Top 175 CO2 Quotes & Sayings

Adding CO2 to the air is like throwing another blanket on the bed.

What historians will definitely wonder about in future centuries is how deeply flawed logic, obscured by shrewd and unrelenting propaganda, actually enabled a coalition of powerful special interests to convince nearly everyone in the world that CO2 from human industry was a dangerous, planet-destroying toxin. It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world - that CO2, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison.

Eventually we'll use a CO2 tax offset by a reduction in taxes elsewhere alongside a cap-and-trade plan, but the degree of difficulty associated with a CO2 tax far exceeds that with a cap-and-trade plan. We're seeing it's hard to get a cap-and-trade plan and it's much easier to use as a basis for a global agreement than a CO2 tax.

Having one national standard for mpg and CO2 is extremely important.

To reduce the interpretation of the causality of all kinds of climate changes and of global warming to one variable, CO2, or to a small proportion of one variable - human-induced CO2 - is impossible to accept. Elementary rationality and my decades-long experience with econometric modelling and statistical testing of scientific hypotheses tell me that it is impossible to make strong conclusions based on mere correlation of two (or more) time series.

To reduce modern climate change to one variable, CO2, or a small proportion of one variable - human-induced CO2 - is not science. To try to predict the future based on just one variable (CO2) in extraordinarily complex natural systems is folly. Yet when astronomers have the temerity to show that climate is driven by solar activities rather than CO2 emissions, they are dismissed as dinosaurs undertaking the methods of old-fashioned science.

It's really important that we have an improvement curve on fuel mileage and CO2 reduction.

By geo-historical standards, today's atmospheric CO2 levels are remarkably - indeed dangerously - low. We need CO2 in the air to support plant growth and agricultural yields, and more would be better.

I think all countries need to aim to cut the CO2 emissions per person, taking account of externalities like imports and exports.

The main thing that's missing in energy is an incentive to create things that are zero-CO2-emitting and that have the right scale and reliability characteristics.

Through our CO2 emissions, we are making the earth a more fertile world.

I am quite surprised and rather disappointed by the loneliness, isolation and indeed demonisation the sadly misunder­stood CO2 is experiencing. Thus, upon leaving the parliament, I am contemplating the foundation of an organisation called 'The Friends of Carbon Dioxide'. Membership will of course be open to all, including the plants whose very existence depends on CO2. I think this organisation's slogan, 'CO2 is not pollution', self-selects. It has both accuracy and melody to commend it.

Clearly the climate is changing, whether caused by CO2 emissions or some other cause.

Despite all the progress climate scientists have made in understanding the risks we run by loading the atmosphere with CO2, the world is still as addicted to fossil fuels as ever.

The physical relationship between CO2 molecules and the atmosphere and the trapping of heat is as well-established as gravity, for God's sakes. It's not some mystery.

... For nearly a decade now, there has been no global warming. Even though atmospheric CO2 has continued to accumulate - up about 4 percent in the last 10 years - the global mean temperature has remained flat. That should raise obvious questions about CO2 being the cause of climate change.

It seems that, notwithstanding the dramatic increases in manmade CO2 emissions over the last decade, the world's warming has stopped.

Weather patterns over the next 20 or 30 years are going to be determined by the amount of CO2 that is up there now

The warming we've experienced in the late 20th century could just as easily be explained by small decreases in cloud cover - natural changes in the system - and have nothing to do with CO2.

It is important that carbon storage is carefully regulated, that the process is transparent to the public, and that there is a clear accounting of what happened to the CO2. This is particularly true of underground storage, where there is always a small chance that pressurized CO2 could escape.

The role of CO2 is not nearly as clear as the climate catastrophists would suggest.

If we don't start thinking big about the CO2 problem, we may miss our opportunity to stop a climate runaway that will trash the habitable parts of the earth.

You're never going to get the amount of CO2 emitted to go down unless you deal with the one magic metric, which is CO2 per kilowatt-hour.

It's likely that CO2 has some warming effect, but real proof of that hypothesis is tricky. You have to confirm by observation exactly how the CO2 changes the situation at different altitudes in the atmosphere and in different regions of the world. For example, CO2 is supposed to warm the upper air faster than the surface, but the measurements don't show that happening. When the CO2 effect is eventually pinned down, it will probably turn out to be weaker and much less worrisome than predicted by the global warming theorists.

A car produces about one pound of CO2 per mile. There is no problem with collecting the CO2 in the tailpipe, but one might easily end up with a trailer hitched to the car for carrying all this CO2 back to the filling station. The gas burned from a 15-gallon tank would fill up five 60-inch-tall gas bottles.

It is a search for a mythical CO2 sink to explain an immeasurable CO2 lifetime to fit a hypothetical CO2 computer model that purports to show that an impossible amount of fossil fuel burning is heating the atmosphere. It is all a fiction.

The Volkswagen Group offers the world's largest low-CO2 fleet.

Putting aside for the moment the question of whether human industrial CO2 emissions are having an effect on climate, it is quite clear that they are raising atmospheric CO2 levels. As a result, they are having a strong and markedly positive effect on plant growth worldwide. There is no doubt about this.

The industrialization of China alone would increase by 90 percent the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere and would at least increase the atmospheric CO2 by at least another 100 parts per million.

We the people, so to speak, need to realize that if we can keep ourselves fed, we might get through this long dark tunnel of power down, and mitigate the consequences of CO2.

The concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide has changed greatly since fossilized life began on Earth nearly 600 million years ago. In fact, there is only 1/19 as much CO2 in the air today as there was 520 million years ago. That high CO2 was hardly the recipe for disaster.

I am troubled by the lack of common sense regarding carbon dioxide emissions. Our greatest greenhouse gas is water. Atmospheric spectroscopy reveals why water has a 95 percent and CO2 a 3.6 percent contribution to the 'greenhouse effect.' Carbon dioxide emissions worldwide each year total 3.2 billion tons. That equals about 0.0168 percent of the atmosphere's CO2 concentration of about 19 trillion tons. This results in a 0.00064 percent increase in the absorption of the sun's radiation. This is an insignificantly small number.

What the American people deserve, I think, is a true, legitimate, peer-reviewed, objective, transparent discussion about CO2.

CO2 is not a pollutant in any normal definition of the term.

CO2 is a pollutant? Tell that to the plants.

There are many direct biological benefits that result from higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Two of the most important are increased plant photosynthesis and water-use efficiency.

...a magical CO2 knob for controlling weather and climate simply does not exist!

Undoubtedly, at the moment, the major cause of CO2 emission is what happens in developed countries.

Even if producing CO2 was good for the environment, given that we're going to run out of hydrocarbons, we need to find some sustainable means of operating.

It would be incorrect to claim that our paper was an endorsement of CO2-induced global warming.

We need to figure out a way to create more energy on a gigawatt scale and not create so much CO2 in the process.

Naturally, we will continue to offer very powerful vehicles in the future. Nevertheless, no other manufacturer has reduced the CO2 emissions of its fleet as substantially as the BMW Group.

CO2 emissions have been increasing, but the rise in air temperature stopped around 2001. Climate change is due in large part to naturally occurring oscillations.

These proven positive consequences of elevated CO2 are infinitely more important than the unsubstantiated predictions of apocalypse that are hypothesized to result from global warming, which itself, may not be occurring from rising atmospheric CO2 levels. The aerial fertilization effect of atmospheric CO2 enrichment is the only aspect of global environmental change about which we can be certain; and to restrict CO2 emissions is to assuredly deny the biosphere the many benefits that accrue from this phenomenon.

CO2 is a minor player in the total system, and human CO2 emissions are insignificant compared to total natural greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, lowering human CO2 emissions will have no measurable effect on climate, and continued CO2 emissions will have little or no effect on future temperature....While controlling CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels may have some beneficial effects on air quality, it will have no measurable effect on climate, but great detrimental effects on the economy and our standard of living.

... The reality is that atmospheric CO2 has a minimal impact on greenhouse gases and world temperature. Water vapor is responsible for 95 percent of the greenhouse effect. CO2 contributes just 3.6 percent, with human activity responsible for only 3.2 percent of that. That is why some studies claim CO2 levels are largely irrelevant to global warming.

Absolutely love the new campaign from the Optimum Population Trust: do your bit for addressing climate change by having fewer children - or even no children. The lifetime CO2 emissions of a UK citizen amount to 750 tonnes (the equivalent - apparently - of 620 return flights between London and New York), so the extra 10 million by which our population will rise between now and 2074 will, over their lifetimes, emit around 7½ billion tonnes of CO2..."births averted" is probably the most single most substantial and cost-effective intervention that governments could be using

Our CO2 mixes with everyone else's within a year, then hangs around for centuries like a shroud.

CO2 is the exhaling breath of our civilization, literally... Changing that pattern requires a scope, a scale, a speed of change that is beyond what we have done in the past.

The idea that somewhere in the desert far away you have a CO2 absorber that's removing the CO2 from the air is an attractive one. It's a costly process that many will say is too expensive, but so are fuel cells in cars. It's a matter of political will to move this forward.

I'm not disputing that increasing CO2 emissions in the atmosphere is going to have an impact. It'll have a warming impact.

Changes in clouds and rainfall can overwhelm what little effect CO2-water vapour has on temperature.

Each year we pump at least six billion tons of heat-trapping carbon into the innermost layer of our atmosphere, whose outer extent is only about twelve miles overhead. According to an IPCC (United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report released this year, atmospheric CO2 will, if the buildup is left unchecked, double from its pre-industrial level within the next century. That doubling of CO2 correlates with an increase in the global temperature of at least three to eight degrees Fahrenheit. The last ice age was just five to nine degrees colder than our current climate.

CO2 is so beneficial...it would be crazy to try to reduce it

Even if you accept the theory of man-made climate change, wind turbines are a rotten way to reduce CO2 emissions, or to improve energy security.

The climate system is constantly readjusting naturally in a large way - more than we would ever see from CO2. The CO2 kick [impact of CO2 emissions] is extremely small compared to what is happening in a natural way. Within the framework of a proper study of the sun-climate connection, you don't need CO2 to explain anything.

Our ACE proposal will reduce CO2 approximately the same levels that the Clean Power Plan would have, if it had been implemented. And we're reducing CO2 from our CAFE standards.

We have to remove the CO2 that the industrial economy has already emitted, which otherwise will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years and alter the Earth's climate irreversibly. It is possible to do this.

CO2 from air can replace petroleum: it can produce plastics and acetate, it can produce carbon fibers that replace metals and clean hydrocarbons, such as synthetic gasoline. We can use CO2 to desalinate water, enhance the production of vegetables and fruit in greenhouses, carbonate our beverages and produce biofertilizers that enhance the productivity of the soil without poisoning it. Carbon negative technology is absolutely needed now.

There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend.