Climate Change Quotes

Reverence for nature is part of our shared heritage. Combating climate change is in our enlightened self-interest.

The Nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.

The handling of our forests as a continuous, renewable resource means permanent employment and stability to our country life. The forests are also needed for mitigating extreme climatic fluctuations, holding the soil on the slopes, retaining the moisture in the ground, and controlling the equable flow of water in our streams.

The poverty of the people and the devastation of the natural environment painfully strike me.

We have to get to the point where we all come together, and we realize that we're all on the same Earth, and there's one way we can fix it.

We need to grow food, and we need to grow fuel. Imagine if, instead of dust rising into the sky, the carbon started returning to the Earth.

There's whistling coming out of a forest somehow; there's an entire dead species of tree right there in front of you, and not just a few trees, it goes for miles and miles. So, with that background, and then knowing what's going on in the world . . . I don't like to dwell on it much, but I think everybody's terrified.

Anyone who believes that there is no such thing as global warming must be blind or unintelligent.

Climate change is a terrible problem, and it absolutely needs to be solved. It deserves to be a huge priority.

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.

The nuclear approach I'm involved in is called a traveling-wave reactor, which uses waste uranium for fuel. There's a lot of things that have to go right for that dream to come true - many decades of building demo plants, proving the economics are right. But if it does, you could have cheaper energy with no CO2 emissions.

You're never going to get the amount of CO2 emitted to go down unless you deal with the one magic metric, which is CO2 per kilowatt-hour.

The cruel injustice is that even though the world's poor are doing essentially nothing to cause climate change, they're going to suffer the most from it.

The climate is like a bathtub that's slowly filling up with water. Even if we slow the flow of water to a trickle, the tub will eventually fill up and water will come spilling out onto the floor. That's the disaster we have to prevent. Setting a goal to only reduce our emissions-but not eliminate them-won't do it.

There are two numbers you need to know about climate change. The first is 51 billion. The other is zero. Fifty-one billion is how many tons of greenhouse gases the world typically adds to the atmosphere every year.

In other words, by mid-century, climate change could be just as deadly as COVID-19, and by 2100 it could be five times as deadly.