Arctic Quotes

People might say, What's so great about the Arctic Monkeys? I've never even seen them. Well, you've never seen God either. You're gonna tell me he's not awesome?

The Arctic is a highway. The tree limit, the scarcity of trees, freed people to walk. Particularly in the wintertime. Which connected people physically, communicatively. And mythically. The long nights of winter free people to tell. And to listen.

We deeply regret that some Senators are still willing to do Big Oil?s bidding, and we now turn to the House where the Arctic drilling scheme should be dead on arrival. Americans are clamoring for a clean Congress and a clean energy plan, but sadly they were shortchanged on both today.

The arctic loneliness of age.

A half-century after racing the Russians to the moon, the U.S. is barely suiting up in the international race to secure interests in the Arctic.

Nature confounds her summer distinctions at this season. The heavens seem to be nearer the earth. The elements are less reserved and distinct. Water turns to ice, rain to snow. The day is but a Scandinavian night. The winter is an arctic summer.

The Arctic is a place that historically, during all preceding human history, has largely been an icy realm with an impact on ocean currents. That, in turn, influences the temperature of the planet. The Arctic is now vulnerable because of the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, with a rate of melting that is stunning.

In 50 years, no one will care about the fiscal cliff or the Euro crisis. They'll just ask, "So the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?"

Before we left, Grandmother talked a lot about the arctic night we would fly through. 'Isn't it a mystical word, "arctic"? Pure and quite hard. And meridians. Isn't that pretty? We're going to fly along them, faster than the light can follow us... Time won't be able to catch us.

We need to save the Arctic not because of the polar bears, and not because it is the most beautiful place in the world, but because our very survival depends upon it.

Researchers at the Naval Postgraduate School have told us that the entire Arctic ice cap may totally disappear in summer in as little as five years if nothing is done to curb emissions of greenhouse gas pollution.

The most important thing for people to know about the governance of the Arctic is that we have a chance now to act to maintain the integrity of the system or to lose it. To lose it means that we will dismember the vital systems that make the Arctic work. It's not just a cost to the people who live there. It's a cost to all people everywhere.

Some have suggested that ideally there must be some international body that would treat areas like the Arctic as a global commerce, a bit like the way we treat the sea. It doesn't belong to any particular country, but to all of us, but I'm not sure some of the powerful are ready for that sort of solution.

You know, once something freezes, it's solid. That's the key to the arctic - they didn't fear the cold, they made use of it.

This fight against drilling in the Arctic Refuge is a fight about our principles. Its about standing up for our environment, our families and our future, and I wont give up this fight.

There is a cheap literature that speaks to us of the need of escape. It is true that when we travel we are in search of distance. But distance is not to be found. It melts away. And escape has never led anywhere. The moment a man finds that he must play the races, go the Arctic, or make war in order to feel himself alive, that man has begin to spin the strands that bind him to other men and to the world. But what wretched strands! A civilization that is really strong fills man to the brim, though he never stir. What are we worth when motionless, is the question.

Opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge stands to not only increase the United States' oil reserves by nearly 50 percent, but it will create thousands of good U.S. jobs.

For example, the Prime Minister earlier this year talked about the importance of the Arctic to our future. He's right. A hundred years from now, the strength of Canada is going to be coming from our resources in the Arctic.

I cannot in good conscience vote for final passage of legislation that would pave the way to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

The undisturbed coastal plain is home to a wide variety of plants and animals and is the only wilderness sanctuary in North America that protects a complete range of the arctic ecosystem.

Remember in 1973 the same science chatter said that the coming Ice Age is going to occur, we're going to lose millions of people. And the politicians knew how to solve it, they just didn't have the courage to solve it; they were going to put coal dust on the Arctic.

I can see now a vision emerging how Canada is going to profit in the future from our Arctic resources without destroying the environment on which it is all based.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is a unique and biologically special place that should be preserved.

O proudly name their names who bravely sail| To seek brave lost in Arctic snows and seas!

No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind: how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in all life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s own culture but within oneself.

Like the canary in the coal mine, the climate changes already evident in the Arctic are a call to action.

You know how they say, 'What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas?' What happens in the Arctic doesn't stay in the Arctic.

I believe Ronald Reagan can make this country what it once was... an Arctic region covered with ice.

There are two kinds of Arctic problems, the imaginary and the real. Of the two, the imaginary are the most real.

Even in our day, science suspects beyond the Polar seas, at the very circle of the Arctic Pole, the existence of a sea which never freezes and a continent which is ever green.

