Composing computer programs to solve scientific problems is like writing poetry. You must choose every word with care and link it with the other words in perfect syntax. There is no place for verbosity or carelessness. To become fluent in a computer lnaguage demands almost the antithesis of modern loose thinking. It requires many interactive sessions, the hands-on use of the device. You do not learn a foreign language from a book, rather you have to live in the country for year to let the langauge become an automatic part of you, and the same is true for computer languages.

What we have lived through, the 20th century, has been like a great party. Adults now have had the best time humanity has ever had. Now the party is over and the Earth is reckoning up.

There aren't just bad people that commit genocide; we are all capable of it. It's our evolutionary history.

The Earth's population will be culled from today's 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes - Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin.

I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.

We are in a fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.

The tropical rain forests are a telling example. Once cut down, they rarely recover. Rainfall drops, deserts spread, the climate warms.