When you have energy companies like Shell and British Petroleum, both of which are perhaps represented in this room, saying there is a problem with excess carbon dioxide emission, I think we ought to listen.
— James Baker
Eye-opening Carbon Dioxide Emissions quotations
Climate change is a crucial issue in todays global agenda.
Hopefully, we will wake up to this reality, sooner rather than later. Pressure has been mounting on European Union Member States to act decisively to fight global warming. A bold target has been set reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 20 by 2020.
How long have we got? We have to stabilize emissions of carbon dioxide within a decade, or temperatures will warm by more than one degree... We don't have much time left.
Just about every generation has some horrific evil that it must fight.
For the Democratic Party today that evil is carbon dioxide emissions. For the rest of us, it is an ideology that teaches that its deity is sanctified by the blood of innocents.
Senator Hillary Clinton is attacking President Bush for breaking his campaign promise to cut carbon dioxide emissions, saying a promise made, a promise broken. And then out of habit, she demanded that Bush spend the night on the couch.
We have to, in the next ten years, begin to decrease the rate of carbon dioxide emissions and then flatten it out. If that doesn't happen in ten years, we're going to be passing certain tipping points. If the ice sheets begin to disintegrate, what can you do about it? You can't tie a rope around an ice sheet.
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.
Society's emissions of carbon dioxide may or may not turn out to have something significant to do with global warming-the jury is still out.
The total efforts of the last 20 years of climate policy has likely reduced global emissions by less than 1 percent, or about 250 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.
I think the deeper truth is that the Kyoto Protocols will not be followed by anyone really and that, in effect, nothing will be done to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse emissions.
I think natural gas has been a big part of the solution if in fact we need to reduce man-generated carbon dioxide emissions.
And "all the above" [what President Barack Obama calls his policy of promoting all forms of domestic energy], compared to "drill, baby, drill," if you actually look at the track record, we've massively escalated the emissions of methane and carbon dioxide.
One of the reasons the United States has actually been reducing its emissions in recent years is actually that there's been a boom in natural gas. It's displacing coal. It emits less carbon dioxide when you burn it. This is not really an Obama policy. It's just something that happened because of technology and the free market.
In the head-spinning cosmos of climate change, everyday hundreds of people claim there are 'thousands of papers' in support of a theory, yet no one can actually name one single paper with empirical evidence that shows carbon dioxide emissions are the main cause of global warming.
We have received no single argument in favour of this document except political pressure. No link has been established between carbon dioxide emissions and climate change. No other objective facts have been presented in recent time. The IPCC's reports in 1990 and 1995 show it clearly.
If you're talking about mugging little old ladies, you don't say, 'What's our target for the rate of mugging little old ladies?' You say, 'Mugging little old ladies is bad, and we're going to try to eliminate it.' You recognize you might not be a hundred percent successful, but your goal is to eliminate the mugging of little old ladies. And I think we need to eventually come around to looking at carbon dioxide emissions the same way.
If food was no longer obliged to make intercontinental journeys, but stayed part of a system in which it can be consumed over short distances, we would save a lot of energy and carbon dioxide emissions. And just think of what we would save in ecological terms without long-distance transportation, refrigeration, and packaging--which ends up on the garbage dump anyway--and storage, which steals time, space, and vast portions of nature and beauty.
We can't conclusively say whether man-made carbon dioxide emissions are contributing to climate change.
'Goals' and 'caps' on carbon emissions are practically worthless, if coal emissions continue, because of the exceedingly long lifetime of carbon dioxide in the air.
President Bush insisted today that he was not caving in to big-money contributors, big-time lobbyists, and overall industry pressure when he broke a campaign promise to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. But the air was thick today with accusations from people who believe that's exactly what happened.
There is no strong evidence to prove significant human influence on climate on a global basis. The global cooling trend from 1940 to 1970 is inconsistent with models based on anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. There is no reliable evidence to support that the 20th century was the warmest in the last 1000 years.
If it were only a few degrees, that would be serious, but we could adapt to it.
But the danger is the warming process might be unstable and run away. We could end up like Venus, covered in clouds and with the surface temperature of 400 degrees. It could be too late if we wait until the bad effects of warming become obvious. We need action now to reduce emission of carbon dioxide.