Dale Jamieson Quotes

• “Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, an achievement that much of the Republican Party has been trying to undo over the past several decades. Richard Nixon signed into law four landmark federal bills: the Clean Air Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Environmental Pesticide Control Act, and the Endangered Species Act. He established the Environmental Protection Agency, and made many strong environmental appointments in his administration. As we saw in Section 2.2, it was when the Reagan administration came to power in 1980 that environmental concern began to become a partisan issue.”

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• “As the late climate scientist Jerry Mahlman used to say, “There is no need to exaggerate the problem of climate change; it is bad enough as it is.”

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• “The challenge we face is not (only) to reduce or stabilize concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide, but to live in productive relationship with the dynamic systems that govern a changing planet. This is a new challenge because humanity is young and now constitutes an important planetary force in a way that is unprecedented. Anthropogenic climate change is the harbinger of a new world in which humans have become a dominant force on Earth’s natural systems.”

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• “[w]e should not think that we can do enough simply by buying fuel-efficient cars, insulating our houses, and setting up a windmill to make our own electricity. That is all wonderful, but it does little or nothing to stop global warming and also does not fulfill our real moral obligations, which are to get governments to do their job to prevent the disaster of excessive global warming.”

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• “We also face psychological obstacles in responding to climate change. Evolution built us to respond to rapid movements of middle-sized objects, not to the slow buildup of insensible gases in the atmosphere. Most of us respond dramatically to what we sense, not to what we think. As a result, even those of us who are concerned about climate change find it difficult to feel its urgency and to act decisively.”

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• “Eighty percent of global carbon emissions come from only 10 countries. Their leaders, along with the executives of the world’s most powerful corporations, have disproportionate influence on the decisions that affect emissions”

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• “Indeed, there is some evidence that abrupt change may already be underway. In recent years we have witnessed the greatest contraction of Arctic sea ice since modern measurements began, and perhaps much longer if anecdotal and anthropological reports are to be believed.42 The summer of 2012 saw an all-time low in Arctic sea ice cover.43 Already in the summer of 2000 a Canadian ship succeeded in transiting the legendary, once impassable Northwest Passage, the elusive goal of mariners since the sixteenth century.”

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• “nearly 80% of the energy consumed in the United States comes from fossil fuels, compared to only 60% of the energy consumed in France. It is thus not surprising that France’s per capita GHG emissions are lower than those of the United States (though it may still surprise that France’s per capita emissions are less than half those of the United States). France’s different energy mix and lower emissions are not simply a matter of luck or circumstance, though they may be experienced that way by some people. Policy choices regarding energy and transport go a long way toward explaining the differences between the United States and France.”

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• “the President’s Science Advisory Committee, Panel on Environmental Pollution, published a report entitled “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment.”44 This report included a section on “climatic effects of pollution” that is notable for treating CO2 as a pollutant. It also includes an appendix on “Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide,” written by a committee chaired by Roger Revelle that also included Wallace Broecker, Joseph Smagorinsky, Harmon Craig, and Charles Keeling. This appendix discusses consequences of increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide such as the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, sea level rise, ocean warming, increasing acidity of fresh waters, and increased photosynthesis. The appendix notes that “[t]he climatic changes that may be produced by the increased CO2 content could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings.”

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• “In 1997 a distinguished group of scientists published an influential article in which they assessed the human impact on the Earth.2 They calculated that between one-third and one-half of Earth’s land surface had been transformed by human action; that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had increased by more than 30% since the beginning of the industrial revolution; that more nitrogen had been fixed by humanity than all other terrestrial organisms combined; that more than half of all accessible surface freshwater was being appropriated by humanity; and that about one-quarter of Earth’s bird species had been driven to extinction.”

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• “The first policy priority is to integrate adaptation with development. The second is to protect, encourage, and increase terrestrial carbon sinks while honoring a broad range of human and environmental values. The third is to adopt full-cost energy accounting that takes into account the entire life cycle of producing and consuming a unit of energy. The fourth is to raise the price of emitting GHGs to a level that roughly reflects their costs. The fifth priority is to force technology adoption and diffusion. The sixth priority is to substantially increase research, especially in renewable energy and carbon sequestration, particularly air capture of carbon. The seventh priority is to plan for the Anthropocene.”

