Nicholas Stern Quotes - Page 2

A rise of 5C would be a temperature the world has not seen for 30 to 50 million years. We've been around only 100,000 years as human beings. We don't know what that's like.

Fortunately poorer countries, such as China, are showing leadership and beginning to demonstrate to the world how to invest in low-carbon growth.

If you look at all the serious scientists in the world, there is no big disagreement on the basics of this...it would be absolute lunacy to act as if climate change is not occurring.

The US will increasingly see the risks of being left behind, and ten years from now they would have to start worrying about being shut out of markets because their production is dirty.

Give up meat to save the planet.

We will not overcome world poverty unless we manage climate change successfully. I've spent my life as a development economist, and it's crystal clear that we succeed or fail on winning the battle against world poverty and managing climate change together. If we fail on one, we fail on the other.

If coal is going to be used, the only response - because it is the dirtiest of all fuels - is that we have to learn how to do carbon capture and storage and we have to learn how to do it quickly on a commercial scale.

Adaptation can efficiently reduce the costs of climate change while atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are being stabilised

A diet that relies heavily on meat production results in higher emissions than a typical vegetarian diet. Different individuals will make different choices. However, the debate about climate change should not be dumbed down to a single slogan, such as 'give up meat to save the planet.

I think that once people understand the great risks that climate change poses, they will naturally want to choose products and services that cause little or no emissions of greenhouse gases, which means 'low-carbon consumption.' This will apply across the board, including electricity, heating, transport and food.

As an undergraduate, I did maths and physics. That doesn't make me a scientist. So I try to read and understand and talk to scientists.

Enlightened self-interest from those involved in hydrocarbons should lead to the support of technologies enabling the clean use of hydrocarbons, such as carbon capture and storage, and not to the defence of deniers and cranks.

To claim the World Bank is just an extension of US foreign policy is just wrong.

You'd see more floods like you've seen in Mozambique in 2000, you'd see more droughts like you saw in Kenya in the late 1990s, there would be a serious threat to the water flow down the Nile on which 10 countries depend.

The record rainfall and storm surges that have brought flooding across the UK are a clear sign that we are already experiencing the impacts of climate change.

It's very important that there should be cross-fertilisation between government and academia. Both parties can benefit from having a better understanding of how the other works.

We run enormous risks and we know what kind of reductions of greenhouse gases are necessary to drastically reduce risks. Reducing emissions by half by 2050 is roughly in the right ballpark. It would bring us below 550 ppm.

We can look back through ice-core data and see over 800,000 years, relationships between carbon dioxide and the temperature of the world. So those people who deny the importance of climate change are just wasting their time. They're also being diversionary because if we don't act the risks are enormous.

The greenhouse effect is something you can observe experimentally - and most people have observed the greenhouse effect themselves, in greenhouses. Yes?