There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global.

The fundamental reason why carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is critically important to biology is that there is so little of it. A field of corn growing in full sunlight in the middle of the day uses up all the carbon dioxide within a meter of the ground in about five minutes. If the air were not constantly stirred by convection currents and winds, the corn would stop growing.

You have this world of mathematics, which is very real and which contains all kinds of wonderful stuff. And then we also have the world of nature, which is real, too.

Our thinking is permeated by our historical myths

Science and religion are, of course, two different ways of looking at the universe; and it's the same universe with two different windows.

It's amazing how much progress there's been in China, and also India. Those are the places that really matter - they're half of the world's population. They're the places where things are enormously better now than they were 50 years ago. And I don't see anything that's going to stop that.

It is our task, both in science and in society at large, to prove the conventional wisdom wrong and to make our unpredictable dreams come true