Climate Disaster Quotes

Nathaniel Rich wrote 'Odds Against Tomorrow' well before Hurricane Sandy and its surge crashed onto the isle of Manhattan, well before the streets were flooded and the subways drowned, only the Goldman Sachs building sparkling above the darkened avenues.

We definitely don't want to go through another Ice Age or another natural cycle of global warming. Both happen over a long period of time. It would be disastrous for our civilization, and not just for us but many other species.

We are in a fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.

The urgency derives from the nearness of climate tipping points.

If Earth ever suffers a runaway greenhouse effect (like what has happened on Venus), then our atmosphere would trap excess amounts of solar energy, the air temperature would rise, and the oceans would swiftly evaporate into the atmosphere as they sustained a rolling boil. This would be bad.

Quickly capping 363 oil well fires in a war zone is impossible. The fires would burn out of control until they put themselves out... The resulting soot might well stretch over all of South Asia... It could be carried around the world... [and] the consequences could be dire. Beneath such a pall sunlight would be dimmed, temperatures lowered and droughts more frequent. Spring and summer frosts may be expected... This endangerment of the food supplies... appears to be likely enough that it should affect the war plans.

We'd already lost the possibility of stopping global warming entirely. That hasn't been in the cards for a long time. The triumph of Trump probably means that we're not going to be able to stop it at the two-degree mark that the world had been aiming for. That's very bad news, mostly because the planet seems to be more sensitive than we thought to even small increases in temperature.

The climate is doing its usual tricks. There's nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now.

The issue of climate change is one that we ignore at our own peril. There may still be disputes about exactly how much we're contributing to the warming of the earth's atmosphere and how much is naturally occurring, but what we can be scientifically certain of is that our continued use of fossil fuels is pushing us to a point of no return. And unless we free ourselves from a dependence on these fossil fuels and chart a new course on energy in this country, we are condemning future generations to global catastrophe.

Evolution is a mistake. Humans are a mistake. We've destroyed our planet.

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.

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.

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.

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.

THTL— too hot to live

Hurricane Katrina this past week was certainly the worst episode in what has become an all-too-familiar and tragic cycle, and our nation is now faced with a set of unprecedented challenges.

Venus has a runaway greenhouse effect. I kind of want to know what happened there because we're twirling knobs here on Earth without knowing the consequences of it. Mars once had running water. It's bone dry today. Something bad happened there as well.

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.

What is the future going to say about us now? What are our kids going to look at us and say, 'How could you not stop that person from getting into power? How could you not stop that environmental disaster that you saw coming a mile away?'

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.

I founded NextGen Climate with a clear mission in mind: to act politically to prevent climate disaster and preserve American prosperity.

If we don't figure out global warming, we're not going to be able to be here.

It is a fact that, up to seven million people a year are dying from fossil fuel pollution. It is a fact that we are already dealing with the catastrophe of climate change in places like California, where people have been burnt out of their homes and where they are dealing with record droughts.

The public is really not kept abreast, and our leaders are not clear and forthright about what the terms of engagement are right now - that we really have no choice except to undertake a wartime scale mobilization, but a mobilization knowing that we can actually fix this. It's only a disaster if we continue to plunge headlong into the problem, which is only accelerating in spite of everything that the Democrats have been willing to say and do about it.

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.