For two days in May, an extraordinary exchange on climate change took place at Berkeley. Sponsored by the Goldman Forum on Press and Public Affairs and hosted by Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism, panels of experts addressed issues facing the globe's most powerful industrial nations and producers of CO2 -- the U.S. and China. The consensus of their research firmly pointed to a global crisis that these scientists no longer consider long term or deferrable. Below are statements the panelists made during the forum.

"Carbon emission in the next 30 years will add three times more CO2 emission than the previous 250 years." -- Berkeley Lab director Steven Chu, quoting International Energy Agency forecast

"Despite significant productivity growth, the implications of the trends in supply and demand are inescapable. China's growth can only be sustained by increased absorption of resources and resource-intensive products. The leading categories are extensive food crops, energy, and raw materials." -- David Roland-Holst, director, Rural Development Research Consortium, Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics

"The data [are] just piling up. With business as normal, by 2060 one-quarter of all houses in the world lying within 500 feet of a coastline will be lost to rising tides." -- Gary Guzy, senior vice president and national environmental business development leader with Marsh, the world's largest risk and insurance services firm

"We have to make climate protection profitable. And there are opportunity costs with more solutions per dollar. Over the next few decades, the U.S. can eliminate its use of oil and revita-lize its economy led by business for profit." -- Amory Lovins, director of the Rocky Mountain Institute and author of Natural Capitalism

"In China, household efficiencies of power are going down due to [the] shrinking size of its households but with many more houses being built." -- Jianguo (Jack) Liu, Rachel Carson Chair in Ecological Sustainability at Michigan State University

"Biofuels are either the solution or a very important part of the solution; but there are likely to be a number of issues along the way-the sources of biological material, imports, technology, labor, farm subsidies, and trade politics." -- Peter Schwartz, founder and chairman of Global Business Network

"Economic theory gives a simple natural way to fight global warming, which is to have escalating taxes on carbon emissions ... Carbon emissions into the atmosphere constitute a nuisance to everybody on the planet. People should be taxed to pay a penalty equal to the value of the nuisance that they cause. In this way people who value their emissions more than the nuisance they cause will make those emissions. They will pay the tax. People whose emissions are not valued as much as the nuisance they cause will curb them. They will not pay the tax ... The economics here is as simple and straightforward as economics ever gets. It would be hard to find any economist who would disagree.

The morality of it is [also] fairly easy ... It is like a case of stealing. By adding more carbon to the atmosphere than our fair share, we are taking more than what rightfully belongs to us. We should not feel entitled to that any more than we would feel entitled to enter uninvited into our neighbors' house and partake of the dinner sitting on the table for their family. -- George Akerlof, professor of economics and Nobel Laureate