James Lovelock Quotes

If humans pursue a business-as-usual course for the first half of this century, I believe the collapse of civilization due to climate change becomes inevitable.

If we do nothing, the ensuing climate catastrophe will wreck our economy - including wreaking havoc on our food production systems. All credible scientists agree on this point.

The picture's pretty bleak, gentlemen... The world's climates are changing, the mammals are taking over, and we all have a brain about the size of a walnut.

We're running the most dangerous experiment in history right now, which is to see how much carbon dioxide the atmosphere... can handle before there is an environmental catastrophe.

In the history of the world, all five mass extinctions have been accompanied by massive climate change, so we are facing an incredibly serious threat. In fact, we are technically in the sixth mass extinction right now, and it is the first mass extinction being attributed to humans.

There is evidence that we are headed into what would be the planet's sixth mass extinction. It's hard to know for sure if you're in one because a mass extinction is an event where over 75 percent of the species on the planet die out over a - usually about a million-year period. The fastest it might happen is in hundreds of thousands of years.

Unless we, who know better than most world citizens the horror of the mushroom cloud that hangs ominously over us, become active Humanists in word and in deed, we may well condemn our world to awake some day never to view again the "green stillness of the country where we can hear the heart of Nature beat," but instead to crawl about and gasp for breath on limited terrain, surrounded by lakes and seas of molten lava, representing the remnants of that which once we knew as Mother Earth.

I think Australia is pretty much living the last day on Earth in a lot of ways.

We hope that as a species we're capable of dealing with environmental catastrophe before it actually does collectively kill most of us.

If nuclear warfare is believed to be somewhat controlled, then climate change is now the greatest threat.

Climatologists are all agreed that we'd be lucky to see the end of this century without the world being a totally different place, and being 8 or 9 degrees hotter on average.

Earth might one day soon resemble the planet Venus.

No matter what we call it, poison is still poison, death is still death, and industrial civilization is still causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet.

Several times in Earth's history, rapid global warming occurred, apparently spurred by amplifying feedbacks. In each case, more than half of plant and animal species became extinct. New species came into being over tens and hundreds of thousands of years. But these are time scales and generations that we cannot imagine.

We'll lose more species of plants and animals between 2000 and 2065 than we've lost in the last 65 million years. If we don't find answers to these problems, we're gonna be victims of this extinction event that we're at fault for.

If we do not act now, we will become spectators to slaughter.

Within hours of the impact, most of Mexico and the United States must have been reduced to a desolate wasteland of the most appalling, agonizing destruction. Where only the day before there had been fertile landscapes, full of animals and plants of all kinds, now there was a vast, smoldering netherworld, mercifully hidden from view by black clouds of roiling smoke.

In our lifetime, we're going to see fifty percent of the world's species go extinct. We're already seeing this radical rise in the world's temperature that was predicted.

We are killing life on Earth, we're in the sixth mass extinction event and it's possible that human beings will go extinct. We're in a culture that doesn't want you to think about that.

In recent years, our planet has been warming at an alarming rate and seen record-breaking temperatures. We are now witnessing the sixth mass extinction event in the earth's geologic history. Our sea levels are rising at an alarming rate, threatening our largest cities, like New York, Los Angeles, and Miami.

If anyone's going to bring about mass extinction, it'll be Donald Trump.

Millennials really don't turn out in numbers that people expect and hope for. Speaking of global warming and climate change, you know all these emails that WikiLeaks is dumping? I haven't found any on climate change. We got emails from Hillary to her campaign staff and her campaign staff to Hillary.

Burning all the fossil fuels will destroy the planet we know, Creation, the planet of stable climate in which civilization developed.

Our presence on this planet does not seem to be sustainable. Our technical civilization makes up particularly vulnerable. There is talk all over the scientific community about climate change. Many of them [scientists] agree, the end of human life on earth is assured.

When you look at the consequences of climate change, at rainforest deforestation, at antibiotic resistance, these are not necessarily political issues, but rather issues that have the ability to threaten our species.