The Heat Is Online

Interpol has warned companies that the carbon trading market would be irresistible to criminal gangs. "If you desperately need credits to offset your emissions, there will be someone who can make that happen," said one agent. "Absolutely, organized crime will be involved."

-- The Adelaide (Australia) Advertiser, June 12, 2009

"For those who are directly or implicitly lobbying against climate action I have a clear message: your ideas are out of date and you are running out of time."

-- UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, May 24, 2009

"Cap-and-trade is the temple of doom. It would lock in disasters for our children and grandchildren. Why do people continue to worship a disastrous approach?"

-- NASA scientist Jim Hansen, "Worshipping the Temple of Doom", May 5, 2009

The Australian fires of 2009 "were the result of the new conditions that climate change has caused . . . Let's stop using the word 'drought', with its implication that dry weather is the exception. The desiccation of the landscape here is the new reality. It is now our climate."

-- Freya Mathews, La Trobe University, in the Sydney Morning Herald, Feb. 9, 2009

"Policy makers need to understand that . . . once we are over the cliff, there's nothing to stop the fall."

-- Michael Oppenheimer, senior climate scientist, Jan. 27, 2009

"Eleven of the last 12 years have been the warmest ever recorded. The trend is very clear."

-- IPCC Head Rajendra Pachauri, Oct. 7, 2008

"The depression we're all trying to avoid could very well be a prolonged chronic reaction to what we've been doing to the world, a mourning and grieving for what we're doing to nature and to cities and to whole peoples...partly because this is the soul's reaction to the mourning and grieving that we're not consciously doing."

-- James Hillman, psychologist, author of "Soul's Code"

"Nature ... has the right to exist, persist, maintain, and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions, and its processes in evolution. Every person, people, community, or nationality will be able to demand the recognition of rights for nature ..."

-- Ecuadoran Constitution, adopted Sept. 29, 2008

"We're toast if we don't get on a very different path. This is the last chance."

-- NASA scientist James Hansen, interview with The Associated Press, June 23, 2008

"We underestimated the risks ... we underestimated the damage associated with temperature increases ... and we underestimated the probabilities of temperature increases."

-- Sir Nicholas Stern, author of "The Stern Report," April 17, 2008

"We are 25 years too late. If the object is to avoid dangerous change, we've already had it. The object now is to avoid really dangerous change."

--Dr. Stephen Schneider, Scientific American, Nov. 26, 2007

"Technological measures are important, but equally important is . . . a consciousness of the commonality of all living beings and an emphasis on shared responsibility."

--Former Czech President Vaclav Havel

"If the rainy season starts late, crops fail and people suffer. Children eat leaves. In that situation, only God can help us."."

--Kasko Ajikara, farmer and father, Gadabedji village, Niger

"It's not five minutes to midnight. It's five minutes after midnight."

-- German Chancellor Angela Merkel, on the urgency of combatting climate change (March 8, 2007)

Exxon Mobil is "the only principled oil and gas company I know in the US."

-- Richard S. Lindzen, BBCNews.com (April 26, 2007)

"We've known for some time that we have to worry about the impacts of climate change on our children's and grandchildren's generations. But we now have to worry about ourselves as well."

-- Margaret Beckett, British Secretary of State for Environment (April, 2002)

"To me the question of the environment is more ominous than that of peace and war...I'm more worried about global warming than I am of any major military conflict."

-- U.N. Weapons Inspector Hans Blix, (March 14, 2003)

"The most populous and wealthiest of the world face a moral challenge greater than colonialism or slavery. They are failing in that challenge. Men have lost reason in the fossil fuel economy. . . Inhabitants of small islands have not agreed [to be] sacrificial lambs on the altar of the wealth of the rich."

-- Ambassador Lionel Hurst, of Antigua-Barbuda (March, 2003)

"Our house is burning down and we're blind to it...The earth and humankind are in danger and we are all responsible. It is time to open our eyes. Alarms are sounding across all the continents . . . We cannot say that we did not know! Climate warming is still reversible. Heavy would be the responsibility of those who refused to fight it."

-- French President Jacques Chirac, World Summit on Sustainable Development, (Johannesburg, August, 2002)

"Prehistoric and early historic societies--from villages to states or empires--were highly vulnerable to climatic disturbances. Many lines of evidence now point to climate forcing as the primary agent in repeated social collapse."

-- Harvey Weiss and Raymond S. Bradley (Science, Jan. 26 2001)