“It is cold fact: the global cooling presents humankind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for ten thousand years. Your stake in the decisions we make concerning it is of ultimate importance; the survival of ourselves, our children, our species.”
Lowell Ponte,
from his 1976 book "The Cooling"
“On the one hand we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but, which means that we must include all the doubts, caveats, ifs and buts.
On the other hand, we are not just scientists, but human beings as well. And like most people, we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change.
To do that we have to get some broad-based support, to capture the public's imagination.
That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage.
So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.
This double ethical bind which we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula.
Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”
Steve Schneider,
from a 1989 Discovery magazine article
(Lead Author, Coordinating Lead Author and Expert Reviewer for various IPCC Assessment Reports and a member of the Core Writing Team for the Synthesis Report of the Fourth Assessment Report (FAR).)
“One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.
This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole,”
“We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy,”
Ottmar Edenhofer,
who co-chaired the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,”
Christiana Figueres,
Executive Secretary of UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change
“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 Timothy Wirth,
in 1993.