Co2 Quotes

Changes in clouds and rainfall can overwhelm what little effect CO2-water vapour has on temperature. ~ Willie Soon

Despite all the progress climate scientists have made in understanding the risks we run by loading the atmosphere with CO2, the world is still as addicted to fossil fuels as ever. ~ Jeff Goodell

We allow it to be dumped into this community asset, which is our one and only atmosphere. So that has to change, and there's really only one entity that can do that. So we have proposed a cap-and-trade system to stop that unlimited pollution, to use the forces of the market to efficiently allocate scarce permits to allow CO2 into the atmosphere. That's just one of 500 things we need to do, but it's probably the granddaddy of them all. ~ Jay Inslee

The scientists who do climate research understand that much of the ever increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere since 1850 must be attributed to burning those fossil fuels to produce the energy that drives industrialization. ~ John Olver

CO2 cannot cause global warming. I'll tell you why. It doesn't mix well with the atmosphere, for one. For two, its specific gravity is 1 1/2 times that of the rest of the atmosphere. It heats and cools much quicker. Its radiative processes are much different. So it cannot - it literally cannot cause global warming. ~ Joe Bastardi

CO2 is a minor player in the total system, and human CO2 emissions are insignificant compared to total natural greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, lowering human CO2 emissions will have no measurable effect on climate, and continued CO2 emissions will have little or no effect on future temperature ... While controlling CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels may have some beneficial effects on air quality, it will have no measurable effect on climate, but great detrimental effects on the economy and our standard of living. ~ Jonathan Duhamel

Whereas CO2 is the dominant greenhouse gas overall, it accounts for only 11 percent of agricultural emissions.2 The rest is nitrous oxide (53 percent) and methane (36 percent). Nitrous oxide is 296 times more potent per pound than CO2 as a climate-change gas, and on farms it results mainly from the use of fertilizer but also from cattle pee, especially if there is excessive protein in their diet, and from the burning of biomass and fuel.3 Methane, which is 25 times more potent than CO2, is mainly emitted by cows and sheep when they belch. Some is also emitted from silage. The CO2 comes from machinery but also from the heating of greenhouses to grow crops out of season or in countries that just don't have the right climate. ~ Mike Berners-Lee

Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear, puts out CO2. And so, what we're going to have to do at a global scale, is create a new system. And so, we need energy miracles. ~ Bill Gates

I think the whole human-induced greenhouse gas thing is a red herring ... I see climate change as due to the ocean circulation pattern. I see this as a major cause of climate change ... These are natural processes. We shouldn't blame them on humans and CO2. ~ William M. Gray

It is the fight for a new economy, a new energy system, a new democracy, a new relationship to the planet and to each other, for land, water, and food sovereignty, for Indigenous rights, for human rights and dignity for all people. When climate justice wins we win the world that we want. We can't sit this one out, not because we have too much to lose but because we have too much to gain. . . . We are bound together in this battle, not just for a reduction in the parts per million of CO2, but to transform our economies and rebuild a world that we want today. ~ Naomi Klein

The problem with small pressure vessels is CO2 toxicity. You can have all the oxygen in the world, but once the CO2 gets above 1 percent, you'll start to get drowsy. At 2 percent, it's like being drunk. At 5 percent, it's hard to stay conscious. Eight percent will eventually kill you. Staying alive isn't about oxygen, it's about getting rid of CO2. ~ Andy Weir

It's important to see things in perspective. Automobile traffic is responsible for only 12 percent of total CO2 emissions. One should be able to point this out without being accused of changing the subject. ~ Martin Winterkorn

The World Health Organization recently published some data showing that each overweight person causes and additional one tonne of CO2 to be emitted every year. With one billion people overweight around the world-of whom at least 300 million are obese-that's an additional one billion tonnes. ~ Jonathon Porritt

I'm really interested in how you create a whole new economy of recycling. It's literally the 'underground economy.' All this stuff that on the surface creates growth and profit, ends up with waste, junk, and CO2. So how do you make it economic to bring new players into the ball game? ~ Peter Senge

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

Climate alarmists insist that the apparently missing heat (from CO2 warming)is hiding in the deep ocean -- which is like telling a child Santa Claus lives at the North Pole, as deep ocean heat can't be measured.
-- Ralph B. Alexander, Letter to The Oregonian, January 28, 2013 ~ Ralph B. Alexander

