Joseph J. Romm Quotes

If the politics of inaction and delay that have triumphed in this country continues for another decade, then Planetary Purgatory in the likely future facing our country before midcentury - probably in your own lifetime.

Hurricane seasons with four or more super-hurricanes, those with sustained wind speeds of 131 mph or more will soon become the norm.

In 2003... the White House conspired with an oil-company funded think tank to block a major government scientific report that sought to spell out the dangers of climate change to Americans.

The Asia-Pacific Partnership is a climate suicide pact. It is playing Russian roulette with six bullets in your gun.

Would PBS go so far as to give air time to an even more extreme kind of disinformer, a Holocaust denier?

On our current path, all our great Gulf and Atlantic coast cities are at risk of meeting the same fate as New Orleans.

We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks - water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land - and not by generating renewable flows.

The best thing about improvements in health care is that all the climate-change deniers are now going to live long enough to see how wrong they were.

Protecting dozens of major coastal cities from future flooding will be challenging enough-rebuilding major coastal cities destroyed by super-hurricanes will be an almost impossible task.

Since 1955 the oceans have absorbed roughly twenty times more heat than the atmosphere.

Conservatives... are so opposed to government regulations that they are skeptical of anyone who identifies a problem that requires regulatory solutions - and they are inherently accepting of those who downplay such problems.

The science is crystal clear: we humans are the primary cause of global warming, and we face a bleak future if we fail to act quickly.

The great political tragedy of our time is that conservative leaders in America have chosen to use their superior messaging and political skills to thwart serious action on global warming.

The entire western Siberian sub-Arctic region is melting, and it has all happened in the last three or four years.

On moral grounds, I think that if you believe a certain outcome is a very possible outcome, you have an obligation to tell people that. With global warming, the probability of a bad outcome if we stay on our current emission trends is incredibly high. If you know a bad outcome is likely to happen, what right do you have not to communicate that? You go into a doctor's office, what are they going to do - not tell you the diagnosis?

If Americans in 2100 came to see 12 meters sea-level rise as inevitable by 2200, who can even begin to fathom how the nation would respond?

By the end of the third decade of this century, all of American life - politics, international relations, our homes, our jobs, our industries, the kind of cars we drive - will be forever transformed by the climate and energy challenge.

The first few feet of sea-level rise alone will displace more than 100 million people worldwide and turn all our major Gulf and Atlantic coast cities into pre- Katrina New Orleans - below sea level and facing super-hurricanes.

The last time Earth was 1°C warmer than today, sea levels were 20 feet higher.

The world beyond 450 ppm atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, the world that crosses carbon cycle tipping points that quickly take us to 1000 ppm, is a world not merely of endless regional resource wars around the globe. It is a world with dozens of Darfurs. It is a world of a hundred Katrinas, of countless environmental refugees

In 2005... Mumbai, India, saw that country's most intense recorded instance of rainfall - 3 feet of rain in twenty-four hours.

When people ask me what they should do, I reply, "Get informed, get outraged, and then get political."

If our government won't spend the money to protect New Orleans sufficiently today, what are the chances we will spend the money to protect dozens of coastal cities post-2050, once everyone knows that sea levels will keep rising and intense hurricanes will occur relentlessly?

Conservative Denyers and Delayers are the main reason America lacks the consensus and the political will to take up the fight against catastrophic climate change.

Some 3 million years ago, when the earth was a little more than 3°C warmer than preindustrial levels (about 2.2°C warmer than today), Antarctica had far less ice and sea levels were a stunning 25 meters higher than today. If we stay on our current emissions path, the planet will almost certainly be that warm by the century's end.

Much of the scientific community has been astonished that their increasingly strong and detailed warnings have been either ignored or attacked.

Ideology trumps rationality. Most conservatives cannot abide the solution to global warming - strong government regulations and a government-led effort to accelerate clean-energy technologies in the market.

Do believe that if we fail to act in time, it will be the single biggest regret any of us has at the end of our lives.

Bush and Inhofe will go down in history with other leaders such as Herbert Hoover and Neville Chamberlain who were blind to their nation's gravest threats.

As long as a handful of U.S. scientists, most receiving funds from the fossil fuel industry, get equal time with hundreds of the world's leading climate scientists, the public inevitably ends up with a misimpression about the state of our scientific understanding.

The United States could dramatically reduce its carbon emissions per kilowatt-hour without raising its overall energy bill.

We created a way of raising standards of living that we can't possibly pass on to our children.

I've always believed that you should stick as closely to the science as possible. And my biggest advice to reporters has been, if you're doing a climate story, talk to climate scientists. The best climate stories are done by the people who talk to climate scientists.

You must become a climate champion, a single-issue voter. You must take whatever action you can. You must use whatever influence you have wherever it would make a difference, even if it is only to educate the people around you.

Replacing half of the U.S. ground-transport fuels with hydrogen from wind power by 2050, for example, might require 1,400 gigawatts of advanced wind turbines or more... replacing those fuels with electricity might require less than 400 GW.

Time is short. We have at most a decade to sharply reverse course.

The coal plants that will be built from 2005 to 2030 will release as much carbon dioxide as all of the coal burned since the industrial revolution more than two centuries ago.