James Hansen
James Hansen
James Edward Hansenis an American adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. He is best known for his research in climatology, his 1988 Congressional testimony on climate change that helped raise broad awareness of global warming, and his advocacy of action to avoid dangerous climate change. In recent years he has become a climate activist to mitigate the effects of climate change, on a few occasions leading to his arrest...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth29 March 1941
CountryUnited States of America
What makes tar sands particularly odious is that the energy you get out in the end, per unit carbon dioxide, is poor. It's equivalent to burning coal in your automobile.
Climate change is analogous to Lincoln and slavery or Churchill and Nazism: it's not the kind of thing where you can compromise.
Being at NASA and having the access to both computing capability and satellite observation capability is kind of the ideal research situation to try to understand global climate change.
I really think the Navy is wrong on this one.
I put a little more emphasis (than the other commissioners did) on the lack of savings when it seemed obvious that we had way too much infrastructure,
If there's one place that I could put my finger on and say what's the No. 1 place that if a rogue aircraft came in and you had trouble it would really have a huge amount of trouble, it would have to be Houston, Texas. Boy, that could just bring America to its knees, almost.
After spending three or four years interacting with the Bush administration, I realized they were not taking any actions to deal with climate change. So, I decided to give one talk, and then it snowballed into another talk and eventually to even protesting and getting arrested.
If somebody came and took my dog, it would break my heart.
If your child gets asthma, the fossil fuel industry doesn't pay. Or if there's a natural disaster, the bill is paid by the taxpayer, not the fossil fuel company.
I don't know how much is done to start with, ... It is a suggestion by political folks in the White House. I don't think that is 'done.'
I can see this train coming down the track,
As a government employee, you can't testify against the government.
Jail threats did not dissuade Martin Luther King - and intergenerational justice is a moral issue of comparable magnitude to civil rights.
In view of the immense power of natural weather and climate fluctuations and the great buffering capacity of the Earth, especially the ocean, it is easy to be skeptical about whether small anthropogenic changes of atmospheric composition can have important practical impacts.