The essential fact which emerges ... is that the three smallest and most active reservoirs ( of carbon in the global carbon cycle), the atmosphere, the plants and the soil, are all of roughly the same size. This means that large human disturbance of any one of these reservoirs will have large effects on all three. We cannot hope either to understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.

When I listen to the public debates about climate change, I am impressed by the enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories.

It is better to be wrong than to be vague.

Some things go better than you expected, other things go worse, so I'm... I think the only sensible thing is just to wait and see and what I'm doing when I'm writing books - I'm not doing science so much anymore.

The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming.

The fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn't scare me at all. There's no reason why one should be scared.

There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use.