Thomas Friedman Quotes

When I listen to the public debates about climate change, I am impressed by the enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories.

The basic scientific conclusions on climate change are very robust and for good reason. The greenhouse effect is simple science: greenhouse gases trap heat, and humans are emitting ever more greenhouse gases.

The climate has been changing since there was a climate.

Among all of our uncertainties weather is the most basic. We can’t live without it and we can’t control it.

Climate does fluctuate. It goes from hot to cold. We have ice ages.

My dad joined Langley in 1964 as a co-op student and retired in 2004 an internationally respected climate scientist.

The physical relationship between CO2 molecules and the atmosphere and the trapping of heat is as well-established as gravity, for God's sakes. It's not some mystery.

An increasing amount of climate research suggests a possibility of global cooling.

We simply don't know yet what's going to happen to the carbon in the atmosphere.

I don't think these weather conditions are going to get better on their own.

My district has been hit with three 500-year floods in the last several years, so either you believe that we had a one-in-over-100-million probability that occurred, or you believe as I do that there's a new normal, and we have changing weather patterns, and we have climate change. This is the science.

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.

We often say that our science is objective and accurate, but we don't often say that our science is incomplete - that although the established parts of natural science are very well tested and the evidence makes a compelling case for things being as they've been described, there nevertheless are open questions that we cannot answer.

The fact is the planet is warming right now, and it is easier to blame it on some human activity rather than saying we should better understand the whole problem and recognize there are natural conditions that are impacting this, too.

The more we look at the kinds of soils and the nature of the atmosphere and the polar caps, it all adds up to tell us that some liquid, which we very much believe was water, did flow in abundance on Mars in the past.

The Climate Risk Managers can be trained in the science and art of managing uncertain rainfall patterns leading to drought or flood.

The climate is changing, but the question is how much - and to what extent human factors are contributing to that.

Through space-based climate studies, my colleagues and I have learned that a stable and comfortable climate is not something to take for granted.

But scientists, who ought to know Assure us that it must be so. Oh, let us never, never doubt What nobody is sure about.

We cannot hope to either understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) new Summary for Policymakers is a political document that downplays assessments of uncertainty from the scientific reports. It omits much contrary evidence. In several cases, it even disagrees with the reports on which it is based.

Man-made global warming was a potential serious threat, and NASA wanted Congress to fund new satellites to study the problem. It was a team effort to get that accomplished.

We need a much better understanding of the climate before making policy choices that would impose substantial economic costs on our Nation.

Thus evidence that contradicts the global warming theory, climate Chicken Littles enlist as evidence for the correctness of their theory; every permutation in weather patterns — warm or cold — is said to be a consequence of that warming or proof of it.

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.