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
I think this is a more optimistic assessment of the chances for keeping climate change moderate in the next 50 years, and the way to do that is to focus on stopping the growth of several gases, ... Global Warming in the 21st Century: An Alternative Scenario.
We've driven them out of the range that has existed for the last 1 million years. And the climate has not fully responded to changes that have already occurred.
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.
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.
Global warming isn't a prediction. It is happening.
Coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet.
We're running out of time.
I've never seen such great support as you see from the folks in Texas. They really put their money where their mouth is.
Earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements, The warming of a few degrees is going to take us to a world that is perhaps as different from today as the last ice age is from today.
Consider the perverse effect cap and trade has on altruistic actions. Say you decide to buy a small, high-efficiency car. That reduces your emissions, but not your country's. Instead it allows somebody else to buy a bigger S.U.V. - because the total emissions are set by the cap.
There's no win for us in talking about this.
I was ready to do a biography, ... But obviously, I was challenged by the daunting prospect of getting him to do it. I had no real confidence. There was nothing about my approach that I thought would convince him.
I think I was just trying to find my father, ... I hadn't been able to ask him these questions.