If you think about the impact of climate change, [it should be how] a doctor would deal with the problem. A scientific hypothesis is tested to absolute destruction, but medicine can't wait. If a doctor sees a child with a fever, he can't wait for [endless] tests. He has to act on what is there. The risk of delay is so enormous that we can't wait until we are absolutely sure the patient is dying.

This was one of those special occasions when I could actually feel the inner appreciation of the beauty of the moment passing like an electric current through the brush in my hand.

There is very good evidence indeed that one of the major reasons for this horror in Syria was a drought that lasted for about five or six years, which meant that huge numbers of people in the end had to leave the land.

Personally, I have been very impressed by the slow food movement. It is about celebrating the culture of food, of sharing the extraordinary knowledge, developed over millennia, of the traditions involved with quality food production, of the sheer joy and pleasure of consuming food together. Especially within the context of family life, this has to be one of the highest forms of cultural activity.

We don't, in a sensible world, want to hand on an increasingly dysfunctional world to our grandchildren.

I think we'd be very foolish to expect that we can just import everything from somewhere else and imagine that that's going to last for ever and ever and ever

If you think about your and my grandchildren, this is what really worries me. I don't want them - if I'm still alive by then - to say, 'Why didn't you do something about it?', when you could have done.