Leonard Mlodinow Quotes

How is it that, in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence, there are still some who would deny the dangers of climate change? Not surprisingly, the loudest voices are not scientific, and it is remarkable how many economists, lawyers, journalists and politicians set themselves up as experts on the science.

Ah, to be a conservative climate change denier. While real scientists must do all the research and engage in heated debates about just how bad things are going to be, the deniers can rest easy in the bliss of willful ignorance.

People realised this is real pollution; it is not fog. Now everyone has to face the data and come out of their comfort zone.

Those who say that climate change doesn't exist are being understood as the flat-earthers that they are, as the people who deny the link between smoking and cancer, as the people who denied the link between HIV and AIDS.

It really gets on my goat that people keep quoting Dorothea Mackellar's 'My Country' as proof that there is no such thing as climate change. A poem written more than 100 years ago by a homesick 19 year old versus an ever-increasing body of refereed scientific thought... hmm, hard to know which way to jump, really.

If people want to believe that our ancestors were riding around on dinosaurs or that the protracted, increasing, and devastating warming of the Earth is just nature doing its thing - I guess I feel I have more useful battles to fight.

Bring down Mike Mann and we can bring down the IPCC, they reckoned. It is a classic technique for the deniers' movement, I have discovered, and I don't mean only those who reject the idea of global warming but those who insist that smoking doesn't cause cancer or that industrial pollution isn't linked to acid rain.

But Big Oil and Big Coal have always been as skilled at propaganda as they are at mining and drilling. Like the tobacco industry before them, their success depends on keeping Americans stupid.

There is no doubt that environmentally related diseases will continue to pose problems in the future.

Global warming' is just the latest in a long line of hysterical crusades to which we seem to be increasingly susceptible.

You cannot affirm the power plant and condemn the smokestack, or affirm the smoke and condemn the cough.

An important reason that we're in the trouble we are in with climate change is that we don't have a handle on our environment. We form public policy based on information that is wrong.

No matter what Sarah Palin and these geniuses she surrounds herself with try to tell you, climate change is not a liberal versus conservative thing, but the people who profit from ignoring it want you to believe it is.

If you look at the casualties, the federal government isn't waging a War on Coal. If anything, coal is waging a war on us.

Climate change carries implications that stretch far beyond extreme weather, however. The effects on public health are far more alarming - and those have to be taken into account in order to calculate an accurate estimate of the costs of inaction.

As a Senator from Rhode Island, I wish that once - just once - the fossil fuel industry and their paid-for PR machine would concede that burning their product causes real harm to other people.

Oil companies have played a role in suppressing the development of alternative fuels.

Clean air and clean ocean, you can't translate that into money if you look at the cost to health, cost to fishery industry.

Coal is cheap, but up to what extent are we going to allow coal plants to operate?

It is a fact that, today, up to seven million people a year are dying from fossil fuel pollution.

Without an end to the burning of fossil fuels, coal especially, most of us will live shorter lives. I'm hopeful, but very, very concerned.

Coal makes us sick. Oil makes us sick. It’s global warming. It’s ruining our country. It’s ruining our world.

Having yet another vote on refinery legislation that uses high oil prices as an excuse to weaken environmental protections and to give more legislative gifts to the oil industry is misguided in the extreme.

The products built in the factories of G.M., Ford and Chrysler are some of the greatest weapons of mass destruction responsible for global warming and the melting of our polar icecaps.

'The Skeptical Environmentalist' was much more the idea of the scientific argument of realizing that we need to be skeptical about a lot of these stories that we hear and to put them in context.