What Experts Say

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Over 250 U.S. scientists and economists’ call for swift and deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions - March 2010 - pdf

'Tipping Points' may arrive without warning, says top forecaster - link
May 2007 - NASA puts Global Warming Tipping Point within 10 years - li
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(more on Tipping Points at foot of page)

"Make no mistake, global warming is happening right now. It is only going to get worse. My generation has failed - we are handing over the problem to our children. They, and their children, will live with the worst consequences of climate change. What we need more than anything else is a mass movement of young people." Peter Goldmark, retiring from Environmental Defense Fund Climate & Air Program at the end of this year. link

Scientist Sir Robert Watson, who chaired IPCC from 1997 until 2002 ~ "All the promises in the world, which we're not likely to realize anyway, will not give us a world with only a 2°C rise. All the evidence, in my opinion, suggests we're on our way to a 3°C to 5°C world." link

The conversion of a climate-change skeptic. "Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real - I'm now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause." - Richard Muller - link [Link to report]

"In the past few centuries, atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased by more than 30%, and virtually all climatologists agree that the cause is human activity, predominantly the burning of fossil fuels, and to a considerable extent, land uses such as deforestation." Stephen Schneider, professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies at Stanford University - died July 2010

"Warming is unequivocal. The evidence for a human footprint is very, very strong, and the prospect of continued warming in the future is very strong," Chris Field, director of the department of global ecology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and a co-chair on the new IPCC report due in 2014. "There are important unknowns, but many of the unknowns are in the direction of risks that are potentially higher."

Revising an earlier call for 450 ppm goal - "What is happening, and what is likely to happen, convinces me that the world must be really ambitious and very determined at moving toward a 350 target." link Rajendra Pachauri - IPPC president and Nobel Laureate ."
"We have only seven years left in which to reverse the global curve of greenhouse gas emissions. That's very little time .. to contain the rise in temperatures below 2-2.4 degrees C, which, according to our studies, is the threshold not to be crossed without putting us in serious danger" link

"Those that have opposed a deal on climate, which would include elements of the fossil fuel industry, have clearly made making a 2C target much, much harder, if not impossible. They've clearly put the world at risk of far more adverse effects of climate change." Prof. Bob Watson, UK chief scientist at the department for environment and rural affairs.

Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters. (THE PENTAGON REPORT ON CLIMATE CHANGE: An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security)
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James Hansen August 2012 "Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather .... to the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change." link “I think we have a very brief window of opportunity to deal with climate change ... no longer than a decade, at the most,” James Hansen - Head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change.

"I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change." In an issue as severe as a war, "it may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while." more
Planet Earth is unwell, argues James Lovelock. Emissions of greenhouse gasses and other environmental changes have, he says, brought humanity and the natural world to the edge of crisis. James
Lovelock - Author of the GAIA theory [more]