Bill McKibben Quotes

The more we heat up the planet, the more it costs all of us, not just in money, but in colossal famines, displacements, deaths, and species extinctions, as well as in the loss of some of the things that make this planet a blue-green jewel, including its specialized habitats from the melting Arctic to bleaching coral reefs.

Climate change is already upon us, and its effects are being felt with increasing intensity.

Even as global warming increases the frequency of El Nino and the Atlantic event, their effects are being amplified by the annual loss of an area of rain forest the size of New Jersey. Less rain falls, and the water runs into the rivers instead of being sucked up by the fungus filaments and tree roots.

Collective human actions are transforming, even ravaging, the biosphere - perhaps irreversibly - through global warming and loss of biodiversity.

In the history of the world, all five mass extinctions have been accompanied by massive climate change, so we are facing an incredibly serious threat. In fact, we are technically in the sixth mass extinction right now, and it is the first mass extinction being attributed to humans.

Human activity is having a major impact on the planet. We consume or have diverted a large proportion of the productivity of the land and oceans. Our hunger for land crowds out fellow species. Our waste products pollute the waters, warm the atmosphere and acidify the oceans.

The living world has become impoverished. Species are being lost every day. Energy and other resources are nearing exhaustion. The environment is deteriorating. Pollution is everywhere. Climate is changing. Natural balances are threatened.

With our evolved busy hands and our evolved busy brains, in an extraordinarily short period of time we've managed to alter the earth with such geologic-forcing effects that we ourselves are forces of nature. Climate change, ocean acidification, the sixth mass extinction of species.

Climate change is obviously happening and there is obviously a man-made contribution.

The human juggernaut is permanently eroding Earth's ancient biosphere.

We'll lose more species of plants and animals between 2000 and 2065 than we've lost in the last 65 million years. If we don't find answers to these problems, we're gonna be victims of this extinction event that we're at fault for.

Climate change had arrived a century sooner than expected, and future generations were no longer the only victims.

The impacts of climate change are not going to get better; they are going to get worse.

Climate change is the greatest threat to humanity, perhaps ever. Global temperatures are rising at an unprecedented rate, causing drought and forest fires and impacting human health.

We are killing life on Earth, we're in the sixth mass extinction event and it's possible that human beings will go extinct. We're in a culture that doesn't want you to think about that.

Climate change has the potential to affect everything we care about - whether it is the health of our families, the stability of our communities, or the fate of the wild animals.

I will be very sad when global warming and toxins kill off all the toads and frogs and salamanders. Here's hoping we, as humans, figure out a way to be less stupid.

He (Jeremy Clarkson) is the last man standing on the beach commanding the glaciers' melt waters to go back

Unfortunately, The End of Nature turns out to be correct, although I wish it were not so. The only places that I was incorrect was, as with environmental science at the time, the estimation of the speed at which we see the effects of global warming.

One thing leads to the other. Deforestation leads to climate change, which leads to ecosystem losses, which negatively impacts our livelihoods - it's a vicious cycle.

When the polar ice caps melt, my recording studio will rise up like an ark, and I'll float off into the drowned world like a character from a J.G. Ballard novel.

Our planet is changing in ways that will have profound impacts on all of humankind.

We're handing them [young people & future generations] a climate system which is potentially out of their control. We're in an emergency: you can see what's on the horizon over the next few decades with the effects it will have on ecosystems, sea level and species extinction

We have chosen to bring future generations into this world of rising seas and warming temperatures, droughts and floods, heat waves and wildfires, a world in which one in four mammals and one in eight birds are at risk of disappearing forever. While the damage we've done is irreversible, that doesn't give us the right to do nothing.

Listen, global warming is a real problem, but it' s not the end of the world. A 30-centimetre sea level rise is just not going to bring the world to a standstill, just like it didn't over the last 150 years.