The question is not, "Is climate change happening?" Nor is the question, "Is climate change man-made?" Rather, we need to realize it?s already here, and start asking, "What are we going to do about it?"
Climate change is part of the normal order of things, and we know it was happening before humans came.
If you look at the polling around climate change in this country before 'Sandy', that was kind of the low point in terms of Americans believing that climate change was real and that humans were causing it.
Despite the international scientific community's consensus on climate change, a small number of critics continue to deny that climate change exists or that humans are causing it. Widely known as climate change "skeptics" or "deniers," these individuals are generally not climate scientists and do not debate the science with the climate scientists.
Recent data and research supports the importance of natural climate variability and calls into question the conclusion that humans are the dominant cause of recent climate change.
Climate scientists think of nothing but climate and then express their concerns in terms of constructs such as global mean surface temperature. But we live in a world in which all sorts of change is happening all the time, and the only way to understand what climate change will bring is to tell stories about how it manifests in people's lives.
Humans are just a very, very small part of the panoply of life, and it is arguable that in a certain sense, humans have emancipated themselves from Darwinian selection.
Climate change is happening, and humans are significant contributors, and that raises some really important policy questions.
Climate change is happening, humans are causing it, and I think this is perhaps the most serious environmental issue facing us.
We can't take climate change and put it on the back burner. If we don't address climate change, we won't be around as humans.
There's no question that, um, you know, the oceans have risen, right? And the climate change part is, is a real part of it.
Climates always change. The question is, how are we going to adapt to climate change? Now, it may be true that we are accelerating it inadvertently by messing with our atmosphere, but regardless of that, the climate will change.
It's very hard to track down what's real and what's not real. We haven't absorbed what climate change is doing. Because whether people associate it or not, fear of immigration is completely related to climate change, because the mass migrations that are happening, the war in Syria, all of these structural human migrations are related to climate change.
I believe humankind has looked at Climate Change in that same way: as if it were a fiction, happening to someone else’s planet, as if pretending that Climate Change wasn’t real would somehow make it go away.
There is no doubt in my mind that the literature on climate change overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that climate change is caused by humans. I have very little reason to doubt that the consensus is indeed correct.
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. The inertia of humans is so huge that you can't really do anything meaningful.