Godfried Danneels Quotes

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.

We must maintain strong building codes, strengthen flood insurance programs, and forcefully acknowledge the reality that rising sea temperatures caused by made-man climate change are negatively impacting our way of life. This should be a bipartisan task that finds support with bipartisan solutions.

As the former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and former governor of New Jersey, I have witnessed the impact of climate change firsthand.

If left unchecked, global change will create violent conflict, torrential storms, shrinking coastlines, and irreversible catastrophe.

Tipping points are so dangerous because if you pass them, the climate is out of humanity's control: if an ice sheet disintegrates and starts to slide into the ocean there's nothing we can do about that.

You know what I always dreamed of? That with the greenhouse effect, one day Estonia can be what L.A. is right now. I always thought when the end of the world comes, I want to be in Estonia. I think then I'd survive.

Climate change is hugely exacerbated by changing patterns of how we choose to live, often in danger zones such as extremely vulnerable coastal zones - from New Jersey to the Philippines. This enormously increases the economic and human costs of hurricanes, rising seas and changing weather patterns.

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

The climate continues to deteriorate.

I don't see this planet being... they're talking about how they're turning around the environmental problems here, but I think it's already too late.

In Congress, I am focused on the effects of climate change, including ocean acidification and sea-level rise - both of which are threats to healthy oceans that sustain life on- and off-shore.

Climate change is not a discrete issue; it's a symptom of larger problems. Fundamentally, our society as currently designed has no future. We're chewing up the planet so fast, in so many different ways, that we could solve the climate problem tomorrow and still find that environmental collapse is imminent.

The environmental movement, like all political processes, reacts best to disasters. But these are very slow, very gradual disasters in the making.

The Maldives, a string of islands off the coast of India whose highest point above sea level is eight feet, may be the first nation to drown. In Alaska, entire towns have begun to shift in the loosening permafrost.

Pollution from human activities is changing the Earth's climate. We see the damage that a disrupted climate can do: on our coasts, our farms, forests, mountains, and cities. Those impacts will grow more severe unless we start reducing global warming pollution now.

Humans have obviously contributed a great deal of carbon to the atmosphere. So we are warming the planet up.

We tend to describe climate change in terms that are abstract—a one degree rise in temperature, an increase in green house gasses—but when waves wash away a village, that’s concrete and very emotional.

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

Climate change carries implications that stretch far beyond extreme weather, however. The effects on public health are far more alarming - and those have to be taken into account in order to calculate an accurate estimate of the costs of inaction.

Climate change is the environmental challenge of this generation, and it is imperative that we act before it's too late.

It's not called the low country for nothing, it's literally at sea level. If we don't start paying attention to conservation in our environment, the water levels are going to rise and those areas are going to start disappearing.

The people of South Jersey know that climate change is real and that it impacts their quality of life. They see that our streets flood almost every time it rains and they have seen that extreme weather events have become more frequent and more violent.

Left unchecked, climate change risks not only making the poorest poorer, but pulling the emerging middle classes back into poverty, too.

Climate change has the potential to swallow up all other issues of development.

Hawaii feels so passionately about climate. You know, our oceans are warming. As a result, we have more ocean acidification and coral bleaching. You can actually see it.