Best 396 quotes in «climate change quotes» category

If the planet was brought to the brink of climate catastrophe within the lifetime of a single generation, the responsibility to avoid it belongs with a single generation too. We all know that second lifetime. It is ours.

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

If this strikes you as tragic, which it should, consider that we have all the tools we need, today, to stop it all: a carbon tax and the political apparatus to aggressively phase out dirty energy; a new approach to agricultural practices and a shift away from beef and dairy in the global diet; and public investment in green energy and carbon capture.

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 we can't love our one and only home, what can we love? If we're unwilling to defend what we love, then what are we?

If we meet a myth with our lives and deepest concerns, the mythic oracles speak directly to us. Myths are oracular in the sense that each person can receive a message or an insight that relates to their life circumstances. The point has never been to “believe” in myths or to simply accept what others have said they mean. The key issue with mythic images is to let them speak to us, wherever and whenever we find ourselves seeking guidance, permission, or understanding.

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.

If you had to invent a threat grand enough, and global enough, to plausibly conjure into being a system of true international cooperation, climate change would be it- the threat everywhere, and overwhelming, and total. And yet now, just as the need for that kid of cooperation is paramount, indeed necessary for anything like the world we know to survive, we are only unbuilding those alliances- recoiling into nationalistic corners and retreating from collective responsibility and from each other. That collapse of trust is a cascade, too.

If you look at the science that describes what is happening on earth today and aren't pessimistic, you don't have the correct data. If you meet people in this unnamed movement and aren't optimistic, you haven't got a heart.

If you love someone, you will want to understand them and accept them as they grow and change; similarly, loving yourself involves a never-ending process of self-understanding and self-acceptance through life's ups and downs...we are finally coming to understand that love for neighbor and love for self naturally lead to love for the earth...if you love your neighbor as yourself, you want both them and you to be able to breathe, so you need to love clean fresh air...you want them and you to be able to drink, so you need to love pure water in all its forms...you want them and you to be be able to eat, so you need to care about the climate...." (p. 59-60)

Ignoring global warming is like crossing a road blindfolded.

If you think you are the mermaid, think again. You are the ocean holding the mermaid afloat, trying to change the world one dolphin at a time.

I glance at the sky, but there are no clouds. There are never clouds. I know what clouds look like only because of the digital images in our lessons at school. I know someone who has been north, to the mountains, and swears she saw clouds. Perhaps she’s telling the truth, but I doubt it.

If your house is on fire, you don't comfort yourself with the thought that houses have been catching fire for thousands of years. You don't sit idly back and think, "Oh well, that is the way of nature." You get going, immediately. And you don't spring into action because of an idealistic notion that houses deserve to be saved. You do it because if you don't, you won't have a place to live.

I invite the reader to consider the possibility that we are now entering a period of hospice for ourselves and with one another. Never before in human history or in our own personal history has our full embodiment, the healing of the mind-body split, been as urgent as it is in this moment. Never before have we so desperately needed to reflect upon our lives and find meaning in them as we do now.

I have a conflict of interest in environmental conservation.

I have blogged previously about the dangerous and deadly effects of science denialism, from the innocent babies unnecessarily exposed to deadly diseases by other kids whose parents are anti-vaxxers, to the frequent examples of how acceptance of evolution helps us stop diseases and pests (and in the case of Baby Fae, rejection of evolution was fatal), to the long-term effects of climate denial to the future of the planet we all depend upon. But one of the strangest forms of denialism is the weird coalition of people who refuse to accept the medical fact that the HIV virus causes AIDS. What the heck? Didn’t we resolve this issue in the 1980s when the AIDS condition first became epidemic and the HIV virus was discovered and linked to AIDS? Yes, we did—but for people who want to deny scientific reality, it doesn’t matter how many studies have been done, or how strong the scientific consensus is. There are a significant number of people out there (especially among countries and communities with high rates of AIDS infections) that refuse to accept medical reality. I described all of these at greater length in my new book Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten our Future.

I live in one of the best places, bar none, to appreciate the wild natural environment. I also live in one of the most politically difficult places to work on its behalf: Alaska.

In Bangladesh alone, tens of millions are expected to have to flee from low-lying plains in coming years because of sea level rise and more severe weather, creating a migrant crisis that will make today's pale in significance. With considerable justice, Bangladesh's leading climate scientist says that "These migrants should have the right to move to the countries from which all these greenhouse gases are coming. Millions should be able to go to the United States." And to the other rich countries that have grown wealthy while bringing about a new geological era, the Anthropocene, marked by radical human transformation of the environment.

I'm always amazed at the human capacity to not make fundamental changes, but instead merely adapt. I see these pictures of people in Beijing and New Delhi, walking around with masks on, because you can't walk outside your house and breathe? If you can't breathe?…If that's not the cue to make a fundamental change, I don't know what is!

In a sentiment of remarkable prescience in the context of climate change denial half a century later, Carson articulated the formidable task before her: It is a great problem to know how to look at unpleasant facts that might have to be dealt with if one recognized their existence.

Incivility is the social equivalent of CO2 and leads to a sort of cultural climate change that is very difficult to reverse. Anger, confusion, and a willingness to engage in bullying to get one's way; these are all results of the current hot house climate we find ourselves in.

