes with fish swimming in the streets and here in the Tampa Bay area the streets are flooding, like in the Venetian Isles neighborhood of St. Petersburg, where flooding has been happening about 70 time per year. Can you imagine being flooded out 70 times per year?

My biggest objection to Marxism has been the presumption that industry should exist at all. I think the unstoppable juggernaut which is global warming demonstrates that processing natural materials on an industrial scale is a suicidal practice.

My generation were diners stuffing ourselves senseless at the Restaurant of the Earth’s Riches knowing—while denying—that we’d be doing a runner and leaving our grandchildren a tab that can never be paid.

Over your lifetime, your individual greenhouse gas contribution will only increase the temperature of the planet by about a half a billionth of a degree Celsius. That, you might think, is such a small difference as to be negligible, so you shouldn't bother trying to reduce your personal emissions. This reasoning, however, doesn't consider expected value. It's true that increasing the planet's temperature by half a billionth of a degree probably won't make a difference to anyone, but sometimes it will make a difference, and when it does, the difference will be very large. Occasionally , that increase of half a billionth of a degree will cause a flood or a heatwave that wouldn't have happened otherwise. In which case the expected harm of raising global temperatures by half a billionth of a degree would be fairly great. We know that something like this has to be the case because we know that, if millions of people emit greenhouse gases, the bad effects are very large, and millions of people emitting greenhouse gases is just the sum of millions of individual actions.

No anti-slavery crusader aimed for a partial solution or settled on a regimen of interim targets. The fight to end slavery was a fight to end 100 percent of slavery for all time. In just that way, we can't settle for partial measures if we are going to win the war for our world. We need to fight for 100 percent sustainability, now.

One of the difficulties in raising public concern over the very severe threats of global warming is that 40 percent of the US population does not see why it is a problem, since Christ is returning in a few decades. About the same percentage believe that the world was created a few thousand years ago. If science conflicts with the Bible, so much the worse for science. It would be hard to find an analogue in other societies.

One of the problems with climate change, global warming and global air pollution is that it may change the frequency and intensity of electrical storm activity. Too much lightning activity may cause excessive mating, aggression, fatigue, illness and disease to occur. Too little may turn off the animal and plant breeding cycles.

Part of the whole capitalist ethic is that the only thing that matters is how much money you make tomorrow: that's the crucial value of the system, profit for tomorrow. Not just profit, but the bottom line has to look good tomorrow. And the result is that planning for the future, and any kind of regulatory apparatus that would sustain the environment for the long-term, become impossible―and that means the planet is going to go down the tubes very fast.

Perhaps we should address fact of man-made pollution instead of focus on the theory of man-made global warming.