Our CO2 mixes with everyone else's within a year, then hangs around for centuries like a shroud. ~ William H. Calvin

It would be incorrect to claim that our paper was an endorsement of CO2-induced global warming. ~ Craig D. Idso

It is in fact necessary to reduce CO2 emissions. There is no reason why we shouldn't spend our vacations on (the North Sea island of) Sylt instead of in the Seychelles, or drive more economical cars - for the sake of preserving increasingly scarce resources if nothing else. But that won't enable us to stop climate change. As long as China, India and the United States continue the way they have been, what we Germans do is more or less irrelevant. ~ Hans Von Storch

These proven positive consequences of elevated CO2 are infinitely more important than the unsubstantiated predictions of apocalypse that are hypothesized to result from global warming, which itself, may not be occurring from rising atmospheric CO2 levels. The aerial fertilization effect of atmospheric CO2 enrichment is the only aspect of global environmental change about which we can be certain; and to restrict CO2 emissions is to assuredly deny the biosphere the many benefits that accrue from this phenomenon. ~ Keith E. Idso

I think all countries need to aim to cut the CO2 emissions per person, taking account of externalities like imports and exports. ~ Martin Rees

But oxygen's easier to find on Mars than you might think. The atmosphere is 95 percent CO2. And I happen to have a machine whose sole purpose is liberating oxygen from CO2. Yay, oxygenator! ~ Andy Weir

Undoubtedly, at the moment, the major cause of CO2 emission is what happens in developed countries. ~ Chris Patten

CO2 is a pollutant? Tell that to the plants. ~ Rick Santorum

The biggest challenge is how to get people to wake up and realize this is a one-shot deal. If we fail, we are witting participants in the biggest experiment humans have ever done: moving CO2 levels to twice their value in the past 670.000 years and hoping it turns out okay for generations to come. ~ Nathan Lewis

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. ~ Bill Gates

The idea that somewhere in the desert far away you have a CO2 absorber that's removing the CO2 from the air is an attractive one. It's a costly process that many will say is too expensive, but so are fuel cells in cars. It's a matter of political will to move this forward. ~ Klaus Lackner

If you ever really want to get away from it all and see something that you have never seen, and have an excellent chance of seeing something no one has ever seen, get in a sub. You climb in, seal the hatch, turn on a little oxygen, turn on the scrubber, which removes the CO2 in the air you breathe, and they chuck you overboard. Down you go. ~ Mike DeGruy

Injecting CO2 into an underground reservoir would certainly change the local environment and thus affect the organisms that live there. Some will thrive, and others will suffer. While we should minimize such impacts, they cannot be avoided completely. The same happens when one plows a field, builds a house or a road, or waters a lawn. ~ Klaus Lackner

Even if producing CO2 was good for the environment, given that we're going to run out of hydrocarbons, we need to find some sustainable means of operating. ~ Elon Musk

Ocean acidification - the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is turning the oceans increasingly acid - is a slow but accelerating impact with consequences that will greatly overshadow all the oil spills put together. The warming trend that is CO2-related will overshadow all the oil spills that have ever occurred put together. ~ Sylvia Earle

For me the two biggest issues are climate change and animal welfare/animal agriculture. And oddly enough animal agriculture is such a contributor to climate change. According to the United Nations, 25% of climate change comes from animal agriculture, so every car, bus, boat, truck, airplane combined has less CO2 and methane emissions than animal agriculture. ~ Moby

CO2 is so beneficial ... it would be crazy to try to reduce it ~ Freeman Dyson

In the European Union, a fleet average of 95 grams of CO2 per kilometer will be permitted in 2020. This corresponds to fuel consumption of about four liters (per 100 kilometers; about 59 mpg). We have to continue reducing the fuel consumption of our vehicles and offer hybrid and electric vehicles, or else we will be unable to achieve these values. ~ Norbert Reithofer

Organisms don't think of CO2 as a poison. Plants and organisms that make shells, coral, think of it as a building block. ~ Janine Benyus

The atmosphere does not fathom whether CO2 comes from U.S. oil or Chinese coal, nor do hurricanes lose force because the Heritage Foundation doesn't believe global warming is a problem. Living systems operate on laws over which we have no say. ~ Paul Hawken

