Quotes & Sayings About Climate

Every footstep we take, every action has a consequence. We breathe in weather, but we breathe out CO2. We're responsible for weather and for climate. — Gretel Ehrlich

Good buildings make and are made by their settings, and they are appropriately different in different locations. Climate, culture, topography and materials have helped create regional architectural languages that seem curiously right for their locations and for all times. — Jaquelin T. Robertson

If you are interested enough in the climate crisis to read this post, you probably know that 2 degrees Centigrade of warming (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is the widely acknowledged threshold for "dangerous" climate change. — Jeff Goodell

To date, no convincing evidence for AGW (anthropogenic global warming) has been discovered. And recent global climate behavior is not consistent with AGW model predictions. — Richard Courtney

The results of recent research on the impacts of climate change dramatically weaken the case for expensive, near-term abatement programs. — Robert O. Mendelsohn

In adopting these attitudes and practices, a parent will accomplish a large part of educating a child for responsibility. And yet, example alone is not enough. A sense of responsibility is attained by each child through his or her own efforts and experience. While the parents' example creates the favorable attitude and climate for learning, specific experiences consolidate the learning to make it part of the child's character. Therefore, it is important to give specific responsibilities to children matched to their different levels of maturity. In most homes children present problems, but parents find the solutions. If children are to mature, they must be given the opportunity to solve their own problems. — Haim G. Ginott

money can't buy good health or a serene state of mind - especially the latter. You can fly to the ends of the earth in search of the best climate or the best medical treatment and the chances are that you will have to keep flying! — Ruskin Bond

Her father said, "You know, my dears, the world has been abnormal for so long that we've forgotten what it's like to live in a peaceful and reasonable climate. If there is to be any peace or reason, we have to create it in our own hearts and homes." "Even at a time like this?" Meg asked. The call from Calvin, the sound of her husband's voice, had nearly broken her control. "Especially at a time like this," her mother said gently. — Madeleine L'Engle

I don't believe that the science is settled on man-made climate change. And so - while I live in Colorado - you see where I live. I love the environment. And - and I want to make sure we do everything we can to protect the environment. I don't want government to put artificial standards on us. — Ken Buck

I do think it's often a mistake to call them climate skeptics. I think they're deniers, just as I think president Ahmadinejad of iran who claims not to believe that the Holocaust occurred. — Thomas Schelling

No people require maxims so much as the American. The reason is obvious: the country is so vast, the people always going somewhere, from Oregon apple valley to boreal New England, that we do not know whether to be temperate orchards or sterile climate. — Edward Dahlberg

We live in a world in which it is impossible to anticipate most of the contingencies that will arise. Neither the political context, nor the inventions, nor the fashions, nor the weather, nor the climate are precisely specifiable in advance. There is, in the real world, no possibility of working with an abstract space of all the contingencies that may evolve. To do real economics, without mythological elements, we need a theoretical framework in which time is real and the future is not specifiable in advance, even in principle. It is only in such a theoretical context that the full scope of our power to construct our future can make sense. — Lee Smolin

From 50 centuries, we can learn about the close relationship between garden design and urban design, because both arts involve the composition of buildings with paving, landform, water, vegetation and climate. — Tom Turner

The ecological challenges we face are the result of billions of ecologically ignorant decisions made by billions of people over centuries. To address the climate crisis, we now need billions of people to make ecologically intelligent decisions. — Allen Hershkowitz

For human beings to destroy the biological diversity of God's creation; for human beings to degrade the integrity of the earth by causing changes in its climate, by stripping the earth of its natural forests or destroying its wetlands; for human beings to contaminate the earth's waters, its land, its air, and its life -- these are sins. — Patriarch Bartholomew

Climate of Egypt in winter is the reign of spring upon earth, & summer in the air, and tranquility in the heat. — Herman Melville

