When policymakers, financiers and scientists describe the world decades from now, in the throes of climatic changes that we now only model, they emphasize what might be lost.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the potential losses we may face due to climate change as projected by experts.
Tatiana Schlossberg emphasizes the urgent need to understand the long-term impacts of climate change, illustrating that when experts discuss future scenarios, they tend to focus on the negative consequences and losses our world may experience if current trends continue. This serves as a call to awareness about the importance of addressing climate issues now to mitigate these potential disasters.
In practice
In a speech about environmental policies, one could use this quote to emphasize the importance of proactive measures.
As climate change moves from a model of the future to the reality of the present, health care systems across the country are facing a difficult set of questions. What are doctors supposed to do when wildfires, rising floodwater or other natural disasters threaten their ability to provide care for patients?
The features that have made plastic so important in the global market are the same ones that make it such a pervasive pollutant: durability and resistance to degradation.
A less icy Arctic is coming, and generally speaking, that's not a good thing. Climate change is warming this region twice as fast as the global average, threatening wildlife and indigenous communities.
Take one round-trip flight between New York and California, and you've generated about 20 percent of the greenhouse gases that your car emits over an entire year.
The fact that communities that are relatively powerless often are exposed to more dangerous pollution and the worst effects of climate change: a society like that is one that is less free and less equal for everybody.
I walk slowly, but never backwards.
We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction.
When things fall apart in your life, you feel as if your whole world is crumbling. But actually it’s your fixed identity that’s crumbling. And as Chögyam Trungpa used to tell us, that’s cause for celebration.
Dreams have consequences. There is no turning back. A revolution is not a painless march to the gates of freedom and justice. It is a struggle between rage and hope, between the temptation to destroy and the desire to build. Its temperament is desperate. It is a tormented response to the past, to all that has happened, the recalled and unrecalled injustices - for the memory of a revolution reaches much further back than the memory of its protagonists.
One mushroom cloud would change history. My deepest fear is that this is exactly what they [Al Qaeda] intend.
Do you know anyone who hasn't changed his mind? This door was a tree, then it will be firewood for someone, then it will return to air and earth. We're all like that, constantly changing. It's simply honest to report that you've changed your mind when you have. When you're afraid of what people will think if you speak honestly, that's where you become confused.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.