Top 44 CO2 Quotes

The science is clear that there is an increase in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. What is not clear from the science is how much of that increase is caused by human activity; and what also is not clear is what impact those increases have on the climatic cycle.

Investigations during the last few decades have brought hydrogen instead of carbon, and instead of CO2 water, the mother of all life, into the foreground.

A worldwide shift to a shorter working week could cut the CO2 emitted this century by half. Countries with a shorter working week have a smaller ecological footprint.

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

The pace of global warming is accelerating and the scale of the impact is devastating. The time for action is limited – we are approaching a tipping point beyond which the opportunity to reverse the damage of CO2 emissions will disappear.

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.

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.

I’m not disputing that increasing CO2 emissions in the atmosphere is going to have an impact. It’ll have a warming impact.

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.

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.

Clearly the climate is changing, whether caused by CO2 emissions or some other cause.

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.

It is important that carbon storage is carefully regulated, that the process is transparent to the public, and that there is a clear accounting of what happened to the CO2. This is particularly true of underground storage, where there is always a small chance that pressurized CO2 could escape.

By burning fossil fuels, we are already dumping 30 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year, which has a profound effect on the climate. So, like it or not, we’re already messing with a system we don’t understand.

It’s really important that we have an improvement curve on fuel mileage and CO2 reduction.

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

We have fans that circulate air in the cabin of the module of the space shuttle. They’re running all the time. They’re absolutely necessary because, otherwise, you will breathe your own CO2 and intoxicate yourself quite fast.

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

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.

CO2 is not a pollutant in any normal definition of the term.

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.

The nuclear approach I’m involved in is called a traveling-wave reactor, which uses waste uranium for fuel. There’s a lot of things that have to go right for that dream to come true – many decades of building demo plants, proving the economics are right. But if it does, you could have cheaper energy with no CO2 emissions.

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?

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.

CO2 is the exhaling breath of our civilization, literally… Changing that pattern requires a scope, a scale, a speed of change that is beyond what we have done in the past.

One of the best ways of reducing both CO2 emissions and poverty in the South would be to strengthen the existing, decentralised demographic pattern by keeping villages and small towns alive. This would allow communities to maintain social cohesion and a closer contact with the land.

You can measure the warming oceans with a thermometer. You measure sea level rise with a yardstick. You can measure the dramatic increase in acidification with a simple pH test, and you can replicate what excess CO2 does to seawater in a basic high school science lab.

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.

I believe that man does have an impact on the climate, that CO2 has an impact on the climate, and we do take that seriously.

Having one national standard for mpg and CO2 is extremely important.

If you had no new technology, and you powered society as we do today – mostly by fossil fuels – you’d have only two choices: Doom yourself to horrific climate change by burning all that carbon and releasing all that CO2. Or power down society, reducing total energy usage around the planet.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Putting aside for the moment the question of whether human industrial CO2 emissions are having an effect on climate, it is quite clear that they are raising atmospheric CO2 levels. As a result, they are having a strong and markedly positive effect on plant growth worldwide. There is no doubt about this.

For someone to say that someone’s a skeptic or a climate denier about the climate changing, that’s just nonsensical. We see that throughout history. We impact the climate by our activity. How much so is very difficult to determine with respect to our CO2 or carbon footprint, but we obviously do.

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.

Through our CO2 emissions, we are making the earth a more fertile world.

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.

The home is the planet. Unless you’re a Martian, you know, we’re sharing the planet. And – and the emissions don’t stop and CO2 doesn’t stop with the border between France, Spain or between Canada and the United States.

On the environmental front there’s concern about global warming and high levels of carbon dioxide, and trees take in CO2 and store carbon.

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.