Great Throughts Treasury

"How a report is framed, which facts it contains and emphasizes and which it ignores, and in what context, are as important to sharing opinion as the bare facts themselves."

"The carbon lobby knew perfectly well that global warming posed real dangers, but it chose to deny those dangers and disparage anyone who sought to bring them to public attention. The lobby put its immediate economic interests ahead of humanity’s future well-being. - See more at: http://politicalquotes.org/taxonomy/term/21262#sthash.x0uC9jhg.dpuf"

"What right [do] people in wealthy countries have to blame the poor for their poverty, much less for humanity’s environmental dilemma, when it [is] rich countries’ consumption patterns that [are] responsible for the vast majority of the world’s resource depletion and ecosystem destruction?"

"One wouldn’t know it from most media coverage, but the world’s leading climate scientists have concluded that last summer’s rash of extreme weather — including record heat across much of Europe (especially Russia) and the United States — was driven in no small part by man-made global warming. Of course no single event can ever be definitively attributed to global warming; weather results from many factors. But according to the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization, the extraordinary heat, rains, drought and flooding that occurred this summer fit the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s projections of “more frequent and more intense extreme weather events due to global warming.” In other words, dangerous climate change is no longer tomorrow’s problem; it is here today. But for most of us, the other scientific shoe has yet to drop. Aside from a fundamentalist few, most people around the world, in rich and poor countries alike, accept that climate change is real and has already begun to occur. Nevertheless, many non-specialists still do not grasp the most fiendish aspect of the climate problem: we can’t turn it off. "

"The battle to prevent climate change, feeble as it was, is over. Now the race to survive it has begun. If humanity is to win this race, we must change the way we think about the climate problem. Humanity has left behind what I call the first era of global warming — when we argued about whether it was real and how to stop it — and entered a new, second era of the problem, where the paradigm has shifted in a fundamental but still largely unrecognized way. In the second era of global warming, the traditional goal of climate policy — limiting global emissions — is more important than ever but no longer sufficient. To be sure, we need to reverse global warming, and quickly — before the earth passes tipping points that could trigger irreversible climate change. At the same time, however, we must now prepare our societies for the many impacts already in the pipeline. In short, we face a double imperative: we must live through global warming even as we halt and reverse it."

"No matter how many solar panels, electric cars and other green technologies we humans may embrace, the fact remains that more severe climate change is locked in for decades to come. The reason is the physical inertia of the climate system: the fact that carbon dioxide can remain in the atmosphere for centuries. Even if global greenhouse gas emissions were magically halted overnight, sheer physical inertia would keep average global temperatures rising for another thirty years at least, scientists say."