We have known since the 1800s that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere. The right amount keeps the climate conducive to human life.
The five-year mean global temperature has been flat for the last decade, which we interpret as a combination of natural variability and a slow down in the growth rate of net climate forcing.
The scientific excitement in comparing theory with data, and developing some understanding of global changes that are occurring, is what makes all the other stuff worth it.
The danger is that the compromises and special interests inherent in Kyoto-style targets and cap-and-trade will be accepted because of bureaucratic momentum.
Goals and caps on carbon emissions are practically worthless, if coal emissions continue, because of the exceedingly long lifetime of carbon dioxide in the air.
Coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet.
Rising carbon price is essential to ‘decarbonize’ the economy – to remove the nation towards the era beyond fossil fuels.
The question is not whether to close the parks, but how to accomplish this goal.
As a government employee, you can’t testify against the government.
Jail threats did not dissuade Martin Luther King – and intergenerational justice is a moral issue of comparable magnitude to civil rights.
The democratic process is supposed to be one person one vote, but it turns out that money is talking louder than the votes.
If we drive our fellow species to extinction, we will leave a far more desolate planet for our descendants than the world we inherited from our elders.
A level of no more than 350 ppm is still feasible, with the help of reforestation and improved agricultural practices, but just barely – time is running out.
The urgency derives from the nearness of climate tipping points.
What has become clear from the science is that we cannot burn all of the fossil fuels without creating a very different planet.
Well, you know what happens to crime when the heat goes up.
The carbon emissions from tar shale and tar sands would initiate a continual unfolding of climate disasters over the course of this century. We would be miserable stewards of creation. We would rob our own children and grandchildren.
We have at most ten years – not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.
I was lucky to grow up at a time when it was not difficult for the child of a tenant farmer to make his way to the state university.
Adding CO2 to the air is like throwing another blanket on the bed.
No member of the human race stepping out onto another heavenly body could possibly have represented the best of humanity more than Neil Armstrong did.