Sea Levels Quotes & Sayings

Beyond the borders of wealthy countries like the United States, in developing countries where most people in the world live, the impacts of climate change are much more deadly, from the growing desertification of Africa to the threats of rising sea levels and the submersion of small island nations. — Amy Goodman

The last time the world was three degrees warmer than today-which is what we expect later this century-sea levels were 25m higher. So that is what we can look forward to if we don't act soon. — James Hansen

French Polynesia embraces a vast ocean area strewn with faraway outer islands, each with a mystique of its own. The 118 islands and atolls are scattered over an expanse of water 18 times the size of California, though in dry land terms the territory is only slightly bigger than Rhode Island. The distance from one end of the island groups to another is four times further than from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Every oceanic island type is represented in these sprawling archipelagoes positioned midway between California and New Zealand. The coral atolls of the Tuamotus are so low they're threatened by rising sea levels, while volcanic Tahiti soars to 2,241 meters. Bora Bora and Maupiti, also high volcanic islands, rise from the lagoons of what would otherwise be atolls.
— David Stanley

Global warming has already triggered a sea level rise that could reach from 6 metres (19.69 ft) to 25 metres (27.34 yards). — James Hansen

More than four billion people live within a stone's throw of the ocean, so what happens to it affects them immediately, daily, whether pollution, more frequent storms, or rising sea levels. — Jon Bowermaster

Every human alive today came from a single mother in Africa, who lived about two hundred thousand years ago. Later, when the sea levels receded about ninety thousand years ago, a small tribe of a few hundred traveled out of the plains of Africa. After crossing the Red Sea through the Gate of Grief passageway, they fanned out and populated the entire world. How can there be any strangers among us when we all share a single common ancestor? — Nina Wirk

We tell our children they're trapped like rats on a doomed, bankrupt, gangster-haunted planet with dwindling resources, with nothing to look forward to but rising sea levels and imminent mass extinctions, then raise a disapproving eyebrow when, in response, they dress in black, cut themselves with razors, starve themselves, gorge themselves, or kill one another. — Grant Morrison

If all the ice sheets melted, sea levels would rise by 60 metres - the height of a twenty-storey building - and every coastal city in the world would be inundated. — Bill Bryson

The science tells us that if we fail to reduce global warming pollution, global temperatures will rise to dangerous levels and unleash devastating extreme weather events and accelerate destructive sea level rise. — Frances Beinecke

Hillary Clinton is listening to the scientists who tell us that - unless we act boldly and transform our energy system in the very near future - there will be more drought, more floods, more acidification of the oceans, more rising sea levels. — Bernie Sanders

At 378 parts per million, current CO2 levels are unprecedented in recent geological history. (The previous high, of 299 parts per million, was reached around 325,000 years ago). It is believed that the last time carbon dioxide levels were comparable to today's was three and a half million years ago, during what is known as the mid-Pliocene warm period, and it is likely that they have not been much higher since the Eocene, some fifty million years ago. In the Eocene, crocodiles roamed Colorado and sea levels were nearly three hundred feet higher than they are today. A scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) put it to me - only half-jokingly - this way: It's true that we've had higher CO2 levels before. But, then, of course, we also had dinosaurs. — Elizabeth Kolbert

The state of our civilization manifests itself both in the non-problems that terrify us beyond all reason - rising sea levels - and in the real problems we pay no heed to [population decline] ... In reality, much of the planet will be uninhabited long before it's uninhabitable — Mark Steyn

Education in India has made monumental progress since Independence but continues to face daunting challenges at multiple levels, particularly in terms of quality, infrastructure and dropout rates. We have islands of excellence floating in a sea of mediocrity. — Shashi Tharoor

Canada, more than any nation, will be affected by rising sea levels from global warming. — David Suzuki

Saving Greenland is both a metaphor and a precondition for saving civilization. If its ice sheet melts, sea levels will rise 23 feet. Hundreds of coastal cities will be abandoned. The rice growing river deltas of Asia will be under water. There will be hundreds of millions of rising-sea refuges. The word that comes to mind is chaos. If we cannot mobilize to save the Greenland ice sheet; we probably cannot save civilization as we know it. — Lester R. Brown

