If you think about your and my grandchildren, this is what really worries me. I don't want them - if I'm still alive by then - to say, 'Why didn't you do something about it?', when you could have done.
I'm in the dark as to how close to an edge or transition to a new ocean and climate regime we might me. But I know which way we are walking. We are walking toward the cliff.
C'mon kids! Wake up and smell the CO2! Take over your administration building, occupy your university president's office, or storm in on the next meeting of your college's board of trustees until they agree to make your school carbon neutral.
A family-friendly "eco-populism" can mobilize and unite millions who, at this point, would be turned off by a more extreme set of demands. The momentum will build, through these early efforts, for more comprehensive solutions.
Any successful long-term strategy will require that the green wave fully and passionately embrace the principles of eco-equity.
Apparently, the fossil-fuel industry's strategy is to convince the American people that we should just burn all the way through the last of our oil and coal reserves.
By kicking its carbon addiction, America will increase its national wealth and generate millions of jobs that can't be outsourced.
Clean coal represents a breakthrough in the marketing of coal, but not in the science of burning coal.
Come, then, let us go forward together with our united strength - and win a better future for generations to come.
Now is not the time to shrink from the challenge of saving our only home in the universe. Now is not the time to pull into ourselves, retreating into either survivalist or escapist mode. To the contrary, this is the time for titans, not turtles. Now is the time to open our arms, expand our horizons, and dream big. Big problems require big solutions.
Now we stand at our own crossroads, looking out upon two futures: one with rising temperatures, rising oceans, and rising violence on a hot and strip-mined planet and another with expanding organic harvests, growing solar arrays, and deepening global partnerships on a green and thriving Earth.
I get to be the mayor of the capital city of the most polluting state of the most polluting country on the planet. ... I see truly a non-carbon economy. It's cleaner. It's healthier. We're about out of alternatives, so it's going to be easier and more cost effective to start to do the right thing.
Anyone who would tackle our current addiction to fossil fuels is going to have to maneuver around denial.
Carbon-free energy is simply something we have to do. The time for talk is past. If we turn around net carbon emissions by 2020 rather than 2040, we get another 2° of fever rather than 3° - and that's a big difference.
Carrying on as usual carries enormous risks, condemning today's students to a world of constant insecurity and frequent catastrophes.
Climate change has a very high procrastination penalty that just grows with each passing year of inaction - rather like what happens if you don't pay off your credit card. But for climate, there is no such thing as a fresh start from bankruptcy.
If we don't start thinking big about the CO2 problem, we may miss our opportunity to stop a climate runaway that will trash the habitable parts of the earth.
Perhaps we should put up posters in such places reminding people that where they stand was underwater the last time that the Earth ran a 3°F fever.
The extinction of Homo Sapiens would mean survival for millions, if not billions, of Earth-dwelling species. Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on Earth - social and environmental.
We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.
This [climate change] is potentially so dangerous that we have to act strongly. Do we want to play Russian roulette with two bullets or one?
Oil depletion and climate change will create an entirely new context in which political struggles will be played out. Within that context, it is not just freedom, democracy, and equality that are at stake, but the survival of billions of humans and of whole ecosystems.
Al Gore likes to say that mankind puts 70 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every day. What he probably doesn't know is that mother nature puts 24,000 times that amount of our main greenhouse gas-water vapor-into the atmosphere every day and removes about the same amount every day. While this does not 'prove' that global warming is not man-made, it shows that weather systems have by far the greatest control over the Earth's greenhouse effect, which is dominated by water vapor and clouds.
Everything on our dinner table-the meat, cheese, salad, bread, and soft drink-requires carbon dioxide to be there. For those of you who believe that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, we have a special diet: water and salt!
If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s blip (as I'm sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean—but we'd still have to explain the land blip.
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