Geological change usually takes thousands of years to happen but we are seeing the climate changing not just in our lifetimes but also year by year.

Imagine a survivor of a failed civilization with only a tattered book on aromatherapy for guidance in arresting a cholera epidemic. Yet, such a book would more likely be found amid the debris than a comprehensible medical text.

We rushed into renewable energy without any thought. The schemes are largely hopelessly inefficient and unpleasant. I personally can't stand windmills at any price.

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.

Perhaps the single most important thing that we can do to undo the harm we have done is to fix firmly in our minds the thought: the earth is alive.

We live at a time when emotions and feelings count more than truth, and there is a vast ignorance of science

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.