Don Young Quotes

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.

In the Andes and the Alps, I have seen melting glaciers. At both of the Earth's Poles, I have seen open sea where ice once dominated the horizon.

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.

If this ice melts in Greenland it can shut down the Gulf Current.

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

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 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.

The average global temperature has increased by about 0.8 degrees Celsius since 1880, with two-thirds of the warming occurring since 1975.

We have no choice: we must protect Arctic ice, enable it to continue to act as an essential temperature regulator for the planet, avoid the catastrophic rise in sea levels that would result from the ice melt, and stop the disappearance of permafrost releasing irreversible quantities of greenhouse gases back into the atmosphere.

You want calamities? What about the Ice Age?

Climate change is having a dramatic effect on the ground.

I don't like the term 'global warming,' because it's misleading. It implies something that's mainly about temperature, that's gradual, and that's uniform across the planet. And in fact, temperature is only one of the things that's changing.

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.

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.

I once saw a lump of Greenland breaking off into the sea and moving south, which of course will affect the atmosphere and us generally, and it'll happen more and more.

Global warming is my personal experience.

The world cannot live without the Arctic; it affects every living thing on Earth and acts as a virtual thermostat, reflecting sunlight and cooling the planet.

The North Pole will be ice-free during summer in years to come, and that itself will put the Arctic Sea basin on a very high risk of... environmental disasters that might be there.

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 do believe in the Bible as the final word of God. And I do believe that God said the Earth would not be destroyed by a flood. Now, do I believe in climate change? In my trip to Greenland, the answer is yes. The climate is changing.

I think the climate has been changing for billions of years.

On 15 July 2007, I swam across an open patch of sea at the North Pole to highlight the melting of the Arctic sea ice.

The climate has been changing since there was a climate.

What people don't understand about the Arctic is that this isn't just about those other people, those Eskimos that have nothing to do with us. The Arctic drives the climate of the whole globe.

What I worry about is climate change, because that would have untold effects that we can't even measure yet.