Quote

I'm saying, Come on, the global warming thing? How did the ice melt during the ice ages? Was the dinosaurs driving SUVs around back then?

In the Andes and the Alps, I have seen melting glaciers. At both of the Earth's Poles, I have seen open sea where ice once dominated the horizon.

The entire North Polar ice cap is disappearing before our very eyes. It's been the size of the continental United States for the last 3 million years and now 40 percent is gone and the rest of it is going.

We believe the ice sheet was not around all the time. It was only around during cool snaps of the climate.

If you compare Everest photographs in 1953 with its current state, things are melting. I imagine if I were a golfer in Indiana, I'd be hard-pressed to believe in climate change because nothing's going on there. But when you're up in the mountains and seeing the glaciers melt away, it's an obvious physical manifestation of a warming planet.

Ice shelves in general have episodic carvings and there can be large icebergs breaking off - I'm talking 100km or 200km long - every 10 or 20 or 50 years.

There's nothing pretty about ice. Ice grows nothing. But we've got this in our minds that we've got to make everything cold.

As a scientist, my attention became totally focused on global warming some 15 years ago by the elegant and powerful measurements of carbon dioxide trapped in ice cores taken as much as 2 miles deep from the great East Antarctica ice sheet.

Global warming has melted the polar ice caps, raised the levels of the oceans and flooded the earth's great cities. Despite its evident prosperity, New Jersey is scarcely Utopia.