Piers Corbyn Quotes

There is no doubt that we should take solar radiation into account. We have seen ground temperatures rising since 1975, and it is important to know to what extent that has been caused by the sun or by carbon dioxide.

Putting aside for the moment the question of whether human industrial CO2 emissions are having an effect on climate, it is quite clear that they are raising atmospheric CO2 levels. As a result, they are having a strong and markedly positive effect on plant growth worldwide. There is no doubt about this.

When I was a boy in the 1930s, the carbon dioxide level was still below 300 parts per million. This year, it reached 382, the highest figure for hundreds of thousands of years.

You could warm Mars up, over time, with greenhouse gases.

The greenhouse effect is something you can observe experimentally - and most people have observed the greenhouse effect themselves, in greenhouses. Yes?

The general trend in the last 4,000 years is that carbon dioxide and temperature have been moving against each other.

I'm saying, Come on, the global warming thing? How did the ice melt during the ice ages? Was the dinosaurs driving SUVs around back then?

It's very clear that global climate change is occurring on earth, but it's also been very clear that that has always happened on earth. We've always had a changing climate on earth. We all know about ice ages. We know when our continent was covered with ice sheets. We know glaciers come and they go. It puzzles me that people forget that.

Few scientists now dispute that today's soaring levels of carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere will cause global temperature averages to rise by as much as nine degrees Fahrenheit sometime after the year 2000.

Al Gore likes to say that mankind puts 70 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every day. What he probably doesn't know is that mother nature puts 24,000 times that amount of our main greenhouse gas-water vapor-into the atmosphere every day and removes about the same amount every day. While this does not 'prove' that global warming is not man-made, it shows that weather systems have by far the greatest control over the Earth's greenhouse effect, which is dominated by water vapor and clouds.

The models that have been constructed agree that when, as has been predicted, the level of carbon dioxide or its equivalent in other greenhouse gases doubles from pre-Industrial Revolution concentrations, the global average temperature will increase, and that the increase will be 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius or 3 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit... In Dallas, for instance, a doubled level of carbon dioxide and other gases like methane, would increase the number of days a year with temperatures above 100 degrees from 19 to 78 each year.

The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium.

The science is clear that there is an increase in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. What is not clear from the science is how much of that increase is caused by human activity; and what also is not clear is what impact those increases have on the climatic cycle.

Adding CO2 to the air is like throwing another blanket on the bed.

The basic science is very well established; it is well understood that global warming is due to greenhouse gases. What is uncertain is projections about specifics in the next few decades, by how much will the climate change.

Some people call it global warming; some people call it climate change. What is the difference?

As a scientist, my attention became totally focused on global warming some 15 years ago by the elegant and powerful measurements of carbon dioxide trapped in ice cores taken as much as 2 miles deep from the great East Antarctica ice sheet.

What most people know but don't realize they know is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already. If the sun wasn't there, we'd be a frozen ice ball at three degrees Kelvin, and the sun powers the entire system of precipitation. The whole ecosystem is solar-powered.

Carbon dioxide isn't the only greenhouse gas out there. Other substances, such as water vapor and nitrous oxide, also trap heat to varying degrees.

Burning carbon-based substances like oil, gas, and especially coal, produces billions of tons of extra carbon dioxide each year. Methane gas from cows and pigs and other animals on our large farms ends up in the atmosphere as well, trapping more of the sun's energy as heat.

Imagine what our planet would look like with an increase in temperature of two degrees or four degrees, given that at 0.8 degrees we already have serious problems in the world.

The atmospheric CO2 concentration is rising - mainly due to the burning of fossil fuels. It's agreed that this build-up will, in itself, induce a long-term warming trend, superimposed on all the other complicated effects that make climate fluctuate.

Climate change is very real.

We can look back through ice-core data and see over 800,000 years, relationships between carbon dioxide and the temperature of the world. So those people who deny the importance of climate change are just wasting their time. They're also being diversionary because if we don't act the risks are enormous.

I don't think anybody would dispute that we're seeing a warming of the Earth.