When I was energy and climate change secretary I sat around a cabinet table with Gove, and he couldn’t help playing to the Tory climate-sceptic audience. As education secretary, he tried to ban climate change from the geography curriculum. After an angry exchange of letters with me, he eventually backed down.
One of the big questions in the climate change debate: Are humans any smarter than frogs in a pot? If you put a frog in a pot and slowly turn up the heat, it won’t jump out. Instead, it will enjoy the nice warm bath until it is cooked to death. We humans seem to be doing pretty much the same thing.
We are working with the communities in building institutional relationships with local governments and businesses to create ways to get value from the Amazonian area in order to keep the forest as the forest. This makes sense for us from the perspective of climate change and of poverty.
The fact that communities that are relatively powerless often are exposed to more dangerous pollution and the worst effects of climate change: a society like that is one that is less free and less equal for everybody.
I do believe in the Bible as the final word of God. And I do believe that God said the Earth would not be destroyed by a flood. Now, do I believe in climate change? In my trip to Greenland, the answer is yes. The climate is changing.
You can’t solve climate change by everybody individually buying a more efficient car and throwing out less stuff. You have to make national changes through national policy.
We have to face the reality of climate change. It is arguably the biggest threat we are facing today.
If you are interested enough in the climate crisis to read this post, you probably know that 2 degrees Centigrade of warming (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is the widely acknowledged threshold for “dangerous” climate change.
It really gets on my goat that people keep quoting Dorothea Mackellar’s ‘My Country’ as proof that there is no such thing as climate change. A poem written more than 100 years ago by a homesick 19 year old versus an ever-increasing body of refereed scientific thought… hmm, hard to know which way to jump, really.
I chose to document the lives of people living in a remote village in Alaska called Shishmaref because there we can literally see how climate change is affecting their homes, livelihoods and ultimately their lives.
I believe that climate change is real, is driven mainly by human activity and that it is driving real-world changes such as extreme weather events, hotter temperatures, rising sea levels and ocean acidification.
Our research indicates that, for example, the physical risks of climate change – both the direct risks to facilities, but also the indirect risks to economic growth and otherwise, are more pronounced and happening more quickly than a traditional perspective would suggest.
I don’t know the science behind climate change. I can’t say one way or another what is the direct impact, whether it’s man-made or not.
In the presidential debates back in 2008 and 2012, the candidates clearly didn’t know how to make climate change resonate with voters – if they mentioned it at all.
Climate change, in some regions, has aggravated conflict over scarce land, and could well trigger large-scale migration in the decades ahead. And rising sea levels put at risk the very survival of all small island states. These and other implications for peace and security have implications for the United Nations itself.
Those who deny human-caused climate change offer no compelling evidence to better explain the undeniable rise in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases and global temperature.
We think climate change is important enough to get its own select committee. It would be in addition to the Energy and Commerce Committee’s jurisdiction.
Climate change is putting pressures on the resources we need to survive: water; agricultural land; food.
Libertarians believe that any government interference is bad. Anyone with a brain knows that climate change needs governmental leadership, and they can smell this is bad news for their philosophy. Their ideology is so strongly held that, remarkably, it’s overcoming the facts.
We’re taking climate change seriously. But it’s not the only environmental issue that we face as a planet.
The direct risks from climate change are obvious: as changing weather patterns cause extremes of flood and drought, hurricanes and typhoons. These damage the physical infrastructure of buildings and bridges roads and railways. They are violent and disruptive.
Climate change is not an excuse to silence political speech.
California continues to pass the most ambitious laws in the world to expand clean energy and combat climate change.
Most challenges arise suddenly, with little warning. Climate change is different. For decades, we’ve known why global average temperatures are rising, why greenhouse gas concentrations are increasing, why the oceans are warming and weather patterns are growing more extreme.
Too often, the air conditioners we use to cool down also contribute to climate change – the very force that’s fueling extreme heat.
The area of climate change has a dramatic impact on national security.
What I think is if the world is in some difficulty – about climate change, about economics – then we had better make sure that 100 per cent of every brain available on the planet is working at full pelt to try to sort these things out.
When you look at the humanitarian issues – poverty, education, rights, violence – I think there are positive trends. But when you look at climate change, at plastic pollution and other forms of pollution, at overconsumption, it’s a different story.
Climate change is a controversial subject, right? People will debate whether there is climate change… that’s a whole political debate that I don’t want to get into. I want to talk about the frequency of extreme weather situations, which is not political.
We don’t think much about climate change and rising sea levels here in the U.S. Beyond a few gardeners, birders and hikers who notice the changes in our own ecosystem, we live on, blissfully unaware of our changing Earth. Our storms – Katrina, Sandy – are dismissed as once-in-a-century events.
Climate change is not the fault of man. It’s Mother Nature’s way. And sucking greenhouse gases from the atmosphere is too limited a solution. We have to be prepared for fire or ice, for fry or freeze. We have to be prepared for change.
We’re in a new reality, living in a time of climate change. We already have climate refugees around the globe and now have to talk about adaptation and mitigation.
The impacts of climate change are almost immeasurable.
One thing most people would agree is that climate change would add further uncertainties to our already quite tight water supply situation in China.
Climate change is crap.
I feel confident that leaders will rise to this challenge with a stronger commitment to tackle climate change and seize the economic opportunities that a post-carbon world has to offer.
As far as I’m aware, everybody in the shadow cabinet accepts that there’s a compelling case on climate change and a strong scientific case.
The Millennials, a generation born digital, will have a much stronger impact on social behaviour than we currently assume. Global climate change and resource security will influence our lives in substantial ways.
We must act to reduce the increasingly dangerous and destructive levels of carbon pollution that account for practically all of global climate change.
In San Francisco, we strive to be a beacon of progressivism for the rest of the country and the world, whether it is leading the way on gay marriage, immigrants rights, or combating climate change.
On climate change, Britain is leading in Europe.
Climate change is real.
The challenge lies in the fact that the planet has limited time. Be it climate change or nuclear fallout, there is very little time. You have to pick your cause.
I have been fighting climate change for two decades, and people often ask me how I remain hopeful in the face of extreme weather and grim forecasts. The answer is simple: I see countless solutions spreading across the nation and across the world. But we need more investment.
What happens if you stand passively by the side of the road with a placard saying, you know, ‘Stop climate change’ is you just get ignored. When you get on the street and block it, people start to have a conversation about this existential situation that we’re in.
If we are to candidly and comprehensively address climate change – which I believe is the true crisis of our time – we must find new ways to generate energy and fuel.
The forces that are in play on climate change essentially revolve around the generation of power, the transportation of goods and services and people, and the sorts of materials that we use to fuel the whole of our civilisation.
Climate change demands a collective response. We can’t expect other countries to act if we don’t.
