“For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself…the increase in the greenhouse gases…has led some to fear that we are creating a global heat trap which could lead to climatic instability.”

— Margaret Thatcher

Speech to the Royal Society (27 September 1988) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107346
Third term as Prime Minister

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Margaret Thatcher 348

British stateswoman and politician 1925–2013

Edward E. David Jr. (1925–2017) American engineer

Keynote address at the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory on the Palisades, New York campus of Columbia University (October 26, 1982) ( Inventing the Future: Energy and the CO2 "Greenhouse Effect", October 26, 1982, December 22, 2018, Exxon, w:Edward E. David Jr., Edward E., David Jr. http://www.climatefiles.com/exxonmobil/inventing-future-energy-co2-greenhouse-effect/,)

“Prediction of the future is possible only in systems that have stable parameters like celestial mechanics. The only reason why prediction is so successful in celestial mechanics is that the evolution of the solar system has ground to a halt in what is essentially a dynamic equilibrium with stable parameters. Evolutionary systems, however, by their very nature have unstable parameters. They are disequilibrium systems and in such systems our power of prediction, though not zero, is very limited because of the unpredictability of the parameters themselves. If, of course, it were possible to predict the change in the parameters, then there would be other parameters which were unchanged, but the search for ultimately stable parameters in evolutionary systems is futile, for they probably do not exist… Social systems have Heisenberg principles all over the place, for we cannot predict the future without changing it.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1980s, Evolutionary Economics, 1981, p. 44

“Poverty has been created by the economic and social system that we have designed for the world. It is the institutions that we have built, and feel so proud of, which created poverty.”

Muhammad Yunus (1940) Bangladeshi banker, economist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

"Eliminating Poverty Through Market-Based Social Entrepreneurship" in Global Urban Development Magazine (May 2005)

“If the US is the country that most contributes with greenhouse gases, in the world, it should assume more responsibility to reduce emissions.”

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (1945) Brazilian politician, 35th president of Brazil

" Brazil rejects Bush move on climate change talks http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/jun/04/brazil.usa" in: The Guardian, May 31, 2007.

“The world around us can be construed as a huge "house" that we share with other humans, as well as with animals and plants. It is in this world that we exist, fulfilling our tasks, enjoying things, developing social relations, creating a family. In short, we live in this world. We thus have a deep human need to know and to trust it, to be emotionally involved in it. Many of us, however, experience an increasing feeling of alienation. Even though, with the expansion of society, virtually the entire surface of the planet has become a part of our house, often we do not feel "at home" in that house. With the rapid and spontaneous changes of the past decades, so many new wings and rooms have been constructed or rearranged that we have lost familiarity with our house. We often have the impression that what remains of the world is a collection of isolated fragments, without any structure and coherence. Our personal "everyday" world seems unable to harmonise itself with the global world of society, history and cosmos.
It is our conviction that the time has come to make a conscious effort towards the construction of global world views, in order to overcome this situation of fragmentation. There are many reasons why we believe in the benefit of such an enterprise, and in the following pages we shall attempt to make some of them clear.”

Diederik Aerts (1953) Belgian theoretical physicist

Source: World views. From Fragmentation to Integration (1994), p. 1; About "The fragmentation of our world"

“The danger is that global warming may become self-sustaining, if it has not done so already. The melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps reduces the fraction of solar energy reflected back into space, and so increases the temperature further. Climate change may kill off the Amazon and other rain forests, and so eliminate once one of the main ways in which carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere. The rise in sea temperature may trigger the release of large quantities of carbon dioxide, trapped as hydrides on the ocean floor. Both these phenomena would increase the greenhouse effect, and so global warming further. We have to reverse global warming urgently, if we still can.”

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author

ABC News interview (16 August 2006)

““Global warming” refers to the global-average temperature increase that has been observed over the last one hundred years or more. But to many politicians and the public, the term carries the implication that mankind is responsible for that warming. This website describes evidence from my group’s government-funded research that suggests global warming is mostly natural, and that the climate system is quite insensitive to humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions and aerosol pollution. Believe it or not, very little research has ever been funded to search for natural mechanisms of warming…it has simply been assumed that global warming is manmade. This assumption is rather easy for scientists since we do not have enough accurate global data for a long enough period of time to see whether there are natural warming mechanisms at work.”

Roy Spencer (1955) American meteorologist

Global Warming: Natural or Manmade? http://www.drroyspencer.com/global-warming-natural-or-manmade/

“Nehru's great passion was to change our society — the congealed society which we inherited from our own past, and from the static past of the British period. And, social change he connected with economic change. We could not change our society without changing our economic system and economic relations in society. His whole dream was that, his whole effort was in that direction. But the march of society, of social change has not been fast enough, nor fundamental enough so far. And, our inherited caste system remains with us, but it has been very badly battered. And, the conceptions behind the caste system have also been very badly damaged by policies, by the march of technology and economics, all these things. To some extent while this progressive movement was taking place, there was also, concurrently, some sort of counter-revolution, resisting it. But the overwhelming force of the progressive movement has been winning by and large. But now we have to specifically deal with many of the social ills and backwardness.”

K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) 9th Vice President and the 10th President of India

Shri K. R. Narayanan President of India in Conversation with N. Ram on Doordarshan and All India Radio

“What many of us fail to realize is that the last four hundred years are a highly special period in the history of the world. The pace at which changes during these years have taken place is unexampled in earlier history, as is the very nature of these changes. This is partly the results of increased communication, but also of an increased mastery over nature, which on a limited planet like the earth, may prove in the long run to be an increased slavery to nature. For the more we get out of the world the less we leave, and in the long run we shall have to pay our debts at a time that may be very inconvenient for our own survival.”

Norbert Wiener book The Human Use of Human Beings

II. Progress and Entropy. p. 46
The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)

“Those who are skeptical about carbon dioxide greenhouse warming might profitably note the massive greenhouse effect on Venus. No one proposes that Venus's greenhouse effect derives from imprudent Venusians who burned too much coal, drove fuel-inefficient autos, and cut down their forests. My point is different. The climatological history of our planetary neighbor, an otherwise Earthlike planet on which the surface became hot enough to melt tin or lead, is worth considering — especially by those who say that the increasing greenhouse effect on Earth will be self-correcting, that we don't really have to worry about it, or (you can see this in the publications of some groups that call themselves conservative) that the greenhouse effect is a "hoax."”

Carl Sagan book Pale Blue Dot

Source: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994), p. 227

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