Carbon Cycle Quotations

Just as human activity is upsetting Earth's carbon cycle, our actions are altering the water cycle.

Bicycles are almost as good as guitars for meeting girls.

The fact that we have been able to perturb the carbon cycle with our industrial revolution is evidence of how vulnerable we are - because when we destroy our environments, we destroy our food and energy supplies. In short, we destroy ourselves.

It's only been in the past two generations that we truly understood the impact our civilization has had on the natural world. To our credit as a species, we have turned this obscure scientific fact about carbon cycles into one of the most important political issues of the 21st century.

Some time ago we discovered the carbon cycle - a long-term set of chemical reactions that govern climates based on how much carbon is free in the atmosphere. At that point, it became clear that humans were affecting our environments far more profoundly than we realized. By releasing so much carbon and greenhouse gas into the environment, we're making long-term changes to every aspect of the natural world.

We cannot hope to either understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.

The essential fact which emerges ... is that the three smallest and most active reservoirs ( of carbon in the global carbon cycle), the atmosphere, the plants and the soil, are all of roughly the same size. This means that large human disturbance of any one of these reservoirs will have large effects on all three. We cannot hope either to understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.