It's not as though we can keep burning coal in our power plants. Coal is a finite resource, too. We must find alternatives, and it's a better idea to find alternatives sooner then wait until we run out of coal, and in the meantime, put God knows how many trillions of tons of CO2 that used to be buried underground into the atmosphere. ~ Elon Musk

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

We need to raise the level of our game in terms of explaining the planetary warming by infrared absorption of CO2 etc. The missing area of understanding seems to be the actual physical mechanism. Lets target an explanation at an audience that has taken 1 year each of undergraduate physics and chemistry, plus calculus. Once we have something that is convincing at this level, we can work on how to communicate this to the interested public (i.e. those that hang out in the climate blogosphere). Willis Eschenbach's help is needed in translating this for the WUWT crowd. ~ Judith Curry

The writer found that certain freshwater crustaceans, namely Californian species of Daphnia, copepods, and Gammarus when indifferent to light can be made intensely positively heliotropic by adding some acid to the fresh water, especially the weak acid CO2. When carbonated water (or beer) to the extent of about 5 c.c. or 10 c.c. is slowly and carefully added to 50 c.c. of fresh water containing these Daphnia, the animals will become intensely positive and will collect in a dense cluster on the window side of the dish. Stronger acids act in the same way but the animals are likely to die quickly. . . Alcohols act in the same way. In the case of Gammarus the positive heliotropism lasts only a few seconds, while in Daphnia it lasts from 10 to 50 minutes and can be renewed by the further careful addition of some CO2. ~ Jacques Loeb

Just like you could dump oil into the Cuyahoga in the 60s and let someone else foot the bill, today you can pump CO2 into the atmosphere and let the whole world foot the bill. ~ Ramez Naam

There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend. ~ Alexander Cockburn

Global warming alarmists invariably try to make their case by resorting to rhetoric, dogma, opinion, and emotion. The closest thing to scientific data in their articles is the occasional chart claiming a poorly understood correlation between atmospheric CO2 and the Earth's temperature. ~ Walter Cunningham

When Arnold Schwarzenegger goes to his reward - how's that? That's a crack, but I treat Governor Schwarzenegger well in my book. He's done such great work in California; we'll forgive him one personal habit. Everybody should have one not-totally-CO2-friendly habit they can be forgiven for. So we'll forgive him that one. ~ Jay Inslee

There appears to be a lot of confusion about the biological benefits of elevated CO2 because the popular media typically fails to report them. Doomsday scenarios of global warming are much more dramatic than the good news of global greening. ~ Keith E. Idso

With this information, in light of the increasing human demands on vegetation, it is my personal opinion that capping CO2 emissions or reducing them to some prior level would be akin to 'biting the hand that feeds us. ~ Keith E. Idso

It looks as though yields of over 10 times what we can currently grow per acre are feasible if you control the CO2 concentration, the humidity, the temperature, all the various factors that plants depend on to grow rapidly. ~ Ralph Merkle

I don't think you have a choice but to pull CO2 back that has already made it out, or is about to make it out, because we are not overnight shutting down all the coal plants. ~ Klaus Lackner

NASA's Aqua satellite is showing that water vapor, the dominant greenhouse gas, works to offset the effect of carbon dioxide (CO2). This information, contrary to the assumption used in all the warming models, is ignored by global warming alarmists. ~ Walter Cunningham

No chemical compound in the atmosphere has a worse reputation than CO2, thanks to the single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control and energy production. The incredible list of supposed horrors that increasing carbon dioxide will bring the world is pure belief disguised as science. ~ William Happer

Yeah, hey you know carbon sinks are so crucial, scrubbing CO2 out of the air may eventually turn out to be our only option, so maybe we should reverse those two clauses. Make carbon sinks come first and the climate-neutral power plants second in that paragraph." "You think?" "Yes. Definitely. Carbon sinks could be the only way that our kids, and about a thousand years' worth of kids actually, can save themselves from living in Swamp World. From living their whole lives on Venus. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

