one.point.zero - Colin O'Brien's weblog

“Imagine for a minute that, instead of discovering a diamond planet, we'd made a breakthrough in global temperature projections.”

“the average American would do less for the planet by switching to a totally local diet than by going vegetarian one day a week”

“Some scientists think climate change needs a more radical approach. As well as trying to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, they have plans to re-engineer the Earth”

“Why bother? That really is the big question facing us as individuals hoping to do something about climate change, and it's not an easy one to answer.”

“It doesn't take a student of psychology to tell us that if you keep moving the goal posts and offer little in the way of hope, then most people will simply give up trying”

“if it's clear that the risk is high, people will work together to reach a common goal. But if it's in the balance, then selfishness takes over”

“if you care about climate change forget about saving the planet”

“it is a serious distortion to imply, as the top ten lists usually do, that there is any equivalence between these lifestyle preferences and the serious decisions that really reduce emissions”

“Companies that are polluting in China are owned by American, European, Japanese and others. They are benefiting from the cheap labour, from the resources and at the same time accusing China of pollution.”

“In the next 24 hours, deforestation will release as much CO2 into the atmosphere as 8 million people flying from London to New York.”

“The rich nations seeking to cut climate change have this in common: they lie”

“The governments using biofuel to tackle global warming know that it causes more harm than good. But they plough on regardless.”

“Tropical diseases like malaria will spread. By 2050, polar bears will mostly be found in zoos, their habitats gone. Pests like fire ants will thrive.”

“Green will never get any sexier than it is in 2007. Because, after this, brown will start going away.”

“The technology exists, perhaps, but the political will and the economic reality doesn't. That reality dictates that stopping climate change is nigh on impossible”

“When a scientist talks about reducing greenhouse gas emissions ... he or she means just that; actually reducing them. But what it is coming to mean in the political lexicon is something very different”

“The idea that you can go out and plant a tree and help reverse global warming is an appealing, feel-good thing”

“Blame nature. Blame lesbians. Blame the Chinese, blame anybody, but not us, not during our lifetime.”

“Texas-based Exxon is trying to influence opinion-makers in Brussels because Europe - rather than the US - is the driving force for action on climate change.”

“The principal costs of climate change will be measured in lives, not pounds”

“Just as in the 15th and 16th centuries you could sleep with your sister and kill and lie without fear of eternal damnation, today you can live exactly as you please as long as you give your ducats to one of the companies selling indulgences”

“the day when we use more than our fair share of the Earth - when 'humanity starts eating the planet' is October 9”

“By 2020, 2025, you will be able to sail a sailboat to the North Pole. The Amazon will become a desert, and the forests of Siberia will burn and release more methane and plagues will return”

“We used to think that it would take 10,000 years for melting at the surface of an ice sheet to penetrate down to the bottom. Now we know it doesn't take 10,000 years; it takes 10 seconds”

“the great droughts which had devastated the Sahel region of Africa had been caused in part by sulphate pollution in Europe and North America.”

“We're cooking our planet to refrigerate the diminishing part that's still habitable”

“Global warming is showing the limits of nuclear power plants, and nuclear power is destroying our environment”

“We know that our elected leaders and the corporate interests they represent are not going to lead the way to the change we need; they are in fact our main obstacles. Despite being in full possession of the facts, they want to carry on making it worse.”