Hoyt Sanford Vandenberg Quotes

Oceans no longer matter when it comes to making us safe.

In Congress, I am focused on the effects of climate change, including ocean acidification and sea-level rise - both of which are threats to healthy oceans that sustain life on- and off-shore.

Oceans are one of the most important things in the world now and that is a national security threat of the United States of America, to be honest with you. That is why seeing the habitat destroyed is so short-sighted by us.

Ocean acidification - the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is turning the oceans increasingly acid - is a slow but accelerating impact with consequences that will greatly overshadow all the oil spills put together. The warming trend that is CO2-related will overshadow all the oil spills that have ever occurred put together.

Over the years, I have seen the power of the oceans to excite, feed, and sustain people. I have also seen them undergo a growing onslaught of attacks, from destructive fishing practices to rising acidification.

Swimming has been a very effective medium for telling a story about the state of our planet.

Let me state what the official IPCC prediction is: Sea levels could go up as much as three-quarters of a meter in this century, but there is a reasonable probability it could be much higher than that.

Australia is the only island continent on the planet, which means that changes caused by planet-warming pollution - warmer seas, which can drive stronger storms, and more acidic oceans, which wreak havoc on the food chain - are even more deadly here.

There are no islands anymore

The United States is lucky: It has only two neighboring countries and oceans on both sides. We have over a dozen neighboring countries and we have a long and complicated history with them.

Pollution, overfishing, the destruction of habitats, and climate change are emptying the oceans and enabling the lowest forms of life to regain their dominance.

Over the last several decades, human activity have so altered the basic chemistry of the seas that they are now experiencing evolution in reverse to the barren primeval waters of hundreds of millions of years ago.

There was a summer during which the whole South Shore of Oahu, you could see the bleached coral almost across all of the surfing spots. And so it's gone from an issue that only environmentalists cared about to an issue that almost everybody in the state of Hawaii cares about, because it's really affecting our quality of life.

Hawaii feels so passionately about climate. You know, our oceans are warming. As a result, we have more ocean acidification and coral bleaching. You can actually see it.

Worldwide, our oceans are warming, rising, and becoming dangerously acidic as a result of carbon pollution and climate change - endangering much that we hold dear.

Since oceans are the life support system of our planet, regulating the climate, providing most of our oxygen and feeding over a billion people, what's bad for oceans is bad for us - very bad.

There is a terribly terrestrial mindset about what we need to do to take care of the planet - as if the ocean somehow doesn't matter or is so big, so vast that it can take care of itself, or that there is nothing that we could possibly do that we could harm the ocean.

The seas need their own Kyoto Protocol.

The first thing that is not obvious to people is global warming is a less-than-1% effect. It's like being shortchanged at the bank by a penny every dollar. Over a long period of time with lots of transactions, that piles up.

There's no question that, um, you know, the oceans have risen, right? And the climate change part is, is a real part of it.

It seems incontrovertible to me that there is a global warming effect and that it is going to be serious, probably not in the amount of, say, six degrees warming, but it's likely that we'll get two to three degrees warming and that will be serious enough.

We are watching things happen with one degree changes in ocean temperature that we thought wouldn't happen until there were two or three degree changes in ocean temperature. These are facts.

I think the Caribbean countries face rising oceans and they face increase in the severity of hurricanes. This is something that is very, very scary to all of us. The island states in the world represent - I remember this number - one-half of 1 percent of the carbon emissions in the world. And they will - some of them will disappear.

Global warming is the foreboding thunder in the distance. Ocean acidification is the lightning strike in our front yard, right here, right now.

Since the middle of the 20th century, more has been learnt about the ocean than during all preceding human history; at the same time, more has been lost.