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The carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is measured. It's uncontroversial. It's going up. We know that has a tendency to warm the atmosphere and we should be worried about that.

Martin Rees

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Martin Rees
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: June 23
Astronomer
Astrophysicist
Cosmologist
Physicist
Politician
University Teacher
Jórvík
Baron Rees of Ludlow
Martin John Rees
Baron Rees of Ludlow
OM
FRS
FREng
FMedSci
Lord Martin Rees
Professor Martin John Rees
Baron Rees of Ludlow
Atmosphere
Worried
Warm
Dioxide
Going
Measured
Carbon
Tendency
Concentration
Tendencies

More quotes by Martin Rees

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Cosmology does, I think, affect the way that we perceive humanity's role in nature. One thing we've learnt from astronomy is that the future lying ahead is more prolonged than the past. Even our sun is less than halfway through its life.
Martin Rees
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I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms that we can't conceive. And there could, of course, be forms of intelligence beyond human capacity-beyond as much as we are beyond a chimpanzee.
Martin Rees
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Science is a part of culture. Indeed, it is the only truly global culture because protons and proteins are the same all over the world, and it's the one culture we can all share.
Martin Rees
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Scientists surely have a special responsibility. It is their ideas that form the basis of new technology. They should not be indifferent to the fruits of their ideas. They should forgo experiments that are risky or unethical.
Martin Rees
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I'm a technological optimist in that I do believe that technology will provide solutions that will allow the world in 2050 to support 9 billion people at an acceptable standard of living. But I'm a political pessimist in that I am concerned about whether the science will be appropriately applied.
Martin Rees
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Indeed, our everyday world presents intellectual challenges just as daunting as those of the cosmos and the quantum, and that is where 99 per cent of scientists focus their efforts. Even the smallest insect, with its intricate structure, is far more complex than either an atom or a star.
Martin Rees
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I have no religious belief myself, but I don't think we should fight about it. In particular, I think that we should not rubbish moderate religious leaders like the Archbishop of Canterbury because I think we all agree that extreme fundamentalism is a threat, and we need all the allies we can muster against it.
Martin Rees
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Scientists habitually moan that the public doesn't understand them. But they complain too much: public ignorance isn't peculiar to science. It's sad if some citizens can't tell a proton from a protein. But it's equally sad if they're ignorant of their nation's history, can't speak a second language, or can't find Venezuela or Syria on a map.
Martin Rees
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I think all countries need to aim to cut the CO2 emissions per person, taking account of externalities like imports and exports.
Martin Rees
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The important point there is that when people talk about a mean temperature rise of say two, three or four degrees that's a sort of global average which really is a signature of large scale change in climatic patterns.
Martin Rees
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I recall a lecture by John Glenn, the first American to go into orbit. When asked what went through his mind while he was crouched in the rocket nose-cone, awaiting blast-off, he replied, I was thinking that the rocket has 20,000 components, and each was made by the lowest bidder.
Martin Rees
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I think a few hundred years from now we'll start having the 'posthuman' era of different species.
Martin Rees
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God invented space so that not everything had to happen in Princeton.
Martin Rees
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An insect is more complex than a star..and is a far greater challenge to understand.
Martin Rees
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I would support peaceful co-existence between religion and science because they concern different domains. Anyone who takes theology seriously knows that it's not a matter of using it to explain things that scientists are mystified by.
Martin Rees
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Campaigning against religion can be socially counter-productive. If teachers take the uncompromising line that God and Darwinism are irreconcilable, many young people raised in a faith-based culture will stick with their religion and be lost to science.
Martin Rees
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In future, children won't perceive the stars as mere twinkling points of light: they'll learn that each is a 'Sun', orbited by planets fully as interesting as those in our Solar system.
Martin Rees
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Experiments that crash atoms together could start a chain reaction that erodes everything on Earth.
Martin Rees
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The U.S., France, Germany and Canada have all responded to the financial crisis by boosting rather than cutting their science funding. The U.K. has not.
Martin Rees
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There may be organic life out there, or maybe machines created by long-dead civilizations, but any signals, even if they are difficult to decode, would tell us that the concepts of logic and physics are not limited to the hardware in human skulls, and will transform our view of the universe.
Martin Rees