The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the 'capabilities' of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain. That is the basis of progressive policy - not maximising economic growth and personal incomes. Nowhere will this be more important than in tackling the greatest problem facing us this century, the environmental crisis. Whatever ideological logo we choose for it, it will mean a major shift away from the free market and towards public action, a bigger shift than the British government has yet envisaged. And, given the acuteness of the economic crisis, probably a fairly rapid shift. Time is not on our side. — Eric Hobsbawm

We have shared responsibility for global climate; we have to reduce climate change below 2 degrees Celsius. — Angela Merkel

In a climate of tight budgets, reduced workforces and stiff competition, internal training can be a great substitute for costly offsite workshops and conferences. — Harvey MacKay

The question of place and climate is most closely related to the question of nutrition. Nobody is free to live everywhere; and whoever has to solve great problems that challenge all his strength actually has a very restricted choice in this matter. The influence of climate on our metabolism, its retardation, its acceleration, goes so far that a mistaken choice of place and climate can not only estrange a man from his task but can actually keep it from him: he never gets to see it. — Friedrich Nietzsche

These people who bang on about saving the planet, it's not the planet they want to save, the planet doesn't need saving. They're concerned solely with preserving the planet so the human race lives on and on, a massive distinction people fail to make — Robert Breeze

I was born in Turkey in an extremely oppressive climate at the time of pogroms, massacres, really. An immigrant appreciates the freedom more. — Elia Kazan

Successfully reframing the climate debate in the United States from one based on environmental values to one based on health values ... holds great promise to help American society better understand and appreciate the risks of climate change ... — George Mason

Indie music is 'it' now. It's kind of a revolution to the music: 1980s, 1990s music was getting very sanitized; they were complying with the music industry. Music was getting more and more dead in a way. Now, because of the social climate that's very severe, the artists are compelled to start being real. It's really great that indie music is now. — Yoko Ono

If substantial methyl hydrate melt begins to occur in the Arctic Ocean basin, then the (carbon) accelerator will be jammed, and there will be nothing we can do to cut the speed of climate change. — Mark Lynas

Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy. — Elizabeth Kolbert

The only thing that will really change global warming in the long run is if we radically increase the speed with which we get alternative technologies to deal with climate change. — Bjorn Lomborg

Others [terrorists] are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves — William Cohen

Climate change: I say the debate is over. We know the science, we see the threat and we know that the time for action is now — Arnold Schwarzenegger

Our carbon emissions have to eventually go to zero. We have to. Otherwise we're never going to have a stable climate and that's what our goal is for human civilization to thrive, a stable climate. We don't want one that's hotter, we don't want one that's colder, we want one that's stable. — Katharine Hayhoe

It's been encouraging to hear the pope talking about climate change and take it away from being a political issue to being one of survival. — Joy Bryant

The increasing frequency of extreme weather events, droughts and floods is in line with what climate scientists have been predicting for decades - and evidence is mounting that what's happening is more severe than predicted, and will get far worse still if we fail to act. — David Suzuki

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. — Terry Joyce

A system in which legal police shootings of unarmed civilians are a common occurrence is a system that has some serious flaws. In this case, the drawback is a straightforward consequence of America's approach to firearms. A well-armed citizenry required an even-better-armed constabulary. Widespread gun ownership creates a systematic climate of fear on the part of the police. The result is a quantity of police shootings that, regardless of the facts of any particular case, is just staggeringly high. Young black men, in particular, are paying the price for America's gun culture. — Matthew Yglesias

We're handing them [young people & future generations] a climate system which is potentially out of their control. We're in an emergency: you can see what's on the horizon over the next few decades with the effects it will have on ecosystems, sea level and species extinction — James Hansen

In certain ways, we, many of us, stopped paying attention to the world. I have to think we would have moved on the whole climate issue in a different way if we'd been paying better attention. — Karen Joy Fowler

Government has the responsibility to provide the climate in which Americans, all Americans, have an opportunity for good jobs; and not only for good jobs, but an opportunity if they have the ability and the desire, to be owners and managers, to have a piece of the action, because if they have a piece of the action, then they believe in the system rather than fighting against it. — Richard M. Nixon