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• “In a memo dated September 17, 1969, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then Counselor to President Nixon for Urban Affairs, later Ambassador to the United Nations (UN) and US Senator from New York, explained the science of change to Nixon’s Chief Domestic Advisor, John Ehrlichman, and warned that sea levels could rise “by 10 feet. Goodbye New York. Goodbye Washington. . .” Moynihan then went on to say that “it is possible to conceive fairly mammoth man-made efforts to countervail the CO2 rise (e.g., stop burning fossil fuels),” but that “in any event. . ., this is a subject that the Administration ought to get involved with.”48 The first report of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), published in 1970, devoted an entire chapter to climate change, including a section entitled “Energy output—A disappearing icecap?”49”

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• “Research has shown that frequent viewers of Fox News, a network that writes skepticism about climate change into its scripts, are less likely to accept the scientific consensus than those who do not watch Fox News.”

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• “Imagine that after reaching an atmospheric concentration of 450 ppm sometime in the next decade, we immediately stop all carbon dioxide emissions. By the year 3000, neither atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide nor global mean surface temperature would have returned to their pre-industrial baselines, and sea levels would still be rising.”

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• “Since the signing of the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, abating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions has been regarded as an urgent global responsibility.2 GHGs linger in the atmosphere for decades, centuries, and even longer. When this is coupled with the fact that their impacts are mediated through various complex systems, the result is that climate change is practically irreversible on the timescales that most of us care about.”

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• “there is no question that there is an enormous range of technologies that are on the shelf. The problem is the gap between technological development, and diffusion and adoption. It is sobering to be reminded that the first hybrid was invented in 1901.”

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• “Climate change poses threats that are probabilistic, multiple, indirect, often invisible, and unbounded in space and time. Fully grasping these threats requires scientific understanding and technical skills that are often in short supply. Moreover, climate change can be seen as presenting us with the largest collective action problem that humanity has ever faced, one that has both intra- and inter-generational dimensions. Evolution did not design us to deal with such problems, and we have not designed political institutions that are conducive to solving them.”

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• “In 1975 Wally Broecker published an influential paper correctly predicting a twentieth-century warming of 0.8°C, and worrying about the consequences for agriculture and sea level.64”

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• “It is usually assumed (in the United States anyway) that China is responsible for these emissions, but everyone has an argument for off-loading responsibility to someone else. It is Australia that extracts the coal, it is China where the emissions occur, and it is the United States and Europe that consume the products with the embedded carbon.69 One could argue that China’s current “bad boy” image as the world’s largest carbon emitter is simply a consequence of Europe and the United States outsourcing manufacturing to China.”

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• “in the 15 European countries that comprised the European Union when the Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997, emissions were nearly 5% lower in 2010 than they were in 1990.149 Compare this to the United States, which is not a party to the Kyoto Protocol, where emissions in 2010 were 5% greater than in 1990.150”

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• “about 7% of the global population is responsible for about 50% of emissions, while 50% of the global population is responsible for about 7% of emissions.91 It is the descendants of the latter group, poor people who emit little, who will suffer most of the damages of climate change.”

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• “Several candidates for the Republican nomination for president in 2012 had previously accepted the climate science consensus, and in some cases actively worked toward climate change solutions (e.g., Huntsman, Pawlenty, Gingrich, and Romney). After becoming presidential candidates, they retreated from their previous positions in every case.”

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• “On July 28 Senator Tim Wirth of Colorado, along with 18 co-sponsors from both political parties, introduced the National Energy Policy Act of 1988, calling for a 20% reduction in US carbon dioxide emissions from 1988 levels by the year 2000.”

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• “By the 1960s scientists had expressed concerns about the possibility of an anthropogenic climate change to presidents of both parties. At the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 the industrialized countries seemed to agree that by 2000 they would stabilize their GHG emissions at 1990 levels. Yet global emissions are still increasing, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is now almost 10% greater than it was in 1992, we have already experienced a warming of .8°C,”

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• “In a September speech to the Royal Society, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher expressed concern about climate change, ozone depletion, and acid rain, echoing Roger Revelle’s language about the global experiment that was now underway, noting that the five warmest years in a century had all been in the 1980s, and reminding her audience of the vulnerability of the Maldives to sea level rise.”

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