“The real negotiation is between humans on the one hand and chemistry and physics on the other. And chemistry and physics, unfortunately, don’t bargain.”

It now appears that the fracturing of that ice is happening much more quickly than people previously thought, apparently at a slow melt.

According to new research emerging from many quarters that our continued devotion to growth above all is, on balance, making our lives worse, both collectively and individually

We celebrate the birth of one who told us to give everything to the poor by giving each other motorized tie racks.

Climate change is a huge problem, an almost insoluble problem, for two reasons. One is the habits of the West in terms of consumption. The other is the incredible iniquity between poor countries and rich countries on this planet.

We use the web to help people organize in the flesh, and then we take the images of those events and put them back on the web to make them add up to more than the sum of their parts.

A voluntary simplification of life-styles is not beyond our abilities, but it is probably outside our desires.

We can either save the planet from catastrophic warming, or protect fossil fuel CEOs. Not both. Do the math(s)

In fact, corporations are the infants of our society – they know very little except how to grow (though they’re very good at that), and they howl when you set limits. Socializing them is the work of politics. It’s about time we took it up again.

Certainly, packets of sea ice, in say the Arctic, which have failed to fully reform in the last couple of years.

In the States we’ve had by far the largest demonstrations in the last few years. The largest civil disobedience actions about anything in US history in the last 30 years have all been centred around the climate.

We’re not at the point of trying to stop global warming; it’s too late for that. We’re trying to keep it from becoming a complete and utter calamity

It’s off the charts – and if you don’t believe the scientists, ask the insurance industry, the people we pay to analyze risk in our society.

You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet

If one wanted to stigmaitise, that’s how one would do it – lots and lots of people saying “we’re severing our ties”.

Probably nothing that we have ever managed to do quite equals the basic undermining of the physical stability of the planet on which most of the world’s poor people depend.

“Science,” of course, replaced “God” as a guiding concept for many people after Darwin. Or, really, the two were rolled up into a sticky ball. To some degree this was mindless worship of a miracle future, the pursuit of which has landed us in the fix we now inhabit.

The origins of chemistry were ignoble, or at least equivocal: the dens of the alchemists, their abominable hodgepodge of ideas and language, their confessed interest in gold, their Levantine swindles typical of charlatans and magicians; instead.

If we do not allow free thinking in chemistry or biology, why should we allow it in morals or politics?

Chemistry is important. If you like your teammates, it’s going to be easier to play with them on the court.

Chemistry is a class you take in high school or college, where you figure out two plus two is 10, or something.

It seemed, indeed, that the study of light-scattering might carry one into the deepest problems of physics and chemistry.

Photosynthetic organisms in the sea yield most of the oxygen in the atmosphere, take up and store vast amounts of carbon dioxide, shape planetary chemistry, and hold the planet steady.

Man can be understood only by ascending from physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. In other words, he is first of all a cosmic problem.

But the other guys that you have have to accept their leadership. They have to respond to it. That’s the chemistry that you never know how that is going to happen.