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.

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

For me, science is just a bunch of tools - it's like playing the violin.

We do not know how much of the environmental change is due to human activities and how much [is due] to long-term natural processes over which we have no control.

The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. ... It was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York.

Unfortunately the global warming hysteria, as I see it, is driven by politics more than by science.

[John Wheeler] rejuvenated general relativity; he made it an experimental subject and took it away from the mathematicians