"Keeling's work was one example of how geophysics research often rested on love of the true world itself."
"The aim was to bind peoples together with interests that transcended the self-serving nationalism that had brought so much horror and death."
"It deserves to be remembered if there is a nugget of value amid the inevitable confusion."
"The 1965 Boulder conference was only one of many occasions when specialists began to interact more closely, drawing on one another's findings or, equally valuable, challenging them."
"People no longer imagined the climate was permanently stable. It was not the weight of any single piece of evidence that convinced them, but the accumulation of evidence from different, independent fields."
"'We may not be given a warning until the CO2 loading is such that an appreciable climate change is inevitable.'"
"A scientific finding cannot flourish in isolation; it needs support from other findings."
"But the simple is not always obvious unless someone points it out."
"Whenever there is evidence that something needs to be done, those who stand to profit from the doing will be especially quick to accept the evidence and argue for policy changes."
"Independent of nationalities, they wielded increasing power by claiming dominion over facts about the actual state of the world - thus shaping perceptions of reality itself."
"The better journalists noted that any one of these incidents might have had nothing to do with global warming. Yet the incidents did reflect disturbing statistical trends."
"Diplomacy is a gradual process. The first and most important work is to shift attitudes step by step."
"'Up until now many scientists may have consciously or unconsciously downplayed the more extreme possibilities at the high end of the uncertainty range, in an attempt to appear moderate and 'responsible' (that is, to avoid scaring people).'"
"Yet the central question had found its answer, an evaluation of danger far more precise than what people will act on when faced with an economic crisis of a foreign threat."
"In the IPCC reports, scientists gave their best answer. Now the main question is what people will choose to do."
"To say that such steps are socially or politically impossible is to forget that far greater changes have come swiftly, in countless areas, one people set their minds to change."
"But in the twenty-first century, in many areas the alternative to government action is not individual liberty; it is corporate power."
