Best 396 quotes in «climate change quotes» category

Society is defined not only by what it creates, but by what it refuses to destroy.

The countries that are the least responsible for causing climate change are paying the heaviest price.

The antidote to climate change is community.

...the contribution of greenhouse gases to the Vostok temperature changes can be...between a lower estimate of 40% and a higher estimate of 65%.

The evidence for man-made global warming is as final as the evidence of Auschwitz.

The goal now is a socialist, redistributionist society, which is nature's proper steward and society's only hope.

The government can't change the weather.

The hard truth is carbon pollution has built up in our atmosphere for decades now. And even if we Americans do our part, the planet will slowly keep warming for some time to come.

The cheapest and most efficient way of slowing down global warming is to protect and restore the forests, particularly the tropical forests

The ice caps are melting, which we see over and over again. Yeah, they're melting on Mars, too!

The planetary machinery tends to be jumpy, this is to respond disproportionately to disruptions that come with the manmade greenhouse effect.

There is no high-carbon future

There are issues of war and peace. And then, there are issues of life and death like this one that are no less morally compelling than war itself.

There are probably already too many people on the planet.

There must be more to life than having everything.

The science [of global warming] is beyond dispute... Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response

Think globally, act locally": "Our salvation depends upon our ability to create a religion of nature.

There is no question that climate change is happening; the only arguable point is what part humans are playing in it.

This is by far the most serious crisis civilisation has ever faced.

We are just about to cross the 400 parts per million threshold.

The urgency derives from the nearness of climate tipping points.

We are in an extremely precarious and urgent situation that compels immediate action

We are not an endangered species ourselves yet, but this is not for lack of trying.

We are now running out of time.

The U.S. has historically been the world's largest contributor to climate change.

Ultimately, the human being is in the mercy of nature.

Unless we free ourselves from a dependence on these fossil fuels... we are condemning future generations to global catastrophe

Vegetarian is the New Prius!

We are running out of time, we must have a planetary solution to a planetary crisis.

We don't have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society.

We've been given a warning by science, and a wake-up call by nature; it is up to us now to heed them.

We don't know what's causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us.

We're running out of time.

Another common recommendation is to turn lights off when you leave a room, but lighting accounts for only 3% of household energy use, so even if you used no lighting at all in your house you would save only a fraction of a metric ton of carbon emissions. Plastic bags have also been a major focus of concern, but even on very generous estimates, if you stopped using plastic bags entirely you'd cut out 10kg CO2eq per year, which is only 0.4% of your total emissions. Similarly, the focus on buying locally produced goods is overhyped: only 10% of the carbon footprint of food comes from transportation whereas 80% comes from production, so what type of food you buy is much more important than whether that food is produced locally or internationally. Cutting out red meat and dairy for one day a week achieves a greater reduction in your carbon footprint than buying entirely locally produced food. In fact, exactly the same food can sometimes have higher carbon footprint if it's locally grown than if it's imported: one study found that the carbon footprint from locally grown tomatoes in northern Europe was five times as great as the carbon footprint from tomatoes grown in Spain because the emissions generated by heating and lighting greenhouses dwarfed the emissions generated by transportation.

When you are in a hole, stop digging!

Yet again, unscientific claims were being circulated broadly, but the scientists' refutation of them was published where only fellow scientists would see it.

Another critical religious motivation for reconsidering diet is concern for human suffering—out of compassion—in light of poverty, malnutrition, and starvation. . . . Not only do we damage the environment with our choice of cheese and cutlets—burdening future populations with pollutants, dead zones, and global climate change—but we also feed tons of precious grains to hundreds of thousands of cattle, pigs, chickens, and turkeys while fellow human beings go without food. Food energy is wasted when we cycle grains through anymals. Rather than breed hungry cattle and chickens to consume grains, we should stop breeding anymals and feed precious grains to those who are already starving. If we did not breed and consume anymals, billions of tons of grains could be redirected to feed hungry human beings, alleviating and/or preventing starvation worldwide.

Any relationship, no matter how fulfilling and restorative it may be, can always be enlivened and enriched. Regardless of how elated or deflated you feel about your work, what can you do to breathe new life into it—to make it more rewarding than it has ever been? Do you need to leave your current work and answer another calling? What is your spiritual employment, dear reader, carrier of so many gifts?

A poet can imagine an iceberg singing a melancholic song while the world leaders find it difficult to imagine proper solution to global warming.