First, I worry about climate change. It's the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it, and make a lot of the other efforts that we're making irrelevant and impossible. — William J. Clinton

Nobody can tell about this California climate. One minit its hot and the next minit its cold, so a person never knows what to hock. — Anita Loos

The climate has been changing. Of course it [has]. Evidence throughout history, [which] we can assess, especially during human history, shows there have been ups and downs. But the last ten thousand years have been relatively stable compared to now. — Sylvia Earle

I don't have much patience for anyone who denies that this challenge is real. — Barack Obama

For I believe that climate does thus react on man
as there is something in the mountain air that feeds the spirit and inspires. — Henry David Thoreau

Adapting to climate change: It really is time for action ... we are on a never-ending road; this is with us for the rest of our natural lives — Joan Ruddock

Look, cell phone geolocation data shows very few clustering anomalies for this hour and climate. And that's holding up pretty much across all major metro areas. It's gone down six percentage points since news of the Karachi workshop hit the Web, and it's trending downward. If people are protesting, they aren't doing it in the streets." He circled his finger over a few clusters of dots. "Some potential protest knots in Portland and Austin, but defiance-related tag cloud groupings in social media put us within the three-sigma rule - meaning roughly sixty-eight percent of the values lie within one standard deviation of the mean. — Daniel Suarez

We have often had this particular exchange about climate and landscape and why we both feel so lonely here uprooted. It was what each of us had wanted of course.Besides wanting to experience a place we hated, we wanted to be insomniacs and loners, losers and drop-outs. To know the sky was the only location of meaning and joy left to us. — Fanny Howe

We may achieve climate, but weather is thrust upon us. — O. Henry

My father's generation's crisis was fighting fascism. Ours is fighting climate change. It is much harder because you can't see it, it is not an obvious threat. But the solution is in our hands. — Nicholas Stern

So passed away Sorrow the Undesired
that intrusive creature, that bastard gift of shameless Nature who respects not the social law; a waif to whom eternal Time had been a matter of days merely, who knew not that such things as years and centuries ever were; to whom the cottage interior was the universe, the week's weather climate, new-born babyhood human existence, and the instinct to suck human knowledge. — Thomas Hardy

For the economy itself will die if our ecosystems collapse. — Leonardo DiCaprio

I was raised in a climate where I believed in God because I was afraid of going to hell - and I didn't think that was the right way to fall in love with somebody. — Scott Stapp

Universal adoption of the institutions of the free society would better enable adaptation to climate both now and in the future. It would also ensure that, if at some point in the future, a real catastrophe, whether human-induced or otherwise (including climate change), does loom on the horizon, humanity would be in a better position to address it. — Julian Morris

Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection, says the German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer. The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the worlds resources will be negotiated. — Ottmar Edenhofer

I am convinced that climate change represents a historic opportunity on an even greater scale. — Naomi Klein

The scientific evidence is now overwhelming: climate change presents very serious global risks, and it demands an urgent global response — Nicholas Stern

Since oceans are the life support system of our planet, regulating the climate, providing most of our oxygen and feeding over a billion people, what's bad for oceans is bad for us - very bad. — Philippe Cousteau Jr.

I chose to document the lives of people living in a remote village in Alaska called Shishmaref because there we can literally see how climate change is affecting their homes, livelihoods and ultimately their lives. — Amy J. Berg

The sea erupted. Often the sea and land changed places. The immobility of contours of continents and seas, a dogma in geology, has no basis in fact. And immediately there is the problem of the climate. There were ancient climates that were very different from what they are today. If those corals grew where they were found, certainly the Earth was not travelling with the same elements of rotation and revolution which means not in the same orbit, not with the axis directed in the same position as it is today. If you don't believe it, try to conservate corals on the North Pole. — Immanuel Velikovsky