For me the most important issue is climate change because it in some ways trumps every other issue. Everything else we care about falls by the wayside if the Greenland ice shelf falls into the sea. And if suddenly sea levels rise 21 feet, everything we hold near and dear ceases to exist. — Moby

Global warming experts are saying that sea levels could rise 20 feet. Apparently their strategy for surviving this is to stand on top of a pile of government research grant money. — Fred Thompson

Global warming is a fact. Now it's up to liberals to make it a reality. Hence there is crucial importance in preventing powerful, greedy free market forces from getting in the way of worsening storms and rising sea levels. The Kyoto Accord is a good first step. — P. J. O'Rourke

At the moment, the 4 percent of us in this country produce a quarter of the world's carbon dioxide - once you look at maps of rising sea levels and spreading mosquitoes, you realize that we've probably never figured out a way to hate our neighbors around the world much more effectively. — Bill McKibben

Similarly, dance is not just a raging sea of unrelated bodily movements; the relationship of those movements to one another is what creates integrity and integrality, a coherence and cohesion that the higher levels of our brain process. — Daniel Levitin

Climate change is a global problem. The planet is warming because of the growing level of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity. If this trend continues, truly catastrophic consequences are likely to ensue from rising sea levels, to reduced water availability, to more heat waves and fires. — Malcolm Turnbull

Imagine that after reaching an atmospheric concentration of 450 ppm sometime in the next decade, we immediately stop all carbon dioxide emissions. By the year 3000, neither atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide nor global mean surface temperature would have returned to their pre-industrial baselines, and sea levels would still be rising. — Dale Jamieson

In September 2013, the panel of 209 lead authors and 600 contributing authors, from 39 nations, poring over 9,200 scientific publications, came to these landmark conclusions: global warming is "unequivocal," sea levels are rising, ice packs are melting, and if we continue at this pace we "will cause further warming and changes in all components of the climate." However, they added, we can slow the process down if we begin at once. — Diane Ackerman

Pirenne was quite right that the ancient trading economy continued after the first invasions and the establishment of the mixed Romano-barbarian successor kingdoms. Some kind of connectivity by sea endured continuously, even if at very low levels (Horden and Purcell 2000). — Henri Pirenne

We don't think much about climate change and rising sea levels here in the U.S. Beyond a few gardeners, birders and hikers who notice the changes in our own ecosystem, we live on, blissfully unaware of our changing Earth. Our storms - Katrina, Sandy - are dismissed as once-in-a-century events. — J. Maarten Troost

But with sea levels rising along the East Coast - a natural phenomenon accelerated by climate change - scientists project that in our lifetimes what was once considered a hundred-year flood will happen every three to twenty years. — Deborah Blum

At the Biesbosch nature center, I met up with a water-ministry official named Eelke Turkstra. Turkstra runs a program called Ruimte voor de Rivier (Room for the River), and these days his job consists not in building dikes, but in dismantling them. He explained to me that the Dutch were already seeing more rainfall than they used to. Where once the water ministry had planned on peak flows in the Rhine of no more than fifteen thousand cubic meters per second, recently it had been forced to raise that to sixteen thousand cubic meters per second and was already anticipating having to deal with eighteen thousand cubic meters per second. Rising sea levels, meanwhile, were likely to further compound the problem by impeding the flow of the river to the ocean. — Elizabeth Kolbert

According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979. — George Will

There is something called the rapture of the deep, and it refers to what happens when a deep-sea diver spends too much time at the bottom of the ocean and can't tell which way is up. When he surfaces, he's liable to have a condition called the bends, where the body can't adapt to the oxygen levels in the atmosphere. All of this happens to me when I surface from a great book. — Nora Ephron

