"While I was on board I soon realised that the boot room, where we all changed our clothing and left our shoes, had turned into a scene of social chaos," McEwan said, describing how the eminent scientists, who down the hall were gathering to talk earnestly about the future of the humankind, were also capable of stealing each others' footwear and regarding their colleagues with deep distrust.
My family love to sing, so we'd make a lot of noise, but just before we all ski off the mountain, I'd have Bach's St Matthew Passion blasting down the valley, celebrating the beauty that humankind can turn its hand to when it isn't killing itself.
Everyone has the right to enjoy culture, participate in a creative and enriching leisure at the service of the progress of humankind.
Extolled by leading grovellers as one of the finest honours available to humankind, or half of it, the OM was founded in 1902, it says on the royal website, by the gross libertine, Edward VII, who set the number of beneficiaries, for reasons too royal to bother with, to 24 at any time.
The point is that Europe is working together in a thrilling intellectual exploration that can have no conceivable commercial or political payoff but could, in some still intangible way, enlighten all humankind.
I believe humankind has looked at climate change in that same way: as if it were a fiction, happening to someone else's planet, as if pretending that climate change wasn't real would somehow make it go away," he told the UN meeting.
All of this misses or trivialises the real, systemic significance of climate change: that humankind is encountering the finitude of our planet, confronting the need to share and protect our endowment from nature, and realising that much will have to change to make this possible.
Once temperatures rise enough, agricultural productivity plummets and humankind is in real trouble.
He thinks chemical companies need to be similarly forthright, and explain to the public that they "actually benefit humankind".
This change in wingspan suggests that natural selection could indeed be at work and that, when faced with new threats from humankind, these birds might be evolving in response.
If its gases were suddenly released, the explosion (a "turnover", in geology-speak) could be "the biggest catastrophe humankind has experienced," perhaps suffocating or incinerating the 2m people who live on the shore, says Jarmo Gummerus, a Finnish engineer.