Our climate leadership team has recommended it go up and I would say there's always going to be upward pressure to raise the carbon tax. Remember, we're already double what the only other province who has a carbon tax is at right now, Quebec - they peg it at about $15 a tonne. — Christy Clark

In the Twenty-first century we are going to confront a climate shock worse than any mankind has ever experienced. — Guillaume Faye

If I could put my finger on it, I'd bottle it and sell it. I came down here originally in 1972 with some drunken fraternity guys and had never seen anything like it - the climate, the smells. It's the cradle of music; it just flipped me. Someone suggested that there's an incomplete part of our chromosomes that gets repaired or found when we hit New Orleans. Some of us just belong here. — John Goodman

Without a doubt, it [Canada] is the land God gave to Cain. — Mordecai Richler

There is, even today, a Flat Earth Society that meets every year to say the Earth is flat. The science about climate change is very clear. There really is no room for doubt at this point. — Rajendra K. Pachauri

We have serious challenges regarding climate change, unsustainable use of natural resources, water scarcity, loss of biodiversity, forests and farmland. Not to mention the huge inequality still prevailing in several parts of the planet. — Guilherme Leal

Animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined; it is the number one cause of climate change. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Although I have a variety of obligations, the climate crisis is my central concern. — Al Gore

Time is running out to deal with climate change. — Steven Guilbeault

When it comes to climate, we can all make a big difference. At the most basic level, don't let denial go unchallenged and win the conversation on climate. — Al Gore

It turns out that there are swaths of habitat in the north of Siberia and Yukon that actually could house a mammoth. Remember, this was a highly plastic animal that lived over tremendous climate variation. — Hendrik Poinar

The need for general scientific understanding by the public has never been larger, and the penalty for scientific illiteracy never harsher ... Lack of scientific fundamentals causes people to make foolish decisions about issues such as the toxicity of chemicals, the efficacy of medicines, the changes in the global climate. — Peter Agre

Nuclear tests poison the environment - and they also poison the political climate. They breed mistrust, isolation and fear. — Ban Ki-moon

It seems clear to me also that climate change is a problem which can no longer be left to our future generation. — Pope Francis

Those people on the other side, they will answer any question about climate change by saying, 'I'm not a scientist.' Well, I'm not a scientist either. I'm just a grandmother with two eyes and a brain. — Hillary Clinton

I like to layer when I fly - the climate always changes from the airport to the plane to the new city. — Shay Mitchell

When you talk to a Republican, many of them just outright say, 'Yeah. Climate change isn't real,' without assessing the facts, and it's a big problem. It's not a red or blue issue, it's a green issue ... Not because of facts or science but because of emotion. — Philippe Cousteau Jr.

Wine is one of the most complex of all beverages: the fruit of a soil, climate, and vintage, digested by a fungus through a process guided by the culture, vision, and skill of an individual man or woman. — Neel Burton

We need to keep switching up the language around climate change. — Cate Blanchett

The winters were getting colder, starting earlier, lasting longer, with more snows than he could remember from childhood. As soon as man stopped adding his megatons of filth to the atmosphere each day, he thought, the atmosphere had reverted to what it must have been long ago, moister weather summer and winter, more stars than he had ever seen before, and more, it seemed, each night than the night before: the sky a clear, endless blue by day, velvet blue-black at night with blazing stars that modern man had never seen. — Kate Wilhelm

If climate change issues are not adequately addressed - if we keep running those nice energy subsidies, if the price on carbon is not adequately set, if policymakers don't have it on their radar screens - then financial stability in the medium and long-term is clearly at stake. — Christine Lagarde

Global climate change is real and we have a limited time to change our behavior or live with the consequences. We can all help by making small changes in our lives to letting our voice be heard by our governing bodies. As has always been the case in this country, if the people demand change, it will come. — Kyra Sedgwick

