Margaret Atwood Quotes

People in low-lying countries like Bangladesh with almost 140 million people who are managing to feed themselves, whose carbon emissions can't really be calculated (they are a rounding error in the UN's attempts to do national comparisons), and yet, most of whose people are at risk from increased flooding due to rising sea levels.

Where I live in Connecticut was ice a mile above my house, all the way back to the North Pole, about 15 million kilometers, that's a big ice cube. But then it started to melt. We're talking about the floods of our living history.

The oncoming trouble I speak of is climate change. It's going to affect all of you in the same way the Second World War consumed people of my parent's generation.

Unless we take action on climate change, future generations will be roasted, toasted, fried and grilled.

Melting of the huge Antarctic glaciers, proceeding more rapidly than anticipated, threatens a rise in sea level that will drive tens of millions from the low-lying plains of Bangladesh alone, with disastrous consequences elsewhere.

The damage that climate change is causing and that will get worse if we fail to act goes beyond the hundreds of thousands of lives, homes and businesses lost, ecosystems destroyed, species driven to extinction, infrastructure smashed and people inconvenienced.

The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it.

It is futile to seek solutions to environmental disturbances without considering them from a broad perspective that encompasses the factors underlying world poverty and the inequities within and among nations.

Emissions of greenhouse gases warm the planet, altering the carbon and water cycles. A warmer ocean stores more heat, providing more fuel for hurricanes. A warmer atmosphere holds more water, bringing dangerous deluges. Rising sea levels threaten coastal zones.

Disadvantaged communities are among the most vulnerable to climate change.

Building on our strong track record of supporting developing countries, including in areas like climate justice, human rights, gender and education, Ireland recognises that vulnerable communities need very considerable assistance in adapting to climate change.

I can't tell the people of India that we'll burden you with high costs because the West has polluted the world, now India will pay for it. Not acceptable to us.

Climate change brings increasingly frequent and severe weather patterns and this means more floods.

One-planet living means not only seeking to reduce our own consumption, but also mobilising against the system that promotes the great tide of junk. This means fighting corporate power, changing political outcomes and challenging the growth-based, world-consuming system we call capitalism.

The changing climate is pushing already vulnerable communities into crisis situations. Children with asthma are forced to miss school and stay inside due to poor air quality. Day laborers and construction workers must work outside in dangerous temperatures. People without homes are unable to escape the impacts of hotter summers and wetter winters.

Women care about a wide range of issues - climate change, social justice. What the Green Party tries to do is apply gender analysis to a whole lot of questions that people might not think of as women's issues. For instance, women in developing countries are the most vulnerable to climate crisis.

Americans are worried about climate change because they can already witness its effects. They see its signature in the drought in California, where record heat has dried the state's fertile soil.

If we do not act to curb climate change immediately, we will leave our children and grandchildren an unrecognizable planetIt is the poor, those least responsible for climate change and least able to afford adaptation, who would suffer the most.

We know that the warming rising seas will swallow entire island nations that are about 25 percent of the UN vote and perhaps at the end, even our civilization. This realization is traumatic and the first reaction to trauma is denial. Since there is some remaining scientific uncertainty, a natural response is to deny that change is occurring. This is natural but it is very dangerous.

For me the most important issue is climate change because it in some ways trumps every other issue. Everything else we care about falls by the wayside if the Greenland ice shelf falls into the sea. And if suddenly sea levels rise 21 feet, everything we hold near and dear ceases to exist.

The interesting thing is, everybody focuses on the global warming as an environmental issue, as something outside our daily lives. But actually the impact of global warming is with us today. Communities are suffering. Communities in poor countries are the ones paying the price, they are not the ones who are polluting, and we need to help them adapt.

I think it's important for people to be aware of the impact that climate change is having on this huge community of people.

Rising sea levels will result in tens to hundreds of millions more people flooded each year with a warming of 3 or 4°C. There will be serious risks and increasing pressures for coastal protection in South East Asia (Bangladesh and Vietnam), small islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and large coastal cities, such as Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Calcutta, Karachi, Buenos Aires, St. Petersburg, New York, Miami and London.

Humanity is sitting on a time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet's climate system into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced - a catastrophe of our own making.

If current tendencies persist, the outcome will be disastrous before too long. Large parts of the world will become barely habitable affecting hundreds of millions of people, along with other disasters that we can barely contemplate.