We now know that we cannot continue to put ever-increasing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. Actions have consequences. In fact, the consequences of past actions are already in the pipeline. Global temperatures are rising. Glaciers are melting. Sea levels are rising. Extreme weather events are multiplying. — Cary Fowler

So now the polar ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising,
and the weather is all messed up. Plants and animals are dying off in record
numbers, and lots of people are starving and homeless. And we're still
fighting wars with each other, mostly over the few resources we have left. — Ernest Cline

The times today are too dangerous for the young and the smart to be not bothered. Know the truth. Remember, "We can deny the truth. But, we can't avoid it." We have been there; we have all been there. Ask a female friend who is fighting for a better pay scale, ask the father of an immigrant who is nervous about the future of his daughter, ask a gay friend who is fighting for the right to marry, ask an African-American friend who wants her younger brother to be unafraid and proud, ask a homeless worker in Bangladesh whose house just got swept by rising sea levels, ask a young child in Beijing who breathes an air polluted by fossil fuels, ask a child labor in India who works ten hours and twelve hours to get two square meals a day. And, when you ask, you will know. You will know why we need to take it personally. — Sharad Vivek Sagar

If our government won't spend the money to protect New Orleans sufficiently today, what are the chances we will spend the money to protect dozens of coastal cities post-2050, once everyone knows that sea levels will keep rising and intense hurricanes will occur relentlessly? — Joseph J. Romm

Al Gore has a hit movie called 'An Inconvenient Truth.' I have an inconvenient truth for him: you're still not the president ... This past weekend, Al Gore's movie, 'An Inconvenient Truth,' earned more per screen than any film in the country ... I dare say Gore's movie is the highest grossing PowerPoint presentation in history ... Global warming: Can we live with it? ... It is time we did something, namely resign ourselves to doing nothing [on screen: Follow Congress' Lead] ... For instance, when sea levels rise, we'll just build levees [on screen: Worked for New Orleans] — Stephen Colbert

Rising sea levels, severe draughts, the melting of the polar caps, the more frequent and devastating natural disasters all raise demand for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. — Leon Panetta

Climate change, in some regions, has aggravated conflict over scarce land, and could well trigger large-scale migration in the decades ahead. And rising sea levels put at risk the very survival of all small island states. These and other implications for peace and security have implications for the United Nations itself. — Ban Ki-moon

Without sounding too grandiose, the survival of the planet itself is at stake, you have rising sea levels, acidification of the oceans, immigration sparked by climate change, droughts that are much more severe. — Laurent Fabius

The retreat of the Arctic sea ice, the warming of the oceans, the rapid shrinking of the glaciers, the redistribution of species, the thawing of the permafrost - these are all new phenomena. It is only in the last five or ten years that global warming has finally emerged from the background "noise" of climate variability. And even so, the changes that can be seen lag behind the changes that have been set in motion. The warming that has been observed so far is probably only about half the amount required to bring the planet back into energy balance. This means that even if carbon dioxide were to remain stable at today's levels, temperatures would still continue to rise, glaciers to melt, and weather patterns to change for decades to come. — Elizabeth Kolbert

Are we likely to see rising sea-levels? Not in our lifetimes or hose of our grandchildren. It is not even clear that sea-levels have risen at all. As so often in this domain, there is conflicting evidence. The melting of polar or sea ice has no direct effect. — Don Aitkin

Let me state what the official IPCC prediction is: Sea levels could go up as much as three-quarters of a meter in this century, but there is a reasonable probability it could be much higher than that. — Steven Chu

They keep saying that sea levels are rising an' all this. It's nowt to do with the icebergs melting, it's because there's too many fish in it. Get rid of some of the fish and the water will drop. Simple. Basic science. — Karl Pilkington

If Americans in 2100 came to see 12 meters sea-level rise as inevitable by 2200, who can even begin to fathom how the nation would respond? — Joseph J. Romm

As a sea level adapted human, I am more fearful about the radiation levels on top of high altitude mountains, mile high modern cities and inside jet aircraft than from nuclear reactors and bombs, as that is where I get the most radiation exposures in the modern world. — Steven Magee