Richard Alley Quotations

Humans are moving the world out of its natural variability. I don't think there are any serious questions of the scientific credibility that big temperature variations move together with greenhouse gases.

Greenland presently makes the largest contribution to sea level rise,

We haven't been sleeping on the rights, or asleep at the wheel, in this case.

Some people have said that maybe global warming is good because it's heading off the next Ice Age. This points out that the next Ice Age is not imminent.

The models we had were not terribly alarming about Greenland. This paper is a real wake-up call.

This is not the biggest problem in the world. The biggest problem in the world is getting along with each other. But it's part of that because we're not going to get along with each other if we're not getting along with the planet.

If we burn all the fossil fuels there are, the Greenland ice sheet will melt, raising sea levels 23 feet or so around the world.

The ice sheets seem to be shrinking 100 years ahead of schedule.

If humans weren't here and we didn't care about anything that lives here, if this were a video game, I'd push the button and see what happens, because it'd be really exciting; but it's not a video game.

The more the climate is forced to change, the more likely it is to hit some unforeseen threshold that can trigger quite fast, surprising and perhaps unpleasant changes.