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 we are doing to the future of our children, and the other species on the planet, is a clear moral issue.
Politicians think that if matters look difficult, compromise is a good approach. Unfortunately, nature and the laws of physics cannot compromise - they are what they are.
There is still time to act and avoid a worsening climate, but we are wasting precious time,
Imagine a giant asteroid on a direct collision course with Earth. That is the equivalent of what we face now [with climate change], yet we dither.
The climate dice are now loaded. Some seasons still will be cooler than the long-term average, but the perceptive person should notice that the frequency of unusually warm extremes is increasing. It is the extremes that have the most impact on people and other life on the planet.
In my three decades in government, I've never seen control of communications to the public so constrained. Communications from government scientists have never been so constrained.
In a way it's kind of my own moon landing, ... It's hard to top this. I don't think I can top it.
You can't turn on your television without seeing these advertisements about clean coal, clean tar sands and the claim that there's more jobs associated with fossil fuels than other industries. That's of course not true. But they're hammering that into the voters' heads.
You can't tie a rope around the ice sheet. You can't build a wall around the ice sheets.
I made the vote predicated on what I thought was right.
In California, they are beginning to require much cleaner fuels for transportation vehicles, ... That kind of thing could go a long way in reducing pollutants.
I'm probably the hardest head of the bunch (of nine commissioners),
Money has too big an influence on our politics in Washington and somehow we need to do something about that.