Ocean Acidification is sometimes referred to as Global Warming's Equally Evil Twin. The irony is intentional and fair enough as far as it goes... No single mechanism explains all the mass extinctions in the record and yet changes in ocean chemistry seem to be a pretty good predictor. Ocean Acidification played a role in at least 2 of the Big Five Extinctions: the End-Permian and the End-Triassic. And quite possibly it was a major factor in a third, the End-Cretaceous. ...Why is ocean acidification so dangerous? The question is tough to answer only because the list of reasons is so long. Depending on how tightly organisms are able to regulate their internal chemistry, acidification may affect such basic processes as metabolism, enzyme activity, and protein function. Because it will change the makeup of microbial communities, it will alter the availability of key nutrients, like iron and nitrogen. For similar reasons, it will change the amount of light that passes through the water, and for somewhat different reasons, it will alter the way sound propagates. (In general, acidification is expected to make the seas noisier.) It seems likely to promote the growth of toxic algae. It will impact photosynthesis - many plant species are apt to benefit from elevated CO2 levels - and it will alter the compounds formed by dissolved metals, in some cases in ways that could be poisonous.

Of the myriad possible impacts, probably the most significant involves the group of creatures ~ Elizabeth Kolbert

A car produces about one pound of CO2 per mile. There is no problem with collecting the CO2 in the tailpipe, but one might easily end up with a trailer hitched to the car for carrying all this CO2 back to the filling station. The gas burned from a 15-gallon tank would fill up five 60-inch-tall gas bottles. ~ Klaus Lackner

The CO2 has to come out, which it does by forming bubbles. Now, champagne is pressurized to six times the atmospheric pressure on earth at sea level, enough to propel a popped champagne cork faster than 30 miles an hour. Lesson: letting the cork shoot out of a bottle when you open it is both tacky and dangerous. ~ Adam Rogers

Statistics compiled by the German Federal Motor Transport Authority highlight how successfully we have reduced fuel consumption. A few years ago, the CO2 emissions for the BMW brand were at well over 200 grams per kilometer. In 2009, that number was at 159 grams. This puts us below our direct competitors ... ~ Norbert Reithofer

Organic farming is environmentally friendlier to every acre of land. But it requires _more_ acres. The trade-off is a harsh one. Would we rather have pesticides on farmland and nitrogen runoffs from them? Or would we rather chop down more forest?

How much more forest would we have to chop down? If we wanted to reduce pesticide use and nitrogen runoff by turning all of the world's farmland to organic farming, we'd need about 50 percent more farmland than we have today. Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug, whose work helped triple crop yields over the last fifty years and arguably saved billions from starvation, estimates that the world would need an _additional_ 5 to 6 billion head of cattle to produce enough manure to fertilize that farmland. There are only an estimated 1.3 billion cattle on the planet today.

Combined, we'd need to chop down roughly half of the world's remaining forest to grow crops and to graze cattle that produce enough manure to fertilize those crops. Clearing that much land would produce around 500 billion tons of CO2, or almost as much as the total cumulative CO2 emissions of the world thus far. And the cattle needed to fertilize that land would produce far _more_ greenhouse gases, in the form of methane, than all of agriculture does today, possibly enough to equal all human greenhouse gases emitted from all sources today.

That's not a viable path. ~ Ramez Naam

By geo-historical standards, today's atmospheric CO2 levels are remarkably - indeed dangerously - low. We need CO2 in the air to support plant growth and agricultural yields, and more would be better. ~ Roger Helmer

The Volkswagen Group offers the world's largest low-CO2 fleet. ~ Martin Winterkorn

Adding CO2 to the air is like throwing another blanket on the bed. ~ James Hansen

The atmospheric CO2 concentration is rising - mainly due to the burning of fossil fuels. It's agreed that this build-up will, in itself, induce a long-term warming trend, superimposed on all the other complicated effects that make climate fluctuate. ~ Martin Rees

The industrialization of China alone would increase by 90 percent the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere and would at least increase the atmospheric CO2 by at least another 100 parts per million. ~ John Olver

Does it make more sense to provide air conditioning or to limit CO2 emissions. I vote for more air conditioning in these susceptible regions. ~ Judith Curry

I couldn't see the end of the corridor, so I stared at the entrance. The ship was a magnificent piece of living technology. Third Fish was a Miri 12, a type of ship closely related to a shrimp. Miri 12s were stable calm creatures with natural exoskeletons that could withstand the harshness of space. They were genetically enhanced to grow three breathing chambers within their bodies. Scientists planted rapidly growing plants within these three enormous rooms that not only produced oxygen from the CO2 directed in from other parts of the ship, but also absorbed benzene, formaldehyde, and trichloroethylene. This was some of the most amazing technology I'd ever read about. Once settled on the ship, I was determined to convince someone to let me see one of these amazing rooms. But at the moment, I wasn't thinking about the technology of the ship. I was on the threshold now, between home and my future. ~ Nnedi Okorafor

