Whole Story of Climate Quotes

“Was Superstorm Sandy caused by greenhouse warming of the planet? In a word, no. Individual storms arise from specific conditions in the atmosphere. Since records have been kept, hurricanes have varied in number and intensity each season with cycles going up and coming down. The temptation to attribute any specific weather event to global warming distracts us from considering and adopting adaptive strategies, such as improving and expanding irrigation for agriculture and the water supply for cities, that will serve us well when climate changes inevitably arrives on our doorstep.”
― E. Kirsten Peters, Whole Story of Climate: What Science Reveals About the Nature of Endless Change

“f we view climate changes as our enemy we will always be defeated, for climate will always change. Natural climate change is frequent, often extreme, and sometimes rapid. Industrial CO2 is a real problem just as you have heard, but it’s only a fragment of the whole story of climate. In other words, I’m not a global warming denier – I want to add to the discussion of climate change from the point of view of geology and natural change. What may matter most is not our carbon policies, but whether we invest in adaptive strategies that can serve us well when change inevitably arrives on our doorstep.”
― E. Kirsten Peters, Whole Story of Climate: What Science Reveals About the Nature of Endless Change

“To geologists, it's death, taxes, and climate change that are the true constants of life on Earth.”
― E. Kirsten Peters, Whole Story of Climate: What Science Reveals About the Nature of Endless Change

“On long timescales, increases in temperature, controlled by the Earth’s orbit around the sun, create more methane and carbon dioxide. That’s right: from what most scientists can tell, greenhouse gases are not the primary driver of long-term climate change on Earth—Milankovitch’s orbital variations are. Still, everything about climate is complex, and it’s quite possible that greenhouse gases can help trigger changes at particular times, or they can help exaggerate feedback processes already underway on Earth. But it’s the orbital variations of the Earth around the sun—the three major interacting Milankovitch cycles—that give the general form to the ups and downs on the temperature plot in figure 11.2. Greenhouse gases and many other variables on Earth simply follow those ups and downs in temperature.”
― E. Kirsten Peters, Whole Story of Climate: What Science Reveals About the Nature of Endless Change

“The notion that climate should remain the same over time is at the core of much of the recent discussion in the public square. Change—including fully natural climate revolutions and more frequent and moderate climate shifts—is understandably frightening. We naturally shy away from it. That’s why it’s actually comforting to believe the message of extreme environmentalists in recent years. Their argument is that we humans are in the process of destroying the world as we know it through our production of greenhouse gases, that we are the sole cause of current climate change. From that premise it follows that if we slash emissions of carbon dioxide greatly enough climate will stop changing. That’s actually reassuring compared to the view offered to us by the Earth herself. The fact is, if human beings had remained hunter-gatherers throughout our entire history, never producing a single molecule of greenhouse gases through agriculture or industry, climate today would still be changing. It would be lurching toward higher temperatures, crashing toward vastly colder temperatures, or at least swinging toward something different from what has been. That’s just the nature of Earth’s climate. It’s not to our liking, and it’s not to say we should do nothing about curtailing greenhouse gas emissions, but surely we must look the basic acts of natural change in the face if we are to have useful policy debates in the public square.”
― E. Kirsten Peters, Whole Story of Climate: What Science Reveals About the Nature of Endless Change