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Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet QUOTES

Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet QUOTES

1 " In the world we grew up in, our most ingrained economic and political habit was growth; it’s the reflex we’re going to have to temper, and it’s going to be tough. "

― Bill McKibben , Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

2 " It ensured that I'd never think that patriotism and dissent were opposites. "

― Bill McKibben , Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

3 " In fact, total global rainfall is now increasing 1.5 percent a decade. "

― Bill McKibben , Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

4 " I am not describing what will happen if we don’t take action, or warning of some future threat. This is the current inventory: more thunder, more lightning, less ice. "

― Bill McKibben , Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

5 " Coral reefs will cease to exist as physical structures by 2100, perhaps 2050.”36 “We are overwhelming the system,” says Richard Zeebe, an assistant professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii. “It’s pretty outrageous what we’ve done.”37 Which is as objective a scientific statement as you’re likely to hear. The idea that humans could fundamentally alter the planet is new. "

― Bill McKibben , Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

6 " Barack Obama sounded a familiar note: “This is our generation’s moment to save future generations from global catastrophe.” Here’s his opponent, John McCain, a few months later: “We and the other nations of the world must get serious about substantially "

― Bill McKibben , Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

7 " Arnold Schwarzenegger, signing new energy legislation: “I want to make California No. 1 in the fight against global warming. This is something we owe our children and grandchildren.” And Arnold at the United Nations: “We hold the future in our hands. Together we must ensure that our grandchildren will not have to ask why we failed to do the right thing, and let them suffer the consequences. "

― Bill McKibben , Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

8 " I think the system has met its match. We no longer possess the margin we’d require for another huge leap forward, certainly not fast enough to preserve the planet we used to live on. "

― Bill McKibben , Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

9 " the world in 2100 would have about 600 parts per million carbon dioxide. That is, we’d live if not in hell, then in some place with a very similar temperature. "

― Bill McKibben , Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

10 " It’s as if we’d conjured up out of nowhere a second human population that’s capable of burning coal and oil and gas nearly as fast as we do. "

― Bill McKibben , Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

11 " Taken together, he said, these two lines of inquiry made it clear that the safe number was, at most, 350 parts per million. "

― Bill McKibben , Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

12 " The planet has nearly 390 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We’re too high. Forget the grandkids; it turns out this was a problem for our parents. "

― Bill McKibben , Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

13 " In September 2009 the lead article in the journal Nature said that above 350 we “threaten the ecological life-support systems that have developed in the late Quaternary environment, and severely challenge the viability of contemporary human societies.”41 A month later, the journal Science offered new evidence of what the earth was like 20 million years ago, the last time we had carbon levels this high: sea levels rose one hundred feet or more, and temperatures rose as much as ten degrees. "

― Bill McKibben , Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

14 " changes in surface temperature, rainfall, and sea level are largely irreversible for more than a thousand years after carbon dioxide emissions are completely stopped. "

― Bill McKibben , Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

15 " Those are big holes. "

― Bill McKibben , Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

16 " The 2008 food crisis is the largest impact of climate change so far. It was caused partly by the poorly-thought-through switch to biofuels as a way of combating climate change, and partly by the drought in western Australia, which local scientists have identified as having been caused by climate change. "

― Bill McKibben , Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

17 " Here’s the Stanford University researcher Rosamond Naylor, who conducted some of the most recent calculations: “I think what startled me the most is that when we looked at our historic examples there were ways to address the problem within a given year. People could always turn somewhere else to find food. But in the future there’s not going to be any place to turn.”61 It doesn’t get any more basic than that. "

― Bill McKibben , Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

18 " In the Sea of Japan, 500 million Nomurai jellyfish—each more than two meters in diameter—are clogging fishing nets; a region of the Bering Sea is so full of jellies that it’s been renamed “Slime Bank.” “Jellyfish grow faster and produce more young in warmer waters,” one researcher explained. "

― Bill McKibben , Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

19 " Here’s all I’m trying to say: The planet on which our civilization evolved no longer exists. The stability that produced that civilization has vanished; epic changes have begun. (My favorite bleak headline, from USA Today in May 2009, describes a new study from the American Meteorological Society: “Global Warming May Be Twice as Bad as Previously Expected.”)69 We may, with commitment and luck, yet be able to maintain a planet that will sustain some kind of civilization, but it won’t be the same planet, and hence it can’t be the same civilization. The earth that we knew—the only earth that we ever knew—is gone. "

― Bill McKibben , Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

20 " something else created modernity, the world that most of us reading this book inhabit. That something was the sudden availability, beginning in the early eighteenth century, of cheap fossil fuel. An exaggeration? One barrel of oil yields as much energy as twenty-five thousand hours of human manual labor "

― Bill McKibben , Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet