“Nobody wanted to buy a computer in 1950, but once they got cheap, everyone bought them.”

We need to invest dramatically in green energy, making solar panels so cheap that everybody wants them.

I tentatively believe in a god. I was brought up in a fairly religious home. I think the world is compatible with reincarnation, karma, all that stuff.

There is something wrong with saying we should start using renewables now, while they are still incredibly expensive.

On average, global warming is not going to harm the developing world.

The second thing is, if you want to do something about global warming, you have to think much more long-term.

The Kyoto treaty has an estimated cost of between US$150 and $350 billion a year, starting in 2010.

We worry about the seemingly ever-increasing number of natural catastrophes. Yet this is mainly a consequence of CNN.

I found university a little dispiriting. I thought I would enter the great halls of Plato, but instead I entered the halls of an intellectual sausage factory. I wanted to do something not on the main course, and chose the environment.

Across Europe, there are six times more cold-related deaths than heat-related deaths…by 2050…Warmer temperatures will save 1.4 million lives each year.

Of course, the world is full of problems. But on the other hand it’s important to get the sense… are we generally moving in the right direction or the wrong direction?

The only thing that will really change global warming in the long run is if we radically increase the speed with which we get alternative technologies to deal with climate change.

To prepare adequately for the challenge of global warming, we must acknowledge both the good and the bad that it will bring.

Money spent on carbon cuts is money we can’t use for effective investments in food aid, micronutrients, HIV/AIDS prevention, health and education infrastructure, and clean water and sanitation.

Surely the biggest problem we have in the world is that we all die. But we don’t have a technology to solve that, right? So the point is not to prioritize problems; the point is to prioritize solutions to problems.

So it’s mainly a question of helping the Third World overcome the effects of global warming.

I think it’s great that we have organisations like Greenpeace. In a pluralistic society, we want to have people who point out all the problems that the Earth could encounter. But we need to understand that they are not presenting a full and rounded view.

I’m a very simple man. You’ve got to have, like, a computer nowadays to turn the TV on and off… and the nightmare continues.

Nowadays we can do computer experiments using Mathematica, and even solve a system of 42 equations. This offers another route to knowledge, rather than mere ideas.

Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.

I know when I grew up, it was, if it was daylight outside, get outside. Well, now, with the technological age of computers and everything, everyone’s inside virtually going everywhere they want to go.

FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed – it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.

Computers seem a little too adaptively flexible, like the strange natives, odd societies, and head cases we study in the social sciences. There’s more opposable thumb in the digital world than I care for; it’s awfully close to human.

If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.

I don’t even know which end of a computer one is supposed to gaze into. I’ve never used a computer.