James Lovelock

“Climatologists are all agreed that we'd be lucky to see the end of this century without the world being a totally different place, and being 8 or 9 degrees hotter on average.”

“I would only have been too pleased if someone had asked me for my data. If you really believed in your data, you wouldn't mind someone looking at it. You should be able to respond that if you don't believe me go out and do the measurements yourself.”

“Life does more than adapt to the Earth. It changes the Earth to its own purposes.”

“If it hadn't been for the Cold War, neither Russia nor America would have been sending people into space.”

“You never know with politicians what they are really saying. And I don't say that in a negative way-they have an appalling job.”

“We'd never have got a chance to go outside and look at the earth if it hadn't been for space exploration and NASA.”

“I'm not a pessimist, even though I do think awful things are going to happen.”

“All the modelling we do shows that the climate is poised on the jump up to a new hot state. It is accelerating so fast that you could say that we are already in it.”

“Just after World War II, this country led the world in science by every way you could measure it, yet the number of scientists was a tiny proportion of what it is now.”

“I'm a scientist, not a theologian. I don't know if there is a God or not. Religion requires certainty.”

“China will soon emit more greenhouse gases than America, but its regime knows if it caps aspirations there will be a revolution.”

“Science always uses metaphor.”

“Nature favors those organisms which leave the environment in better shape for their progeny to survive.”

“Fudging the data in any way whatsoever is quite literally a sin against the holy ghost of science. I'm not religious, but I put it that way because I feel so strongly. It's the one thing you do not ever do. You've got to have standards.”

“I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change. The inertia of humans is so huge that you can't really do anything meaningful.”

“What I like about sceptics is that in good science you need critics that make you think: 'Crumbs, have I made a mistake here?' If you don't have that continuously, you really are up the creek. The good sceptics have done a good service, but some of the mad ones I think have not done anyone any favours.”

“It just so happens that the green religion is now taking over from the Christian religion. I don't think people have noticed that, but it's got all the sort of terms that religions use... The greens use guilt. That just shows how religious greens are. You can't win people round by saying they are guilty for putting (carbon dioxide) in the air.”

“The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium.”

“Sadly, it's much easier to create a desert than a forest.”

“Life clearly does more than adapt to the Earth. It changes the Earth to its own purposes. Evolution is a tightly coupled dance, with life and the material environment as partners. From the dance emerges the entity Gaia.”