Frederick Seitz Quotes

The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe.

It is one thing to impose drastic measures and harsh economic penalties when an environmental problem is clear-cut and severe....It is foolish to do so when the problem is largely hypothetical and not substantiated by observations....we do not currently have any convincing evidence or observations of significant climate change from other than natural causes.

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.

I always thought we had an environmental problem, but I hadn't realized how urgent it was. James Lovelock writes that by the end of this century there will be one billion people left.

Our presence on this planet does not seem to be sustainable. Our technical civilization makes up particularly vulnerable. There is talk all over the scientific community about climate change. Many of them [scientists] agree, the end of human life on earth is assured.

In ten years [i.e., 1980] all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.

We hope that as a species we're capable of dealing with environmental catastrophe before it actually does collectively kill most of us.

Our situation, with global warming and air quality and all of that, has gotten to be catastrophic.

With the Gulf spill, I absolutely merged in the time when I had that infection. I couldn't get out of the Gulf spill. There were so many similarities: the drains and the siphoning and the tubes. And also in the way the earth was hurt, the ocean was bleeding. Remember the video cams of the oil gushing? I couldn't stop watching that.

I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.

Global warming may be a 'crisis,' even 'the most pressing environmental problem of our time.' ... Indeed, it may ultimately affect nearly everyone on the planet in some potentially adverse way, and it may be that governments have done too little to address it. It is not a problem, however, that has escaped the attention of policymakers in the Executive and Legislative Branches of our Government, who continue to consider regulatory, legislative, and treaty-based means of addressing global climate change.

The environment is going to change very quickly.

If our system continues without modification involving environmental and social concern, we will face an economic and social break down.

There are a lot of problems in the world, a lot of tragic things that have to be addressed, economic, medical, political, all kinds of things, but, to my way of thinking, they pale in comparison to the overall problem of the environmental deadline.

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.

I have witnessed the takeover of my world by plastic.

If we don't cut carbon's money pipeline, we will pay for their gasoline with floods, droughts, fires, super storms, drowned cities, mass extinctions, wars, and collapsing civilizations.

No hope for planet at all. But I will be gone before the planet is gone, so it's your problem.

The planet is in distress and all of the attention is on Paris Hilton.

Whether many people realize it yet or not, man, the Inferior Animal, has by now proved himself incapable of keeping his own species - and others - alive for very much longer. So the earth has begun its own plan to set things right.

If environmental protection efforts continue to lag behind economic growth, pollution will become even more rampant.

The picture's pretty bleak, gentlemen... The world's climates are changing, the mammals are taking over, and we all have a brain about the size of a walnut.

It seems clear to me also that climate change is a problem which can no longer be left to our future generation.

Something bad happened on both Mars with its dried-up watercourses and Venus with its runaway greenhouse effect. Could something bad happen on Earth too? Our species currently turns row upon row of environmental knobs, without much regard to long-term consequences.

Isn't it sad that you can tell people that the ozone layer is being depleted, the forests are being cut down, the deserts are advancing steadily, that the greenhouse effect will raise the sea level 200 feet, that overpopulation is choking us, that pollution is killing us, that nuclear war may destroy us - and they yawn and settle back for a comfortable nap. But tell them that the Martians are landing, and they scream and run.