Leonor Varela Quotes

Climate change had arrived a century sooner than expected, and future generations were no longer the only victims.

The floods and fires and storms and droughts that Australia has suffered in the last few years have left no doubt in many Australians' minds about just how much is a stake in a super-heated world.

We’re the first generation to feel the impact of climate change and the last generation that can do something about it.

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.

As species are exterminated by shifting climate zones, ecosystems can collapse, destroying more species.

With a disaster like global warming, it's too late to worry about when it's looming except to figure out how to adapt to it.

Most reputable scientists agree that climate change is real and that the effects are likely to be bad. But nobody can say for sure exactly what 'bad' means. The safest and most equitable way out of this horrific mess is simple: cut fossil-fuel emissions.

China and India will take the global leadership on climate change: they are suffering for it.

In the case of climate change, the threat is long-term and diffuse and requires broad international action for the benefit of people decades in the future. And in politics, the urgent always trumps the important, and that is what makes it a very difficult and challenging issue.

So it's mainly a question of helping the Third World overcome the effects of global warming.

Collective human actions are transforming, even ravaging, the biosphere - perhaps irreversibly - through global warming and loss of biodiversity.

Australia has suffered a decade of drought, epic floods, a Category 5 cyclone, and a plague of locusts. But just because Aussies have the biggest carbon footprint in the world, it doesn't mean they're stupid.

I joined the Safe Climate Caucus because I believe in leaving a safer planet for future generations.

Climate change could produce a lot of misery and waste without necessarily leading to large-scale armed conflict, which depends more on ideology and bad governance than on resource scarcity.

There's no really rosy scenario ahead, where climate change just doesn't happen, but I believe we don't have the ethical right to throw our hands up in the air and say, 'Game over.' Whatever pathway we choose, our descendants will be dealing with that reality for centuries to come.

By the time we see that climate change is really bad, your ability to fix it is extremely limited... The carbon gets up there, but the heating effect is delayed. And then the effect of that heat on the species and ecosystem is delayed. That means that even when you turn virtuous, things are actually going to get worse for quite a while.

We don't think much about climate change and rising sea levels here in the U.S. Beyond a few gardeners, birders and hikers who notice the changes in our own ecosystem, we live on, blissfully unaware of our changing Earth. Our storms - Katrina, Sandy - are dismissed as once-in-a-century events.

Climate change is destroying our path to sustainability. Ours is a world of looming challenges and increasingly limited resources. Sustainable development offers the best chance to adjust our course.

What I worry about is climate change, because that would have untold effects that we can't even measure yet.

We used to call them the storm of the century but now we're seeing what happens if we don't act fast enough - and real human beings are suffering because of that.

For millions of Americans, climate change is no longer just a chart or a graph. It's the smoke on our tongues from massive wildfires. It's the floodwater invading our homes and record-breaking hurricanes and heat waves.

Anybody who doesn't see the impact of climate change is really, I would say, myopic. They don't see the reality. It's so evident that we are destroying Mother Earth. This is not the problem of one country or a few countries: it is the problem of mankind. We need to work together to stop this. Otherwise, our future generations will simply disappear.

All countries will feel the increasing effects of dangerous climate change and it is those least able to bear it who are already being hurt first and hardest.

Climate change is the greatest threat to humanity, perhaps ever. Global temperatures are rising at an unprecedented rate, causing drought and forest fires and impacting human health.

Climate change is sometimes misunderstood as being about changes in the weather. In reality it is about changes in our very way of life.