Let me put it this way: You cannot live in the world without being in pain, spiritual and physical pain. We have developed mechanisms to deal with these pains, to overcome them somehow. Therapy, religion and spirituality, relationships, material success. All this can work, but also become a problem itself.
The pursuit of happiness has even been put into the American constitution a couple centuries ago. Today we're so rich, we own much more than we need, we have liberties unknown before, even though they are endangered in the current political climate in the US - and we forget how wonderful it nevertheless is, compared to most other political and economic systems. We have a saying that goes: Give a man enough rope and he hangs himself. — David Foster Wallace

but the truth is that earth's climate never rests. It is in constant flux. Every event in history occurred against the background of some climate change. In particular, our planet has experienced numerous cycles of cooling and warming. During — Yuval Noah Harari

We're at a crucial point in history. We cannot have fast cars, computers the size of credit cards, and modern conveniences, whilst simultaneously having clean air, abundant rainforests, fresh drinking water and a stable climate. This generation can have one or the other but not both. Humanity must make a choice. Both have an opportunity cost. Gadgetry or nature? Pick the wrong one and the next generations may have neither. — Mark Boyle

Environment is no one's property to destroy; it's everyone's responsibility to protect. — Mohith Agadi

In Europe, where climate change absolutism is at its strongest, the quasi-religion of greenery in general and the climate change issue in particular have filled the vacuum of organised religion, with reasoned questioning of its mantras regarded as a form of blasphemy. — Nigel Lawson

Consumptive patients, with lungs incompetent to perform the duties of lungs, people with defective hearts that break down under excitement of the circulation, people with any constitutional flaw preventing the due fulfillment of the conditions of life are continually dying out and leaving behind those fit for the climate, food, and habits to which they are born ... And thus is the race kept free from vitiation. — Herbert Spencer

Climate change is having a dramatic effect on the ground. — Andrew Mitchell

...and any discussion of art vs. entertainment in the present cultural climate invites accusations of elitism and snobbery. — Steven Moore

In light of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, critics are arguing that abuses of Iraqi prisoners are being produced by a climate of disregard for the laws of war. — John Yoo

The choices we make now will shape the future of not just our countries, but the world at large. We should intensify our cooperation in confronting global challenges like Terrorism, Cyber Security and Climate Change. — Narendra Modi

Concentration of greenhouse gases, especially CO2, have increased substantially since the beginning of the industrial revolution. And the National Academy of Sciences indicates that the increase is due in large part to human activity. — George W. Bush

Too often, the air conditioners we use to cool down also contribute to climate change - the very force that's fueling extreme heat. — Frances Beinecke

We humans, one species of animal amongst millions, have now become the de facto guardians of the planet's climate stability. — Mark Lynas

Identifying the flaw in the US philosophical roots requires that we move beyond the intellectual and emotional climate in which the Constitution was conceived and adopted. The meanings of concepts and words change with use, and even the Supreme Court has admitted that the original perspective of the American social contract has been altered by the passage of time. — David E. Wilkins

Well, I think of the folks who are the climate deniers as the flat Earthers and the people who say the moon landings never happened. — Jeffrey Kluger

I think it is important for people to understand that there are real serious economic costs and real serious economic damages associated with inaction on climate change. — Naomi Oreskes

Climate change is the world's greatest environmental challenge. It is now plain that the emission of greenhouse gases, associated with industrialization and economic growth ... is causing global warming at a rate that is unsustainable. — Tony Blair

I think governments will increasingly be tempted to rely on Silicon Valley to solve problems like obesity or climate change because Silicon Valley runs the information infrastructure through which we consume information. — Evgeny Morozov

The civil rights movement was very important in my house, and then Vietnam was very important 'cause there were two boys, so I came of age during a very heated political climate. — Al Franken

Ireland, in breadth, and for wholesomeness and serenity of climate, far surpasses Britain; for the snow scarcely ever lies there above three days: no man makes hay in the summer for winter's provision, or builds stables for his beasts of burden ... the island abounds in milk and honey. — Venerable Bede

Ethics and Equity are at the core of debate of climate change. Debate has to move from Climate Change to Climate Justice. — Narendra Modi