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John

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“In study after study I conducted, I found that older people with more-positive perceptions of aging performed better physically and cognitively than those with more-negative perceptions; they were more likely to recover from severe disability, they remembered better, they walked faster, and they even lived longer.”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live

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“The bottom line is that the science says that most extreme weather events show no long-term trends that can be attributed to human influences on the climate.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

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“More bluntly, they’re saying that we’ve no idea what causes this failure of the models. They cannot tell us why the climate changed during those decades. And that’s deeply unsettling, because the observed early twentieth-century warming is comparable to the observed late twentieth-century warming, which the assessment reports attribute with “high confidence” to human influences.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

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“The implication is that the models generally agree. But that isn’t at all the case. Comparisons among models within any of these ensembles show that, on the scales required to measure the climate’s response to human influences, model results differ dramatically both from each other and from observations. But you wouldn’t know that unless you read deep into the IPCC report. Only then would you discover that the results being presented are “averaging” models that disagree wildly with each other.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

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“The could question is very different from the question of “What should we do?” Any discussion of how the world should respond to a changing climate is best informed by scientific certainties and uncertainties. But it’s ultimately a discussion of values—one that weighs development, environment, and intergenerational and geographical equities in light of imperfect projections of future climates. And the could and should questions are different still from asking “What will we do?” Answering that involves assessing the realities of politics, economics, and technology development. Indeed, the simple truth is that there are many things the world could do and perhaps even should do—such as eliminating poverty—but which it will not do for various reasons. Importantly, making a judgment about will is not at all the same as stating an opinion about should.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

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