Climate change is real. Climate change is being substantially increased by humans and the carbon we put into the atmosphere. And it appears to be speeding up. If science has made any mistakes, science has been underestimating it.
Interpretation
Climate change is a serious and rapidly worsening issue largely caused by human activity.
In this quote, James Balog emphasizes the urgency and reality of climate change, pointing out that human actions, particularly the emission of carbon, are significantly accelerating this crisis. He suggests that the scientific community may have underestimated the severity and speed of climate change, urging a reevaluation of our understanding of this critical issue.
In practice
In a presentation about the impact of human activity on the environment, I would quote Balog to emphasize our responsibility.
The most important advances, the qualitative leaps, are the least predictable. Not even the best scientists predicted the impact of nuclear physics, and everyday consumer items such as the iPhone would have seemed magic back in the 1950s.
The way life manages information involves a logical structure that differs fundamentally from mere complex chemistry. Therefore chemistry alone will not explain life's origin, any more than a study of silicon, copper and plastic will explain how a computer can execute a program.
If we think of our chromosomes - they carry our genetic material - as being like shoelaces, I work on the plastic tips at the end that protect them.
...there is simply nothing so important to a people and its government as how many of them there are, whether their number is growing or declining, how they are distributed as between different ages, sexes, and different social classes and racial and ethnic groups, and again, which way these numbers are moving.
Theoretical physics is one of the few fields in which being disabled is no handicap - it is all in the mind.
For me, arguably the story of telomeres and telomerase began thousands of years ago, in the cornfields of the Maya highlands of Central America.
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