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Men are weak now, and yet they transform the Earth’s surface. In millions of years their might will increase to the extent that they will change the surface of the Earth, its oceans, the atmosphere and themselves. They will control the climate and the solar system just as they control the Earth. They will travel beyond the limits of our planetary system; they will reach other Suns and use their fresh energy instead of the energy of their dying luminary.

 

Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky

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Mars, Triton, Pluto and Jupiter all show global warming. Climate changes on other planets and their moons show that climate change elsewhere in the Solar System could not possibly be due to human activity on Earth. There must be a driving force outside the Earth. It is the Sun.

 

Ian Plimer

 

As to that which is called nature, it is no other than the laws by which motion and action of every kind, with respect to unintelligible matter, is regulated. And when we speak of looking through nature up to nature's God, we speak philosophically the same rational language as when we speak of looking through human laws up to the power that ordained them.
God is the power of first cause, nature is the law, and matter is the subject acted upon.
But infidelity by ascribing every phenomenon to properties of matter, conceives a system for which it cannot account, and yet it pretends to demonstration. It reasons from what it sees on the surface of the earth, but it does not carry itself on the solar system existing by motion. It sees upon the surface a perpetual decomposition and recomposition of matter. It sees that an oak produces an acorn, an acorn an oak, a bird an egg, an egg a bird, and so on. In things of this kind it sees something which it calls a natural cause, but none of the causes it sees is the cause of that motion which preserves the solar system.

 

Thomas Paine

 

Everybody assumes that the earth naturally is in radiative balance, and yet we don’t even know that from an observational point of view. It could be that the earth is constantly out of radiative balance. We know it certainly is locally, because that is what drives the weather. Weather is a complex, fluid system that is forced by heat inequalities around the earth; that is what drives it. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were substantial imbalances in the earth’s radiative budget and yet everybody starts out assuming that it is in balance. My personal opinion is that the modelers who believe this are mostly physicists rather thanscientists and they not as familiar with the climate system complexities that we atmospheric types tend to focus on. All of these assumptions about the Earth being in radiative balance are made by modelers, but I don’t think anybody had demonstrated them. They are just assumptions.

 

Roy Spencer

 

The great object of all knowledge is to enlarge and purify the soul, to fill the mind with noble contemplations, to furnish a refined pleasure, and to lead our feeble reason from the works of nature up to its great Author and Sustainer. Considering this as the ultimate end of science, no branch of it can surely claim precedence of Astronomy. No other science furnishes such a palpable embodiment of the abstractions which lie at the foundation of our intellectual system; the great ideas of time, and space, and extension, and magnitude, and number, and motion, and power. How grand the conception of the ages on ages required for several of the secular equations of the solar system; of distances from which the light of a fixed star would not reach us in twenty millions of years, of magnitudes compared with which the earth is but a foot-ball; of starry hosts—suns like our own—numberless as the sands on the shore; of worlds and systems shooting through the infinite spaces

 

Edward Everett

 

If we look to the answer as to why for so many years we achieved so much, prospered as no other people on earth, it was because here in this land we unleashed the energy and individual genius of man to a greater extent than has ever been done before. Freedom and the dignity of the individual have been more available and assured here than in any other place on earth. The price for this freedom at times has been high, but we have never been unwilling to pay the price.

 

Ronald Reagan