The average ground temperature of the Earth is impossible to measure since most of the Earth is ocean...So this average ground temperature is a fiction.

I like people who are working on practical things and who are working in teams. It's not so important to get the glory. It's much more important to get something that works. It's a better way to live.

Mathematics is really an art, not a science. You could say science also is an art. So I would say the difference is something you can't really describe - you can only recognize. You hear somebody playing the violin, and it was Fritz Kreisler or it was somebody else, and you can tell the difference. It is so in almost every art. We just don't understand why it is that there are just a few people who are just completely off the scale and the rest of them are just mediocre. And we don't know why. But I say it's certainly true of mathematics.

Our thinking is permeated by our historical myths

The biologists have essentially been pushed aside. Al Gore's just an opportunist. The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers.

The progress of science requires the growth of understanding in both directions, downward from the whole to the parts and upward from the parts to the whole. A reductionist philosophy, arbitrarily proclaiming that the growth of understanding must go only in one direction, makes no scientific sense. Indeed, dogmatic philosophical beliefs of any kind have no place in science.

The glory of science is to imagine more than we can prove.