Stephen J. Dubner Quotes

CO2 is the exhaling breath of our civilization, literally... Changing that pattern requires a scope, a scale, a speed of change that is beyond what we have done in the past.

The scientists who do climate research understand that much of the ever increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere since 1850 must be attributed to burning those fossil fuels to produce the energy that drives industrialization.

The reality is that de-carbonisation is not happening fast enough.

Clearly there’s going to be an impact. So I’m not disputing that increasing CO2 emissions are in the atmosphere is going to have an impact. It will have a warming impact. It’s an engineering problem and it has engineering solutions.

What the American people deserve, I think, is a true, legitimate, peer-reviewed, objective, transparent discussion about CO2.

Climate change is real. Climate change is being substantially increased by humans and the carbon we put into the atmosphere. And it appears to be speeding up. If science has made any mistakes, science has been underestimating it.

The U.S. has historically been the world's largest contributor to climate change.

Every footstep we take, every action has a consequence. We breathe in weather, but we breathe out CO2. We're responsible for weather and for climate.

Preventing global warming from becoming a planetary catastrophe may take something even more drastic than renewable energy, superefficient urban design, and global carbon taxes.

We run enormous risks and we know what kind of reductions of greenhouse gases are necessary to drastically reduce risks. Reducing emissions by half by 2050 is roughly in the right ballpark. It would bring us below 550 ppm.

Recent warming coincides with rapid growth of human-made greenhouse gases. The observed rapid warming gives urgency to discussions about how to slow greenhouse gas emissions.

We now know that we cannot continue to put ever-increasing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. Actions have consequences. In fact, the consequences of past actions are already in the pipeline. Global temperatures are rising. Glaciers are melting. Sea levels are rising. Extreme weather events are multiplying.

I am now certain that we have no alternative but to reduce urgently the levels of carbon that we are still pumping into the atmosphere as though tomorrow simply didn't matter. If we don't act collectively and individually, our children and their children will reap a whirlwind which will obliterate their civilisation.

Look, very clearly there are things that need to be done urgently in relation to climate change, and of those the most obvious is to have an enforceable and equitable arrangement delivering deep cuts in emissions into the middle of the century.

By burning fossil fuels, we are already dumping 30 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year, which has a profound effect on the climate. So, like it or not, we're already messing with a system we don't understand.

Despite all the progress climate scientists have made in understanding the risks we run by loading the atmosphere with CO2, the world is still as addicted to fossil fuels as ever.

The greenhouse effect of carbon-dioxide emissions does produce gentle warming if it is not counteracted by unpredictable natural phenomena, but it cannot be measured directly against the volume of such emissions.

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

Many of the technologies we've invented are necessary to keep 6.5 billion people alive. We can't go back from that, so we need to decarbonize really rapidly.

The industrialization of China alone would increase by 90 percent the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere and would at least increase the atmospheric CO2 by at least another 100 parts per million.

A cap on carbon is important because it sets a specific goal for reducing carbon emissions 80% by 2050.

There is only one possible route of action, Greenhouse gases have to be radically reduced and it has to happen worldwide. Until now, the US has kept its eyes shut to this emergency. Americans make up a mere 4 percent of the population, but are responsible for close to a quarter of emissions.

Climate change is a consequence of the build up of greenhouse gases over the past 200 years in the atmosphere, and virtually all these emissions came from the rich countries.

Now, we put out a lot of carbon dioxide every year, over 26 billion tons. For each American, it's about 20 tons. For people in poor countries, it's less than one ton. It's an average of about five tons for everyone on the planet. And, somehow, we have to make changes that will bring that down to zero.

In the absence of federal leadership, Coloradans should take our rightful role as leaders seriously and work with other states and countries to reduce carbon emissions.