Bill McKibben Quotes

We know the surface temperature of the Earth is warming. It has risen by .6 degrees Celsius over the past 100 years. There was a warming trend from the 1890s to the 1940s, cooling from the 1940s to the 1970s, and then sharply rising temperatures from the 1970s to today.

In Australia, average temperatures have risen almost one degree since 1910, and each decade since the 1940s has been warmer than the one before. That warming is real. Its consequences are real. And it will change our lives in real and practical ways.

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

The ten hottest years in the atmospheric record, going back only 160 years, have been in the last eleven years.

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.

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

Our planet is warming due to pollution from human activities. And a warming climate increases the likelihood of extreme weather.

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

The last time the world was three degrees warmer than today-which is what we expect later this century-sea levels were 25m higher. So that is what we can look forward to if we don't act soon.

global warming. every day i leave my house and think, "was it this hot last year?" the heat this summer here in LA and in most of the US has been unbearable. i can't remember another time when it was 105 degrees fahrenheit out here (40.5 celsius), and that's the kind of weather we've been having pretty much every day.

Probably more than anything else, the place that we really see the effects of the power of even the relatively mild temperature increases so far is in the melting of everything frozen on the planet.

The important point there is that when people talk about a mean temperature rise of say two, three or four degrees that's a sort of global average which really is a signature of large scale change in climatic patterns.

There is definitely global warming, and man is definitely contributing to it. Go out to, say, Montana and talk to some pretty conservative people, hunters and fishermen. They know that in the trout stream they fished when they were growing up, the trout are stressed because the water temperature is going up. They know the hunting season has been delayed because the snows are coming later, and therefore the elk aren't coming down from the mountains.

Is global warming new? I don't know. When I was young I remember the sun being hot.

We just see a sort of cascading amount of data of the damage that is being done by those increased temperatures.

Climate change is having a dramatic effect on the ground.

Global warming is my personal experience.

Every day, the temperature of Sol's surface increases by five billionths of a degree, a change of no consequence for thousands of millennia to come. But a few hundred million years from now, barring a fix by our descendants, this relentless heating will substantially change Earth's biosphere in ways that might not be survivable for us.

Even if we were to stop putting out greenhouse gases right now, we'd still face decades of warming.

I think global warming is a very real problem for our world. I've seen the changes that have taken place in the Antarctic, in the Himalayas, where the natural ice has sort of faded away, and there's no doubt in my mind that we're living in a strange world, a world which is not easy to understand or handle, But there's nothing you can do about, you just have to live your life as best you can.

Our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change. The deadly European heat wave of 2003, the fiery Russian heat wave of 2010 and catastrophic droughts in Texas and Oklahoma last year [2011] can each be attributed to climate change. The odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small. To count on those odds would be like quitting your job and playing the lottery every morning to pay the bills.

The facts are there that we have created, man has, a self-inflicted wound that man has created through global warming.

We're clearly not going to stop global warming at this point. We've already raised the temperature of the planet one degree. We've got another degree in the pipeline from carbon we've already emitted. What we're talking about now is whether we're going to have a difficult, difficult century, or an impossible one.

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.

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.