Nicholas Kristof Quotes

Young people, those who think they're experts in science, there's no doubt. They just believe it, and so there has to be an explanation - and whatever man is doing has caused the jet stream to slow down, and that is permitting the polar vortex.

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 key thing to understand is that solar activity causes shifts in the jet stream with consequent changes in weather patterns and triggers processes that lead to storm formation.

Some scientists believe climate change is the cause of unprecedented melting of the North Pole, and that effects these very uncertain weather patterns. I think we should listen to those scientists and experts.

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.

As Earth's climate changes, we can expect more destructive hurricanes. As sea level and surface temperatures rise, more solar energy is trapped in the atmosphere, revving up the hydrological cycle of evaporation and precipitation and sometimes manifesting in terrifying storms.

It was some UN agency that issued a report saying we're beyond the point of return here. And there was a picture of a polar bear on a little, tiny block of ice, which is a fraudulent - there are more polar bears than ever. The arctic ice caps are not melting. There's so much garbage out there.

We're seeing the reality of a lot of the North Pole starting to evaporate, and we could get to a tipping point. Because if it evaporates to a certain point - they have lanes now where ships can go that couldn't ever sail through before. And if it gets to a point where it evaporates too much, there's a lot of tundra that's being held down by that ice cap.

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

Scientists with access to data from Navy submarines traversing underneath the North polar ice cap have warned that there is now a 75 percent chance that within five years the entire ice cap will completely disappear during the summer months.

Ice in the West Antarctic and over Greenland, i.e., ice that's over a rock at the moment, that will raise the level of the sea as it slides into the ocean, putting at risk everyone and everything that lives on the coasts, and that includes an enormous percentage of the world's people.

Certainly, packets of sea ice, in say the Arctic, which have failed to fully reform in the last couple of years.

A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods.

Rising seas create a higher baseline for future storm surges. The New York City Panel on Climate Change has projected that coastal waters may rise by two feet by 2050 and four feet by the end of the century.

We finally know where the red line for climate really is. After the rapid melt of arctic ice in the summer of 2007, our best scientists, led by NASA's Jim Hansen, went back to work and produced a series of papers showing that with more than 350 ppm (parts per million) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we couldn't have a planet "similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted."

I sometimes wish we could have, over the next five or ten years, a lot of horrid things happening-you know, like tornadoes in the Midwest and so forth-that would get people very concerned about climate change.

The Antarctic ice sheet has reached record levels in the midst of so-called climate change and global warming. It's the same thing at the North Pole. Arctic ice sheet levels are at record levels. The North Pole is supposed to have been melted by now, according to Algore.

Ask people who are close to the natural world: farmers, people who work the land or in some way use the land for their livelihoods. They will tell you what they are seeing isn't so good. They will tell you the changes they have seen in the past twenty years are remarkable in one way or another and unlike anything they had seen before that.

It now appears that the fracturing of that ice is happening much more quickly than people previously thought, apparently at a slow melt.

I do believe that our climate is changing. I don't agree that all the changes are necessarily due solely to human activity.

Among the environmental trends undermining our future are shrinking forests, expanding deserts, falling water tables, collapsing fisheries, disappearing species, and rising temperatures. The temperature increases bring crop-withering heat waves, more-destructive storms, more-intense droughts, more forest fires, and, of course, ice melting. We are crossing natural thresholds that we cannot see and violating deadlines that we do not recognize.

What a seaOf melting ice I walk on!

There is an emerging scientific consensus that global warming is making hurricanes more intense and more destructive. It turns out that Katrina fits into a pattern that scientists and greens have been trying to warn us about for a long time.

The climate system is being pushed hard enough that change will become obvious to the man in the street in the next decade.

Sure there's a percentage of people who are like, "It snowed in May. I don't believe in climate change." Well, that's crazy, but that's always gonna be the case. I suppose if climate change happens much faster than even the dire experts predict, then I suppose opinions will change.