Global Warming/Quotes

"The real negotiation is between humans on the one hand and chemistry and physics on the other. And chemistry and physics, unfortunately, don't bargain."

- Bill McKibben on the International Climate Change Summit

"I have spent a long research career studying physics that is closely related to the greenhouse effect...Fears about man-made global warming are unwarranted and are not based on good science....The earth's climate is changing now, as it always has. There is no evidence that the changes differ in any qualitative way from those of the past."

- Dr. Will Happer, Princeton physicist

"There's a better scientific consensus on this than on any issue I know -- except maybe Newton's second law of dynamics...Man has reached the point where his impact on the climate can be as significant as nature's."

- D. James Baker, administrator of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

"It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don't buy into anthropogenic global warming."

- U.S Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA

"There is broad agreement within the scientific community that amplification of the Earth's natural greenhouse effect by the buildup of various gases introduced by human activity has the potential to produce dramatic changes in climate. Only by taking action now can we ensure that future generations will not be put at risk."

- Statement by 49 Nobel Prize winners and 700 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 1990

"I am a skeptic...Global warming has become a new religion."

- Nobel Prize winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever

"I have not been one who believed in the global warming. But I tell you, they are making a convert out of me as these blistering summers. They have broken heat records in a number of cities already this year and broken all-time records and it is getting hotter and the ice caps are melting and there is a build up of carbon dioxide in the air. We really need to address the burning of fossil fuels.""

- Pat Robertson of the 700 Club

"The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn't listen to others. It doesn't have open minds... I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists."

- Indian geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia at Punjab University

"The European records, being so long, make a convincing case that we're already seeing changes ... This is not like "Centuries from now the ice sheets will melt." This is "In a few decades it will be dramatically different." To me, that's alarming."

- Drew Shindell, NASA physicist

"CO2 emissions have been increasing, but the rise in air temperature stopped around 2001. Climate change is due in large part to naturally occurring oscillations."

- Syunichi Akasofu, professor emeritus at the University of Alaska

"[W]hen we look at the graphs of rising ocean temperatures, rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and so on, we know that they are climbing far more steeply than can be accounted for by the natural oscillation of the weather ... What people (must) do is to change their behavior and their attitudes ... If we do care about our grandchildren then we have to do something, and we have to demand that our governments do something."

- David Attenborough, naturalist

"Runaway greenhouse theories contradict energy balance equations."

- Miklós Zágoni, physicist and environmental researcher

"The absolutely best case scenario - which in my opinion is unrealistic - with the minimum expected climate change... we end up with an estimate of 9% [of all species] facing extinction."

- Chris Thomas, ecologist at the University of Leeds

"Even doubling or tripling the amount of carbon dioxide will virtually have little impact, as water vapour and water condensed on particles as clouds dominate the worldwide scene and always will."

- Geoffrey G. Duffy, Chemicals and Materials engineering professor at the University of Auckland, New Zealand

"Unless we stop dumping 70 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every 24 hours, which we are doing right now ... the continued acceleration of this pollution would destroy the future of human civilization."

- Al Gore, former U.S. vice-president and Nobel Peace prize winner

"For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?"

- Geologist Dr. David Gee, professor at Uppsala University, Sweden

"It used to be controversial whether smoking caused lung cancer, it used to be controversial whether HIV caused AIDS. Now, there are a few mavericks who deny those things. In the case of climate change, I think the debate is going the same way in that there is a strong consensus that it is a serious matter."

- Lord Martin Rees, Royal Society president and Astronomer Royal of Great Britain

"Global warming causing climate change may be the ultimate issue that unites us all."

- Louise Burfitt-Dons

""Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century's developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age.""

- Richard Lindzen, MIT