Climate quotes

• "In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation…We need to ‘cull’ the surplus population."

  – Prince Philip, United Kingdom

• In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interaction these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.

  – Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider, in Report for the Club, The First Global Revolution

• What if a small group of these world leaders were to conclude the principal risk to the earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? ... In order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring this about?

  – Maurice Strong

• If we want a good environmental policy in the future, we’ll have to have a disaster. It’s like safety on public transport. The only way humans will act is if there’s been an accident.

  – Sir John Houghton, first co-chair of the IPCC and lead editor of its first three Reports. From Me and my God column, Sunday Telegraph, September 10th, 1995

• We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing…

  – Senator Tim Wirth, 1993

• Our confidence in our conclusion that a doubling of CO2 will eventually result in significant temperature increases and other climate changes is based on the fact that the results of the radiative-convective and heat-balance model studies can be understood in purely physical terms and are verified by the more complex GCM’s.

  – The Charney Report

• "The data doesn’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models"

  – Professor Chris Folland, Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, 1992

• I have never before witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report.

  – Dr Frederick Seitz, regarding the 1995 IPCC WG1 report:
  
  

• Santer single-handedly reversed the ‘climate science’ of the whole IPCC report and with it the global warming political process! The ‘discernible human influence’ supposedly revealed by the IPCC has been cited thousands of times since in media around the world, and has been the ‘stopper’ in millions of debates among nonscientists

  – Avery and Singer, regarding the 1995 IPCC WG1 report

• I have never been convinced that there is ANY fingerprint of anthropogenic warming.

  – Dr Roy W. Spencer

• Thousands of scientists have been funded to find a connection between human carbon emissions and the climate. Hardly any have been funded to find the opposite. Throw 30 billion dollars at one question and how could bright, dedicated people not find 800 pages worth of connections, links, predictions, projections and scenarios? (What’s amazing is what they haven’t found: empirical evidence.)[

  – Joanne Nova

• Today’s debate about global warming is essentially a debate about freedom. The environmentalists would like to mastermind each and every possible (and impossible) aspect of our lives.

  – Vaclav Klaus, in his book Blue Planet in Green Shackles
• According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event". "Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said.

• “With a combination of climate change and technology, it’s not unthinkable that Antarctica might become inhabited, although it’s hard to imagine it being densely populated,”
  – Professor Adrian Raftery, Univ. Washington