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
The forcings that drive long-term climate change are not known with an accuracy sufficient to define future climate change.
It's as certain that as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, we will just keep burning them.
CEOs of fossil energy companies know what they are doing and are aware of long-term consequences of continued business as usual. In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.
How long have we got? We have to stabilize emissions of carbon dioxide within a decade, or temperatures will warm by more than one degree... We don't have much time left.
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.
To be playing in a threesome with Neil Armstrong and Clint Eastwood was pretty incredible, ... For Peggy and I to be part of that was pretty heady stuff.
What really won that (decision in favor of Groton) was Rob Simmons, ... He did a phenomenal job.
What is frustrating people, me included, is that democratic action affects elections but what we get then from political leaders is greenwash.
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.
We need to send a message to Congress and the president that we want them to take the actions that are needed to preserve climate for young people and future generations and all life on the planet.
With a fourth generation of nuclear power, you can have a technology that will burn more than 99 percent of the energy in the fuel. It would mean that you don't need to mine uranium for the next thousand years.
We can't afford to wait another 10 years.
My final obligation is not to Neil... it's not to any of the historical actors, it's to posterity, ... It's to try to tell the story as genuinely and as profoundly as I can for the benefit of readers who don't know the history and for readers who are going to come across this book hundreds of years from now.
On a per capita basis, Britain is responsible for more of the carbon dioxide now in the atmosphere than any other nation on Earth because it has been burning it from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.