In a well-monitored storage site, it is always possible to release CO2 in a controlled manner in the unlikely event that it threatens to escape. Such a release is certainly no worse than ignoring the emission in the first place. ~ Klaus Lackner

There is some CO2-water vapor feedback. But it's not operating on a global scale. The modellers cannot accurately separate water vapour from the effects of clouds and rainfall. ~ Willie Soon

Climate change is a global issue - from the point of view of the Earth's climate, a molecule of CO2 emitted in Bejing is the same as a molecule emitted in Sydney. ~ Jeff Goodell

Rush Limbaugh is beginning to look more and more like Mr. Big, and at some point somebody's going to jam a CO2 pellet into his head and he's going to explode like a giant blimp. That day may come. Not yet, but we'll be there to watch. ~ Chris Matthews

We thus find ourselves in the situation that the entire theory of man-made global warming-with its repercussions in science, and its important consequences for politics and the global economy-is based on ice core studies that provided a false picture of the atmospheric CO2 levels. ~ Zbigniew Jaworowski

The majority of humankind does not accept this system, despite claims of worldwide support. Even with Russia's ratification, 75% of the world's CO2 is emitted by, 68% of the world's GDP is produced in, and 89% of the world's population live in countries that are not handcuffed by Kyoto's restrictions. Like fascism and communism, Kyotoism is an attack on basic human freedoms behind a smokescreen of propaganda. Like those ideologies of human hatred, it will be exposed and defeated. ~ Andrey Illarionov

The concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide has changed greatly since fossilized life began on Earth nearly 600 million years ago. In fact, there is only 1/19 as much CO2 in the air today as there was 520 million years ago. That high CO2 was hardly the recipe for disaster. ~ Greg Benson

I thought if the climate was heating that CO2 was the only forcing, and it would be late in the century before we had trouble. Now that we know about the other half of the forcing, it's obvious that the trouble is coming much sooner. ~ Paul R. Ehrlich

To reduce modern climate change to one variable, CO2, or a small proportion of one variable - human-induced CO2 - is not science. To try to predict the future based on just one variable (CO2) in extraordinarily complex natural systems is folly. Yet when astronomers have the temerity to show that climate is driven by solar activities rather than CO2 emissions, they are dismissed as dinosaurs undertaking the methods of old-fashioned science. ~ Ian Plimer

By the end of this century, CO2 levels could reach a level not seen ~ Elizabeth Kolbert

It's fine if you're making 1,000 or 2,000 of an electric car, and I think there is value in that in a lot of ways, but it's not going to have a big dent in oil consumption in the country, or CO2 emissions. ~ Rick Wagoner

If the world gets a lot hotter in a hurry and the primary aim is to cool it down, then the current plan of carbon mitigation will almost certainly not be effective. It'll be too little, too late, and too optimistic - in large part because the atmospheric half-life of CO2 is roughly 100 years. ~ Stephen J. Dubner

Make no mistake: Tackling climate change is vital. But to see everything through the lens of short-term CO2 reductions, letting our obsession with carbon blind us to the bigger picture, is to court catastrophe. ~ Alex Steffen

Absolutely love the new campaign from the Optimum Population Trust: do your bit for addressing climate change by having fewer children - or even no children. The lifetime CO2 emissions of a UK citizen amount to 750 tonnes (the equivalent - apparently - of 620 return flights between London and New York), so the extra 10 million by which our population will rise between now and 2074 will, over their lifetimes, emit around 7½ billion tonnes of CO2 ... "births averted" is probably the most single most substantial and cost-effective intervention that governments could be using ~ Jonathon Porritt

Probably the single-most concrete and substantive thing an American, young American, could do to lower our carbon footprint is not turning off the lights or driving a Prius, it's having fewer kids ... we'll soon see a market in baby-avoidance carbon credits similar to efforts to sell CO2 credits for avoiding deforestation ... ~ Andrew Revkin

There's such a wide variation in tax systems around the world, it's difficult to imagine a harmonized CO2 tax that every country agrees to. That's not in the cards in the near term. But the countries that are doing the best job, like Sweden, are already doing both of these. I think that eventually we'll use both of them but we need to get started right away and the cap-and-trade is a proven and effective tool. ~ Al Gore

The US in some ways has been the best. Who figured out shale gas? Although that wasn't a good thing [for CO2 levels], it was very innovative. It's led to low-cost energy. Who figured out nuclear power? Largely the United States. Once you get past the steam engine, which is mostly British, then the US has been at the center of most of the energy things that have happened. ~ Bill Gates

The role of CO2 is not nearly as clear as the climate catastrophists would suggest. ~ Tony Abbott

Here's the solution. We need a CO2 tax, revenue-neutral, to replace taxation on employment, which was invented by Bismarck - and some things have changed since the 19th Century. ~ Al Gore

Why do we focus on certain things at the expense of others? We will risk our lives to save a person from drowning, yet not make a donation that could save dozens of children from starvation. We install solar panels when their impact on CO2 emissions is minimal - and indeed may have a net negative effect if manufacturing and installation are taken into account - rather than contributing to more efficient infrastructure projects. ~ Graeme Simsion

The sea is a spirit level, a pantry, a playground, a mansion rowdy with life, a majestic reminder of our origins, another kind of body (a body of water), and female because of her monthly tides. But her bones are growing brittle, her brine turning ever more acidic from all the CO2 we've slathered into the air and all the fertilizer runoff from our fields. ~ Diane Ackerman

We need to figure out a way to create more energy on a gigawatt scale and not create so much CO2 in the process. ~ Klaus Lackner

The record from the Vostok core shows that CO2 levels and temperatures have varied in tandem. Current CO2 levels are unprecedented in the last 420,000 years. Credit: J.R. Petit et al, Nature, vol. 399 (1999). ~ Elizabeth Kolbert

The reality is that atmospheric CO2 has a minimal impact on greenhouse gases and world temperature. Water vapor is responsible for 95 percent of the greenhouse effect. CO2 contributes just 3.6 percent, with human activity responsible for only 3.2 percent of that. That is why some studies claim CO2 levels are largely irrelevant to global warming. ~ Walter Cunningham

A magical CO2 knob for controlling weather and climate simply does not exist! ~ Willie Soon

That's really the limiting factor to life support. Not the amount of oxygen you bring with you, but the amount of CO2 you can remove. ~ Andy Weir

I particularly dislike the high-profile switch-off campaigns where whole cities are plunged into darkness for an hour as a supposedly symbolic gesture about energy use. So is the implication that we all need to live in constant gloom to reduce CO2 emissions? ~ Mark Lynas

My view is that we don't know what's causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us. ~ Mitt Romney

If we don't start thinking big about the CO2 problem, we may miss our opportunity to stop a climate runaway that will trash the habitable parts of the earth. ~ William H. Calvin

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. ~ Syun-Ichi Akasofu

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

It is impossible to talk about slowing climate change without talking about reducing CO2 emissions. Equally, it is impossible to talk about adapting to climate change without considering how we will feed ourselves. And it is out of the question that we can adapt agriculture without conserving crop diversity. ~ Cary Fowler

We can no longer completely avoid anthropogenic climate change. At best, limiting the temperature rise to two degrees is just about possible, according to optimistic estimates. That's why we should spend more time talking about adjusting to the inevitable and not about reducing CO2 emissions. We have to take away people's fear of climate change. ~ Hans Von Storch

Breath does, in fact, connect us all in a very literal way. Take a breath now. And as you breathe, think about what is in your breath. There perhaps is the CO2 from the person sitting next-door to you. ~ Jane Poynter

Past, present and future CO2 emissions will have a cumulative impact on both global warming and ocean acidification. The laws of physics are non-negotiable. ~ Anonymous

Local and state governments have outrun the federal government. The EPA has served notice that it will enact a rule requiring CO2 reductions by major emitters in the absence of major legislation. But it's a blunt instrument that is a little more difficult to use than a legislative remedy. ~ Al Gore

Many people believe the whole catastrophe is the oil we spill, but that gets diluted and eventually disarmed over time. In fact, the oil we don't spill, the oil we collect, refine and use, produces CO2 and other gases that don't get diluted. ~ Carl Safina