There is still time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, if we take strong action now.
Nicholas SternRead
The scientific evidence is now overwhelming: climate change presents very serious global risks, and it demands an urgent global response.
Interpretation
Climate change poses significant global risks that require immediate action.
In this quote, Nicholas Stern emphasizes the urgent and serious nature of climate change as a pressing global issue backed by solid scientific evidence. He calls for a prompt and coordinated response from the global community to address the risks posed by climate change, highlighting the collective responsibility to mitigate its impacts.
In practice
During a climate conference, this quote can be used to highlight the urgent need for policy changes.
There is still time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, if we take strong action now.
The basic scientific conclusions on climate change are very robust and for good reason. The greenhouse effect is simple science: greenhouse gases trap heat, and humans are emitting ever more greenhouse gases.
Those who say that climate change doesn't exist are being understood as the flat-earthers that they are, as the people who deny the link between smoking and cancer, as the people who denied the link between HIV and AIDS.
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.
This [climate change] is potentially so dangerous that we have to act strongly. Do we want to play Russian roulette with two bullets or one?
Do politicians understand just how difficult it could be, just how devastating rises of 4C, 5C or 6C could be? I think, not yet
Experimentation is the least arrogant method of gaining knowledge. The experimenter humbly asks a question of nature.
Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
Where ignorance lurks, so too do the frontiers of discovery and imagination
Gravitational waves, because they are so imperturbable - they go through everything - they will tell you the most information you can get about the earliest instants that go on in the universe.
I think of the brain as a computational device: It has a bunch of little components that perform calculations on some small aspect of the problem, and another part of the brain has to stitch it all together, like a tapestry or a quilt.
No one trusts a model except the man who wrote it; everyone trusts an observation, except the man who made it.
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