She was riding a bear! And the Aurora was swaying above them in golden arcs and loops, and all around was the bitter Arctic cold and the immense silence of the North.

Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.

There is no proof that carbon dioxide is causing or precedes global warming....All indications are that the minor warming cycle finished in 2001 and that Arctic ice melting is related to cyclical orbit-tilt-axis changes in earth's angle to the sun.

The Old Religion, as we call it, is closer in spirit to Native American traditions or to shamanism of the Arctic. It is not based on dogma or a set of beliefs, nor on scriptures or a sacred book revealed by a great man. Witchcraft takes it's teachings from nature, and reads inspiration in the movements of the sun, moon, and stars, the flight of birds, the slow growth of trees, and the cycles of the seasons.

You can drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, on every continental shelf and atop every hill in America for that matter, and you still won't reverse the fact that our oil production is in permanent decline. We're just sopping up what's left, digging ourselves into a deeper hole.

Remember...this year has already seen more billion-dollar weather-related disasters than any year in US history. Last year was the warmest ever recorded on planet Earth. Arctic sea ice is near all-time record lows. Record floods from Pakistan to Queensland to the Mississippi basin; record drought from the steppes of Russia to the plains of Texas...This is what climate change looks like in its early stages.

In the Arctic I met some Russian sailors on a submarine and they chorused, "Gordon's alive!"

Every [Alaskan] has witnessed climate change over the past fifty years. Our winters are warmer, our summers are longer, and our Arctic Village shores, once protected by sea ice are eroding.

I am shocked, truly shocked. I was in Siberia a few weeks ago, and I am now just back in from the field in Alaska. The permafrost is melting fast all over the Arctic, lakes are forming everywhere and methane is bubbling up out of them.

We've lost half the summer sea ice in the Arctic. We've wiped out an enormous percentage of the world's coral reefs. We see huge changes in the planet's hydrology already, the cycles of drought and flood both amped up because warm air holds more water vapor than cold. These things are happening with a one-degree increase and going to two degrees won't be twice as bad, the increase in damage won't be linear, it most certainly will be exponential. So it was precisely the wrong moment to elect Trump.

The Arctic is the planet's air conditioner and it's starting to break down.

For the first time in history, my community has had to use air conditioners. Imagine that, air conditioners in the Arctic.

It was some UN agency that issued a report saying we're beyond the point of return here. And there was a picture of a polar bear on a little, tiny block of ice, which is a fraudulent - there are more polar bears than ever. The arctic ice caps are not melting. There's so much garbage out there.

I don't know what compassionate conservative means. Does it mean cutting kids out of after school programs, Does it mean drilling in the arctic wildlife refuge? Does it mean sending kids to Iraq without body armor that's state of the art?

We thank those Senators, both Republican and Democrat, who stood firm against tremendous pressure from the Bush administration, pro-drilling members of Congress and their allies in the oil industry. They recognize that the budget is an inappropriate place to decide controversial national policy matters like America's energy policy. We urge all members of Congress to remain steadfast in their belief that the vast, unspoiled wilderness of America?s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is more than a line item in the Federal Budget.

Canada regards herself as responsible to all mankind for the peculiar ecological balance that now exists so precariously in the water, ice and land areas of the Arctic archipelago. We do not doubt for a moment that the rest of the world would find us at fault, and hold us liable, should we fail to ensure adequate protection of that environment from pollution or artificial deterioration.

With 1 million square miles of the Arctic melting unexpectedly this summer, these are warning signs that we have to act and act now. Our addiction to Middle Eastern oil obviously has security implications, and we think it's about time to be generating Eastern Washington wind energy instead of sending our money to the sheikhs.

We finally know where the red line for climate really is. After the rapid melt of arctic ice in the summer of 2007, our best scientists, led by NASA's Jim Hansen, went back to work and produced a series of papers showing that with more than 350 ppm (parts per million) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we couldn't have a planet "similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted."

It's possible that we'll screw up the climate so badly that most of us will die and a few breeding pairs will remain somewhere in the arctic. What's more likely is that we'll continue remaking the planet, driving many species to extinction, killing millions of people through the indirect effects of climate change, making life even harder for the poor and powerless than it is now, and making it a little more difficult for the global middle class to live the lives to which they have become accustomed - in other words, business as usual, only worse.

Temperature measurements in the arctic suggest that it was just as warm there in the 1930's...before most greenhouse gas emissions. Don't you ever wonder whether sea ice concentrations back then were low, too?