Bill McKibben Quotes

The ice doesn't care who's in the White House. It doesn't care which party controls your congress. It doesn't care which party controls your parliament. It just melts.

Experts say this global warming is serious, and they are predicting now that by the year 2050, we will be out of party ice.

So far the earth has warmed about a degree Fahrenheit globally averaged. That doesn't seem like an enormous amount but it's unlike what we would have expected twenty years ago.

The ice caps are melting, which we see over and over again. Yeah, they're melting on Mars, too!

The warnings about global warming have been extremely clear for a long time. We are facing a global climate crisis. It is deepening. We are entering a period of consequences.

If there's horrible flooding in Pakistan or a horrible heat wave in Texas, we're no longer able to call it an act of God, or a natural disaster, or something like that, the way we could have through all of human history until 35 or 40 years ago.

We need the science to continue. The heat, the storms, the sea level rise, the Arctic melting. These are all real facts that over time will sink in. The question is, will that be two years, or five years or 10 years?

In Australia, average temperatures have risen almost one degree since 1910, and each decade since the 1940s has been warmer than the one before. That warming is real. Its consequences are real. And it will change our lives in real and practical ways.

If there is no cost to be paid for the indiscriminate dumping of pollution into the earth's atmosphere, then it should be a surprise to no one that today we will dump another 70 million tons of global warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet. ... We have to [act] this year, not next year. Mother Nature does not do bailouts.

At a press conference yesterday NASA announced that 2005 was the hottest year on record. It is so hot, and global warming is so bad, if the presidential election were held today, Al Gore would still lose.

Melting icebergs aren't beheading Christians in the Middle East.

The most frightening interview I've ever done was with Dr. Lonnie Thompson of The Ohio State University on the subject of global warming.

Global warming is something that happens to all of us, all at once.

The Arctic is a place that historically, during all preceding human history, has largely been an icy realm with an impact on ocean currents. That, in turn, influences the temperature of the planet. The Arctic is now vulnerable because of the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, with a rate of melting that is stunning.

What do we do about climate change bearing down upon us?

If you think of the ice caps as the fridge of our planet, if your fridge at home died, the food you eat would go rotten, and you'd starve.

Global warming is my personal experience.

You can't tie a rope around the ice sheet. You can't build a wall around the ice sheets.

Global warming isn't a prediction. It is happening.

Glaciers are almost gone from Glacier National Park.

The Arctic is among the least understood places on the planet; however, we do know that its landscape is changing and evolving as quickly as cell phones and the Internet.

The 'New Yorker' asked me to shoot a story on climate change in 2005, and I wound up going to Iceland to shoot a glacier. The real story wasn't the beautiful white top. It ended up being at the terminus of the glacier where it's dying.

The entire North Polar ice cap is disappearing before our very eyes. It's been the size of the continental United States for the last 3 million years and now 40 percent is gone and the rest of it is going.

The prediction that glaciers will be gone from Glacier National Park has been moved up by 10 years to 2020, the same year it's predicted the Arctic Sea will be ice-free in the summer.

In the Arctic, things are already getting freaky. Temperatures have warmed three times faster than the global average.