James Lovelock Quotes

We the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency-a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential...the earth has a fever. And the fever is rising...Indeed, without realizing it, we have begun to wage war on earth itself.

We got a dying world around us.

Human extinction in our children's lifetime, it should be your top news item every single day, what's happening, you should be holding politicians to account.

The UN has given us until 2020 to change the course of humanity. If that doesn't happen human extinction in my children's lifetime is a possibility.

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.

Global warming is already acting upon us with an accelerated feedback and compounded effect that may be irreversible! We do not have eons or centuries or many decades. Most of us alive today may not even have the luxury of saying 'Après moi, le déluge' because we will be around to experience it ourselves. And if you think it will be 'interesting' or 'exciting,' ask the tsunami survivors if that's how they felt. This time the plutocratic drive to 'accumulate, accumulate, accumulate' may take all of us down, once and forever.

Clouds of a different sort signal an environmental holocaust without precedent. Once again, world leaders waffle, hoping the danger will dissipate. Yet today the evidence is as clear as the sounds of glass shattering in Berlin.

If enough of us stop looking away and decide that climate change is a crisis worthy of Marshall Plan levels of response, then it will become one.

Now comes the threat of climate crisis - a threat that is real, rising, imminent, and universal. Once again, it is the 11th hour. The penalties for ignoring this challenge are immense and growing, and at some near point would be unsustainable and unrecoverable. For now we still have the power to choose our fate, and the remaining question is only this: Have we the will to act vigorously and in time, or will we remain imprisoned by a dangerous illusion?

The world was warned of extremely severe dangers unless urgent steps are taken to deal with global warming.

All of us living in today's world are facing an enormous crisis - arguably the greatest that humanity has ever faced - in the form of man-made global warming; one can't be neutral at such a moment. It's like claiming to be neutral if you're living in Germany in 1933.

I'm willing to engage or indulge real ideas, but if we don't do something [about global warming], we're all going to die! What's it going to take, a big f--ing disaster with all kinds of people dying? We need to change our priorities fast.

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

Tragically, policymakers have thrown horrendous amounts of taxpayer money needed for other purposes at solving an unsubstantiated emergency. It is scandalous that so many climate scientists who fully knew that Al Gore had no basis for his irresponsible claims stood mute.

Our world faces a true planetary emergency. I know the phrase sounds shrill, and I know it's a challenge to the moral imagination.

As signs of climate instability increase, radical and rapid action is becoming ever more urgent.

What's happening to our world? Imagine the year 2000 and our ozone layer has vanished... Our planet has a fever and she is burning up - what will you do?

For reasons we don't have to get into, climate change has become an incredibly polarized issue in the United States. I think that is sad. My own personal view is that we're in a planetary emergency such has not been seen in 600,000 years.

If this summer is especially bad a crisis mentality will take over and Congress will want to pass legislation to show that they're on top of the situation.

No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished.

There are two problems for our species' survival - nuclear war and environmental catastrophe - and we're hurtling towards them. Knowingly.

On this 50th Earth Day, we face a crisis unknown to those who gathered on the first Earth Day - the climate crisis.

We can't take climate change and put it on the back burner. If we don't address climate change, we won't be around as humans.

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.

We're not just being dramatic talking about a human extinction - that's the pathway we're on. We have to look at the bigger picture. If your child had cancer and it was unlikely they were going to survive, you'd do everything in your power to fight it.