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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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