A small cabin stands in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, about a hundred yards off a trail that crosses the Cascade Range. In midsummer, the cabin looked strange in the forest. It was only twelve feet square, but it rose fully two stories and then had a high and steeply peaked roof. From the ridge of the roof, moreover, a ten-foot pole stuck straight up. Tied to the top of the pole was a shovel. To hikers shedding their backpacks at the door of the cabin on a cold summer evening -- as the five of us did -- it was somewhat unnerving to look up and think of people walking around in snow perhaps thirty-five feet above, hunting for that shovel, then digging their way down to the threshold. [1971]

As you strive for personal effectiveness and leadership excellence, there are local and global questions that you will inevitably have to face. These range from poverty, corruption, terrorism, food security, scarcity of resources and overpopulation among others. Your power and influence for significance in leadership excellence will increase in direct proportion to your ability to find effective and sustainable practical solutions to some of these real-life challenges.

A less negative carbon ideologue then I might interpret the lonely wariness of Mr. Winkler and of Sharon Carlisle as proof of wrongheaded irrelevance. Socrates was equally irrelevant once the Athenians had served him his hemlock. The insipidities of the hollowed out Greeley Tribune, the no comment of most people to whom I “reached out,” and the typical anomie of an American metropolis, whose citizens I rarely saw except in their cars, in retail establishments or at the Fourth of July parade, operated synergistically to create the usual hot wide silence—about fracking, climate change, democracy and every other thing. A certain form of economic development held sway, and that was that.

And 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?" In fact, anybody in business who didn't ask that question would find themselves out of business—just because that's the way that capitalist institutions work. I mean, if some executive came along and said," I'm not going to look at it that way, I'm going to do things differently," well, they'd get replaced by someone who would try to make more money off it―because these are simply institutional facts, these are facts about the structure of the institutions. And if you don't like them, and I don't, then you're going to have to change the institutions. There really is no other way.

A post-petroleum world will necessitate walking long distances and exerting much more physical energy to accomplish even routine tasks than we are now accustomed to. Most of our bodies in current time are not up to the task. Yet preparing the body for living in a collapsing world is one of the most fundamental of preparations. Although we may not be able to store vast quantities of food or water, may not have our homes or property equipped as much as we would prefer in preparation for collapse, and may not have learned all the skills we would like to master, becoming present in our bodies and keeping them healthy and fit are factors over which we have control.

A rising tower of wood and needles and branches and great slabs of bark that has grown for hundreds of years. An impossible castle made from air and sunlight, fixed in place by the power of photosynthesis and chlorophyll. Magic. With lights.

As long as Death keeps himself out of sight in our hot dark future, we need not face facts.

As the discoverer and principal excavator of Murray Springs, [...] Haynes deserves credit for drawing attention to a very curious aspect of the site--a distinct dark layer of soil draped 'like a shrink-wrap,' as Allen West puts it, over the top of the Clovis remains and of the extinct megafauna--including Eloise. Haynes has identified this 'black mat' (his term) not only at Murray Springs but at dozens of other sites across North America, and was the first to acknowledge its clear and obvious association with the Late Pleistocene Extinction Event. he speaks of the 'remarkable circumstances' surrounding the event, the abrupt die-off on a continental scale of all large mammals 'immediately before deposition of the ... black mat,' and the total absence thereafter of 'mammoth, mastodon, horse, camel, dire wold, American lion, tapir and other [megafauna], as well as Clovis people.' Haynes notes also that 'The basal black mat contact marks a major climate change from the warm dry climate of the terminal Allerod to the glacially cold Younger Dryas.' From roughly 18,000 years ago, and for several thousand years thereafter, global temperatures had been slowly but steadily rising and the ice sheets melting. Our ancestors would have had reason to hope that earth's long winter was at last coming to an end and that a new era of congenial climate beckoned. This process of warming became particularly pronounced after about 14,500 years ago. Then suddenly, around 12,800 years ago, the direction of climate change reversed and the world turned dramatically, instantly cold--as cold as it had been at the peak of the Ice Age many thousands of years earlier. This deep freeze--the mysterious epoch now known as the Younger Dryas--lasted for approximately 1,200 years until 11,600 years ago, at which point the climate flipped again, global temperatures shot up rapidly, the remnant ice sheets melted and collapsed into the oceans, and the world became as warm as it is today.

A state of half-ignorance and half-indifference is a much more pervasive climate sickness than true denial or true fatalism.

As the planet gets warmer, we are going to have more intense and frequent heat waves, which would in turn increase the rate of death from illnesses as well, like heart attack, heat stroke, organ failure, and others.

BLUE, THE colour of the sky, of the ocean, of certain stars and planets and the hue of the bluest eyes you have ever seen.