We have to, in the next ten years, begin to decrease the rate of carbon dioxide emissions and then flatten it out. If that doesn't happen in ten years, we're going to be passing certain tipping points. If the ice sheets begin to disintegrate, what can you do about it? You can't tie a rope around an ice sheet.

The climate system is being pushed hard enough that change will become obvious to the man in the street in the next decade.

The 5-year mean global temperature has been flat for the last decade, which we interpret as a combination of natural variability and a slow down in the growth rate of net climate forcing.

The climate dice are now loaded. Some seasons still will be cooler than the long-term average, but the perceptive person should notice that the frequency of unusually warm extremes is increasing. It is the extremes that have the most impact on people and other life on the planet.

I tend to be naive and gullible, I guess, but I try to believe that governments believe what they say.

We're handing them [young people & future generations] a climate system which is potentially out of their control. We're in an emergency: you can see what's on the horizon over the next few decades with the effects it will have on ecosystems, sea level and species extinction

The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.