Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Scientist Quotes #1

"Climate change is coming at us faster, with larger impacts and bigger risks, than even most climate scientists expected as recently as a few years ago. The stated goal of the UNFCCC – avoiding dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate – is in fact unattainable, because today we are already experiencing dangerous anthropogenic interference. The real question now is whether we can still avoid catastrophic anthro-pogenic interference in climate. There is no guarantee that catastrophe can be avoided even we start taking serious evasive action immediately; But it’s increasingly clear that the current level of anthropogenic interference is dangerous: Significant impacts in terms of floods, droughts, wildfires, species, melting ice already evident at ~0.8°C above pre-industrial Tavg. Current GHG concentrations commit us to 0.6°C more."
John Holdren, Director, Woods Hole Research Centre, leading climate scientist, Nov 3, 2006.

"If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment."
Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Nov 17, 2007.

Global climate change and other ongoing persistent global environmental problems "threaten humanity's very survival.... The need couldn't be more urgent ... to act now to safeguard our own survival and that of future generations."
UNEP GEO-4, 2007

"We have reached a point of planetary emergency,'' he said. "There are tipping points in the climate system, which we are very close to, and if we pass them, the dynamics of the system take over and carry you to very large changes which are out of your control."
James Hansen, Jun 24, 2008.

"The potential for runaway greenhouse warming is real and has never been more clear."
UNEP Year Book, 2009

"For humanity it's a matter of life or death," he said. "We will not make all human beings extinct, as a few people with the right sort of resources may put themselves in the right parts of the world and survive. But I think it's extremely unlikely that we wouldn't have mass death at 4C. If you have got a population of nine billion by 2050 and you hit 4C, 5C or 6C, you might have half a billion people surviving".
Kevin Anderson, Deputy Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and joint chair in Energy and Climate Change at the School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering at the University of Manchester and School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia. Nov 29, 2009.

in response to the question “what has to be done?” stated: 
“extremely rapid reduction in emissions … I would say, 80 percent within the next ten years or so … people like me have been looking at the evidence about this on a day to day basis and we have been doing it for years, and to look in to the abyss at this length is a daunting task.”
Andrew Glikson, paleoclimate scientist, Australia National University, July 2009.

“My view is that the climate has already crossed at least one tipping point, about 1975-1976, and is now at a runaway state, implying that only emergency measures have a chance of making a difference…”  
Andrew Glikson, 2010

"analysis suggests that despite high-level statements to the contrary, there is now little to no chance of maintaining the global mean surface temperature at or below 2°C. Moreover, the impacts associated with 2°C have been revised upwards, sufficiently so that 2°C now more appropriately represents the threshold between 'dangerous' and 'extremely dangerous' climate change."

"Humans have already set in motion 69 feet of sea level rise."
Jason Box, professor in glaciology at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, Jan 31, 2013.

"It is the summer sea ice loss passing point of no return, leading to unstoppable catastrophic Arctic Methane feedbacks sooner or later ... puts us in a planetary emergency today."
John Nissen. Arctic Methane Emergency Group. Dec 4, 2014.

"If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we're f'd."
Jason Box. Jul 7, 2015.

"We are in a kind of climate emergency now... It is becoming more and more urgent. Time has almost run out to get emissions down. That’s the real emergency."
Prof Stefan Rahmstorf, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Mar 14, 2016.

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