The Quotes

From James Hansen, one of the worlds foremost climatologists with an excellent track record for previous predictions:-

• “We are on the precipice of climate system tipping points beyond which there is no redemption.”
• “My frustration arises from the huge gap between words of governments, worldwide, and their actions or planned actions. It is easy to speak of a planet in peril. It is quite another to level with the public about what is needed, even if the actions are in everybody’s long-term interest”.
• About Australia’s proposed legislation “Your plan resembles the Kyoto Protocol. It is larded with caveats and escape valves. In contrast, a successful plan must recognize geophysical constraints and economic reality“

From a study sponsored by the insurance giant Swiss Re (CCF-II is one of their scenarios)

• “CCF-II would involve blows to the world economy sufficiently severe to cripple the resilience that enables affluent countries to respond to catastrophes. In effect, parts of developed countries would experience developing nation conditions for prolonged periods”… “Still, CCF-II is not a worst-case scenario“.
  
• Multiple runs of climate models suggest that we may have vastly underestimated the role of positive feedbacks… and an ensemble of models extends the upper end of the range to 11°C.
  

Meteorologist Jeff Masters writing to Climate Progress:-

• “In my thirty years as a meteorologist, I’ve never seen global weather patterns as strange as those we had in 2010. The stunning extremes we witnessed gives me concern that our climate is showing the early signs of instability”
• “Forty years from now, the crazy weather of 2010 will seem pretty tame. We’ve bequeathed to our children a future with a radically changed climate that will regularly bring unprecedented weather events–many of them extremely destructive–to every corner of the globe. This year’s wild ride was just the beginning”

Prof. Peter Höppe at reinsurance company Munich Re

• “It’s as if the weather machine had changed up a gear. Unless binding carbon reduction targets stay on the agenda, future generations will bear the consequences.”
• “The only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change”

From James Lovelock originator of the Gaia Hypothesis

• We’re unlikely to become extinct by global heating, but we may be cut back to one billion people or less.
• About 80% of the world’s population to be wiped out by 2100… Prophets have been foretelling Armageddon since time began,… But this is the real thing. (In the Guardian newspaper)

From David Letterman (in an amusing video rant)

• “We are screwed” … “We are walking dead people” … “We are dead meat”