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.

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. And that, by some miracle, the language that nature speaks is the same language that we invented for mathematics. That's just an amazing piece of luck, which we don't understand.

The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people's hopes.

Vegetation is really controlling what happens...whereas the emphasis in the climate models has always been on the atmosphere.

I think the biggest misconception is that everybody has to learn mathematics. That seems to be a complete mistake.

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

The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.