Al Gore Quotes

We're putting 70 million tonnes of pollution into the atmosphere every day, trapping an enormous amount of extra heat from the sun inside the earth's atmosphere. It's threatening to push the planet past a tipping point beyond which climate change would be difficult to stop

Climate change represents the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen

The hard truth is carbon pollution has built up in our atmosphere for decades now. And even if we Americans do our part, the planet will slowly keep warming for some time to come.

If there is no cost to be paid for the indiscriminate dumping of pollution into the earth's atmosphere, then it should be a surprise to no one that today we will dump another 70 million tons of global warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet. ... We have to [act] this year, not next year. Mother Nature does not do bailouts.

The cumulative amount of man-made global pollution that's in the atmosphere now traps as much extra heat energy every day as would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every day. It's a big planet, but that's an awful lot of energy.

By burning fossil fuels, we are already dumping 30 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year, which has a profound effect on the climate. So, like it or not, we're already messing with a system we don't understand.

Clearly there’s going to be an impact. So I’m not disputing that increasing CO2 emissions are in the atmosphere is going to have an impact. It will have a warming impact. It’s an engineering problem and it has engineering solutions.

Climate change is a consequence of the build up of greenhouse gases over the past 200 years in the atmosphere, and virtually all these emissions came from the rich countries.

Once the steam engine went away and we started moving into burning fossil fuels - not just burning them, but everything we do with oil - we've been experiencing [these problems] at an accelerated rate. The scary end-game scenario is getting closer and closer, about what we're going to be able to do to sustain life on this planet as we have come to know it. And I think this is a very real possibility, that we could be dealing with conditions we have no idea how to wrestle with.

Back in 2005, when I was Christopher Eccleston, we saw one of the largest increases on record, of CO2 in the atmosphere. Unless we keep the rise in global temperature to under 2 degrees, by the time I'm Daniel Radcliffe or wee Jimmy Crankie, I won't be able to save the planet. I won't be here to help you -- well I might, but I'll be that bloke who won Any Dream Will Do.

Few scientists now dispute that today's soaring levels of carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere will cause global temperature averages to rise by as much as nine degrees Fahrenheit sometime after the year 2000.

If we did not take action to solve this crisis, it could indeed threaten the future of human civilization. That sounds shrill. It sounds hard to accept. I believe it's deadly accurate. But again, we can solve it.

Judging by the pollution content of the atmosphere, I believe we have arrived at the late twentieth century.

The consensus is that climate change ranks along with nuclear warfare as the top two risks facing human civilization.

Climate change is real. Climate change is being substantially increased by humans and the carbon we put into the atmosphere. And it appears to be speeding up. If science has made any mistakes, science has been underestimating it.

The scientists who do climate research understand that much of the ever increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere since 1850 must be attributed to burning those fossil fuels to produce the energy that drives industrialization.

We're running the most dangerous experiment in history right now, which is to see how much carbon dioxide the atmosphere... can handle before there is an environmental catastrophe.

I think we should all be more concerned about the environment and the effects of global warming. It will be pointless to talk about all the issues that divide us when it's 300 degrees outside.

The truth is, as most of us know, that global warming is real and humans are major contributors, mainly because we wastefully burn fossil fuels.

What we're doing to the planet is inexcusable.

I think there's plenty of evidence that we need to stop spewing so much carbon into the air, that we're contributing to climate change and that we ought to look for alternatives.

My goal is to leave this planet with the biggest carbon footprint I can possibly leave.

I always get involved with the environment because once you go past the tipping point with the environment, you don't get it back.

I would be absolutely astounded if population growth and industrialisation and all the stuff we are pumping into the atmosphere hadn't changed the climatic balance. Of course it has. There is no valid argument for denial.

Even if we were to stop putting out greenhouse gases right now, we'd still face decades of warming.