Nicholas Stern Quotes

I’ve never really had much of a career plan, and interesting opportunities kept cropping up.

Climate change is a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen…We risk damages on a scale larger than the two world wars of the last century.

Enlightened self-interest from those involved in hydrocarbons should lead to the support of technologies enabling the clean use of hydrocarbons, such as carbon capture and storage, and not to the defence of deniers and cranks.

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.

There is still time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, if we take strong action now.

My father’s generation’s crisis was fighting fascism. Ours is fighting climate change. It is much harder because you can’t see it, it is not an obvious threat. But the solution is in our hands.

The one way of guaranteeing to fail is to assume that we will.

If coal is going to be used, the only response – because it is the dirtiest of all fuels – is that we have to learn how to do carbon capture and storage and we have to learn how to do it quickly on a commercial scale.

Science and policy-making thrive on challenge and questioning; they are vital to the health of inquiry and democracy.

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?

Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.

Adaptation is the only means to reduce the now-unavoidable costs of climate change over the next few decades

Climate change will affect the basic elements of life for people around the world – access to water, food production, health, and the environment. Hundreds of millions of people could suffer hunger, water shortages and coastal flooding as the world warms.

Greenhouse gas emissions: Ultimately, stabilisation – at whatever level – requires that annual emissions be brought down to more than 80% below current levels

What we are talking about is extended world war…People would move on a massive scale. Hundreds of millions, probably billions of people would have to move.

Adaptation is a vital part of a response to the challenge of climate change

Unfortunately, the current pace of progress is not nearly rapid enough, with many rich industrialised countries being slow to make the transition to cleaner and more efficient forms of economic growth.

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.

Climate change and global poverty are two sides of the same coin. Both challenges must be addressed together. If we fail on one, we will also fail on the other.

Failing to curb the impact of climate change could damage the global economy on the scale of the Great Depression or the world wars by spawning environmental devastation that could cost 5 to 20 percent of the world’s annual gross domestic product.

Looking back, I underestimated the risks. The planet and the atmosphere seem to be absorbing less carbon than we expected, and emissions are rising pretty strongly. Some of the effects are coming through more quickly than we thought then.

The scientific evidence is now overwhelming: climate change presents very serious global risks, and it demands an urgent global response.

We run enormous risks and we know what kind of reductions of greenhouse gases are necessary to drastically reduce risks. Reducing emissions by half by 2050 is roughly in the right ballpark. It would bring us below 550 ppm.

We will not overcome world poverty unless we manage climate change successfully. I’ve spent my life as a development economist, and it’s crystal clear that we succeed or fail on winning the battle against world poverty and managing climate change together. If we fail on one, we fail on the other.

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.

Do politicians understand just how difficult it could be, just how devastating rises of 4C, 5C or 6C could be? I think, not yet

We can look back through ice-core data and see over 800,000 years, relationships between carbon dioxide and the temperature of the world. So those people who deny the importance of climate change are just wasting their time. They’re also being diversionary because if we don’t act the risks are enormous.

As an undergraduate, I did maths and physics. That doesn’t make me a scientist. So I try to read and understand and talk to scientists.

I think that once people understand the great risks that climate change poses, they will naturally want to choose products and services that cause little or no emissions of greenhouse gases, which means ‘low-carbon consumption.’ This will apply across the board, including electricity, heating, transport and food.