I don't spend a huge amount of time fixated on climate denial because I don't think that their objections, though sometimes couched in science, are based in science. I think they're based in ideology. And I don't think there's anything you can do.

We can no longer imagine that we are part of something larger than ourselves - that is what all this boils down to.

There is basically no one not on the payroll of Exxon Mobil or coal companies who any longer contend that this is not something to worry about.

Winning slowly is another way of losing. Americans are screwing up our health care system again right now. That's going to cause grave trouble for people over the next five, 10 years. There are going to be lots of people who die, lots of people who are sick. It's going to be horrible. But 10 years from now it will not be harder to solve the problem because you ignored it for those 10 years. With climate change, that's not true. As each year passes, we move past certain physical tipping points that make it impossible to recover large parts of the world that we have known.

But tolerance by itself can be a cover for moral laziness.

On the top of these mile thick slabs of ice the water is percolating quickly to the base and greasing the skids, as it were, for the slide of that ice into the ocean.

One degree turns out to be enough to really unhinge all sorts of earth's ecosystems.