Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

You could warm Mars up, over time, with greenhouse gases.

Earth might one day soon resemble the planet Venus.

The greenhouse effect is something you can observe experimentally - and most people have observed the greenhouse effect themselves, in greenhouses. Yes?

Human-caused climate change threatens almost every aspect of human existence.

It's not the case that carbon dioxide drives temperatures. When you leave Ice Ages, it's the other way around: The temperatures go up first, and then carbon dioxide levels go up.

Mars once was wet and fertile. It's now bone dry. Something bad happened on Mars. I want to know what happened on Mars so that we may prevent it from happening here on Earth.

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

Once the steam engine went away and we started moving into burning fossil fuels - not just burning them, but everything we do with oil - we've been experiencing [these problems] at an accelerated rate. The scary end-game scenario is getting closer and closer, about what we're going to be able to do to sustain life on this planet as we have come to know it. And I think this is a very real possibility, that we could be dealing with conditions we have no idea how to wrestle with.

Unless we stop dumping 70 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every 24 hours, which we are doing right now ... the continued acceleration of this pollution would destroy the future of human civilization.

Something bad happened on both Mars with its dried-up watercourses and Venus with its runaway greenhouse effect. Could something bad happen on Earth too? Our species currently turns row upon row of environmental knobs, without much regard to long-term consequences.

I think it's crazy for us to play games with our children's future. We know what's happening to the climate, we have a highly predictable set of consequences if we continue to pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

We're putting 70 million tonnes of pollution into the atmosphere every day, trapping an enormous amount of extra heat from the sun inside the earth's atmosphere. It's threatening to push the planet past a tipping point beyond which climate change would be difficult to stop

Climate change is real and humans do contribute to those changes.

Hurricane Sandy is a disturbing sign of things to come. We must heed this warning and act quickly to solve the climate crisis. Dirty energy makes dirty weather.

We are upsetting the atmosphere upon which all life depends. In the late 80s when I began to take climate change seriously, we referred to global warming as a "slowmotion catastrophe" one we expected to kick in perhaps generations later. Instead, the signs of change have accelerated alarmingly.

Overall, The Population Bomb was probably too optimistic. I was writing about climate change - Anne and I actually wrote the book. We discussed whether or not you'd have to take a gondola to the Empire State Building, and that sort of thing, but we didn't know at the time whether the climate change would be in the direction of heating or cooling. We just didn't know enough about it.

It does not matter whether we burn fossil fuels with malice or with love. As far as the atmosphere is concerned, it is not concerned. It is a collection of gases.

[G]lobal warming, that manufactured monomania.

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

One problem is that we are heavily dependent upon fossil fuels. And that's where the greenhouse gases come from, by and large, some deforestation, as well. But we have not yet come to grips with how to change that. So that's where we are right now.

Climate change represents the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen

Climate change is a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen...We risk damages on a scale larger than the two world wars of the last century.

Coal makes us sick. Oil makes us sick. It’s global warming. It’s ruining our country. It’s ruining our world.

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.

... the consensus of the scientific community has shifted from skepticism to near-unanimous acceptance of the evidence of an artificial greenhouse effect. Second, while artificial climate change may have some beneficial effects, the odds are we're not going to like it. Third, reducing emissions of greenhouse gases may turn out to be much more practical and affordable than currently assumed.