Winter regularly takes many more lives than any heat wave: 25,000 to 50,000 each year die in Britain from excess cold. Across Europe, there are six times more cold-related deaths than heat-related deaths...by 2050...Warmer temperatures will save 1.4 million lives each year.

The total efforts of the last 20 years of climate policy has likely reduced global emissions by less than 1 percent, or about 250 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.

Of course, the world is full of problems. But on the other hand it's important to get the sense... are we generally moving in the right direction or the wrong direction?

Think on a 50-year scale, which is a much more natural time-scale for global warming. The US is right now spending about 200 million dollars annually on research into renewable energy.

I found university a little dispiriting. I thought I would enter the great halls of Plato, but instead I entered the halls of an intellectual sausage factory. I wanted to do something not on the main course, and chose the environment.

My suggestion is that we should first work to ensure the Third World has clean drinking water and sanitation.

Surely the biggest problem we have in the world is that we all die. But we don't have a technology to solve that, right? So the point is not to prioritize problems; the point is to prioritize solutions to problems.