Without a movement pressing for change, there's little hope. We've got to work the political system to make this happen fast. The physics and chemistry are daunting. The resources on the other side are very large.

I'm probably the wrong person to ask. My partner in much of this work [climate movement], who really came up with the divestment campaign with me, Naomi Klein, I think has written powerfully about this.

There's always the danger that people will simply sign online petitions, the way they used to just mail in checks, and there's the greater possibility we'll just spend our whole lives staring at screens and never get anything done.

If you were running a solar company you may be okay - you may be able to keep growing. The question for physics is: Can you grow fast enough to begin to catch up with the damage?

We're mathematically past the point where the accumulation of individual actions can add up quickly enough to make a difference. The individual action that actually matters is not being an individual. It's joining together with other people in groups large enough to change the political dynamic around climate change.

The Old Testament contains in many places, but especially in the book of Job, one of the most far-reaching defenses ever written of wilderness, of nature free from the hand of man. The argument gets at the heart of what the loss of nature will mean to us....God seems to be insisting that we are not the center of the universe, that he is quite happy if it rains where there are no people - that God is quite happy with places where there are no people, a radical departure from our most ingrained notions.

everyone knows, at some level, that the sharp line between "good weather" and "bad weather" is a fiction, that we need rain as surely as we need sun.