Industrial civilization has held us in a subhuman state all our lives, and we now have the opportunity to discover the powers of the universe coursing through us and our environment. Likewise, we have the extraordinary privilege as consciously self-aware humans of intentionally participating with those powers in an intimate, passionate, caring relationship with the universe.

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.

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

Innovation is the heart of humanity. We need new ideas and new creativities to help address contemporary issues.

Instead of saying that everyone – i.e. every one – is responsible for climate change, we all have to do our bit, it would be better to say that no-one is, and that’s the very problem. The cause of eco-catastrophe is an impersonal structure which, even though it is capable of producing all manner of effects, is precisely not a subject capable of exercising responsibility. The required subject – a collective subject - does not exist, yet the crisis, like all the other global crises we’re now facing, demands that it be constructed.

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

Intense sunlight rained down on a half-submerged city. Waves crashed between buildings that stood like waterlogged tombstones. Skyscrapers of smashed glass and twisted rusting metal jutted from the churning swell as islands of broken dreams. A familiar tower with a familiar clock face…Big Ben. London stared back at Blue. What was left of it. A sea-drowned cemetery for a time and a place long dead.

In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, but is probably no coincidence at all, the history of these events is recovered just as people come to realize that they are causing another one.

In the end, it’s fear, greed and stupidity that will destroy us.

I saw the Eagle Tree for the first time on the third Monday of the month of March, which I guess could be considered auspicious if I believed in magic or superstition or religion...

It is only individual great forces, which must be pulled together, in our common vision of combating the climate change.

It is not for I to preach or lay blame at ones door, but to present the facts for all who have found within them humanity, so one can seek the answers for themselves, to endorse their own growing suspicions.

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

I want to be done with tears, and the day is too beautiful for them anyway. Nevertheless, I consider my tears for a moment, the idea of them, a link to the earth’s ancient origins. I’m comforted by the notion that I carry a bit of the sea within myself wherever I go. It’s nice to think that water is not such an exotic thing after all.

I watched water dripping off the ferns and the needles of the Western Red Cedar next door. I watched it running in runnels down the bark of the Cherry tree, and I looked at the small droplets of misty water that were accumulating on the broad leaves of the Bigleaf Maple.I touched one of the accumulated droplets, and instantly it was gone.

Just as Leninists knew what was good for the proletariat, thereby conferring on themselves a gratifyingly providential role, so the environmentalists now know what is good for humanity and likewise confer on themselves a providential role. The beauty of preservation of the environment as a cause is that it is so large that it would justify almost any ends used to achieve it, for a livable environment is the sine qua non of everything else. You can demonstrate and riot for the good of humanity to your heart’s content; your questions about what life is for are answered.

Living democracy grows like a tree, from the bottom up.

Life everywhere is affected by these fires. Residents of Malibu have brought their animals to the beaches for safety, shelter and companionship... California is a paradise for all. A gift. We are sad to not be able to defend it against Mother Nature's wrath. We love California. We are not ill-prepared. We are up against something bigger than we have ever seen. It's too big for some to see at all. Firefighters have never seen anything like this in their lives. I have heard that said countless times in the past two days, and I have lost my home before to a California fire, now another. Hopefully we can come together to take Climate Change on. We have the tools and could do it if we tried. There is no downside... - more at neil young archives website

Likewise, civilizations have throughout history marched blindly toward disaster, because humans are wired to believe that tomorrow will be much like today — it is unnatural for us to think that this way of life, this present moment, this order of things is not stable and permanent. Across the world today, our actions testify to our belief that we can go on like this forever, burning oil, poisoning the seas, killing off other species, pumping carbon into the air, ignoring the ominous silence of our coal mine canaries in favor of the unending robotic tweets of our new digital imaginarium. Yet the reality of global climate change is going to keep intruding on our fantasies of perpetual growth, permanent innovation and endless energy, just as the reality of mortality shocks our casual faith in permanence.

Much of the oxygen we breathe comes from plants that died long ago. We can give thanks to these ancestors of our present-pay foliage, but we can't give back to them. We can, however, give forward. When we are unable to return the favor, we can pay it forward to someone or something else. Using this approach, we can see ourselves as part of a larger flow of giving and receiving throughout time. Receiving from the past, we can give to the future. When tackling issues such as climate change, the stance of gratitude is a refreshing alternative to guilt or fear as a source of motivation.

Many people think trees grow so big from soil and water, but this is not true. Trees get their mass from the air. They gobble up airborne carbon dioxide and perform an act of chemical fission by using the energy from sunshine... Essentially, trees are made of air and sunshine.

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

Millions of people across the world live in a state of acute environmental crises caused by the lack of access to safe and usable water resources, because of natural disasters, socio-economic conditions, wars and conflicts. At Green the Gene, we are developing extremely simple yet highly technology and data intensive solutions tailored to address extremely specific problems faced by communities.

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

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.

My arms sometimes move on their own in big flapping motions, as if I might take off, and my hands spin like a hummingbird’s wings.

My fingers are callused from gripping tree limbs, and my nails are short and grubby with bark. They are like the talons of a bird that lives only in trees.

One of the biggest differences between humans and trees is simply that humans burn trees.