In a devastating example of critical thinking gone bad, highly educated, deeply caring parents avoid the vaccinations that would protect their children from killer diseases. I love critical thinking and I admire skepticism, but only within a framework that respects the evidence.

We are suffering just now from a bad attack of economic pessimism. It is common to hear people say that the epoch of enormous economic progress which characterised the nineteenth century is over; that the rapid improvement in the standard of life is now going to slow down – at any rate in Great Britain; that a decline in prosperity is more likely than an improvement in the decade which lies ahead of us. (...)

What climatology is not, is an excuse for planet-wide manipulations; neither is it a scare story, a source of sensational copy for journalists short of lines, or provider of disaster movie scenarios. The protection of Nature and the fight against pollution need no false climatic premisses to underpin them: their necessity is self-evident.
Let those who claim to knowledge of the ‘climate’ make sure that they know what they are talking about, and take time to learn the facts - and this includes some scientists, it must be said. The destiny of climatology is not to be a recreation, a supplier of news items and catastrophes: its destiny, as a science of Nature, is to resolve, objectively, disinterestedly, and responsibly, some of humanity’s fundamental problems.