Clive Thompson Quotes

Mother Nature comes up against reality, and the reality is that the system doesn't work.

We ignore slow environmental changes unless they are crisis-driven, such as hurricanes in Florida.

Pollution knows no boundaries; it moves across borders.

I'm not going to argue with scientists how much human activity affects natural environment, including climate.

One degree turns out to be enough to really unhinge all sorts of earth's ecosystems.

Climate change has the potential to affect everything we care about - whether it is the health of our families, the stability of our communities, or the fate of the wild animals.

The environment is going to change very quickly.

Unfortunately, The End of Nature turns out to be correct, although I wish it were not so. The only places that I was incorrect was, as with environmental science at the time, the estimation of the speed at which we see the effects of global warming.

Forests are the world's air-conditioning system-the lungs of the planet-and we are on the verge of switching it off.

Sometime in the last ten years the best brains of the Occident discovered to their amazement that we live in an Environment. This discovery has been forced on us by the realization that we are approaching the limits of something.

Throughout all of human history we've enjoyed certain benign circumstances: an envelope of atmosphere, an envelope of temperature. A kind of resilience that if you cut down trees, then they'll grow back. You take fish, they recover. You put stuff into the atmosphere that you know is not good for us, but we can still breathe. We haven't awakened, generally, to the sense of urgency that does exist.

We don't have seasons anymore. You know why? We lost the ozone layer. Well, put it on milk cartons - let's find it!

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.

Ultimately, if you think about all the youth that everybody has mentioned here in Africa, if everybody is raising living standards to the point where everybody has got a car and everybody has got air conditioning, and everybody has got a big house, well, the planet will boil over - unless we find new ways of producing energy.

It is your human environment that makes climate

Climate change is such a consequential crisis to everybody in the world.

Our planet is changing in ways that will have profound impacts on all of humankind.

Fortunately, we know more about the problems that we have than in all preceding history. We know now the consequences of the things that we put into the air, into the water - of the way we treat life on Earth.

The debate is over. The scientific community has spoken in a virtually unanimous voice. Climate change is real. It is caused by human activity.

I just wonder what it would be like to be reincarnated in an animal whose species had been so reduced in numbers than it was in danger of extinction. What would be its feelings toward the human species whose population explosion had denied it somewhere to exist. I must confess that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus.

I don’t think we have conclusive proof that humans are at the center of [global warming]

For those of us who worry more about working people than about windfall profits for oil companies, it may net out. A better question is: what does it do to our economy if we manage to overheat the earth? This summer's drought provides a small taste.

If I put myself on the side of those who see the world as warming up in a bad way, who see the general march of industrial culture as something undesirable, the one thing I must be beware of doing and which my colleagues on that side don't beware of doing, we must beware of saying we've got to stop changing the environment. There is no 'the' environment which we can change, the world is changing all the time.

Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else? If contributing to the suffering of billions of animals that live miserable lives and (quite often) die in horrific ways isn't motivating, what would be? If being the number one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet (global warming) isn't enough, what is? And if you are tempted to put off these questions of conscience, to say not now, then when?

I have a friend named Doris who argues, on good authority, that the single biggest cause of global warming is menopause.