James Hansen Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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.

He wanted it to be a scholarly book, ... I think if I had been a commercial writer, he would not have paid much attention. He's not interested in feature stories about him.

I think you have a base that can be a credit to this area, more so. I guess I didn't understand the importance of this area to America.

It is an important study that increases our confidence that there is a link between global warming and intense tropical storms.

I think I was just trying to find my father, ... I hadn't been able to ask him these questions.

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.

The area below the proposed plat has experienced numerous slides that have resulted in residential property damage.

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.

You have no time to do the science if you're talking to the media.

Tipping points are so dangerous because if you pass them, the climate is out of humanity's control: if an ice sheet disintegrates and starts to slide into the ocean there's nothing we can do about that.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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've never seen such great support as you see from the folks in Texas. They really put their money where their mouth is.

Coal is responsible for as much atmospheric carbon dioxide as other fossil fuels combined and it still has far greater reserves. We must stop using it.

This is an authorized biography, and a lot of readers may suspect that that means that it will treat Neil with kid gloves, ... That's not the case. Neil gave me complete freedom of interpretation and analysis. All he wanted to do was have input to make sure my facts were straight.

They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public.

They're a lot of fun to perform with. They're good guys to work with. They're helpful to work with. Any time you can work with a professional group, it's helpful.

It's not something you can adapt to. We can't let it go on another 10 years like this. We've got to do something.

For instance, they're using the economy as the reason not to consider taking action. I've been chastised for being a scientist saying we are damaging the economy in the long run. But you need to look at the broad problem. I think I'm free to do so and free to have my opinion.

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.

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.

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.

I'm probably the hardest head of the bunch (of nine commissioners),

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.

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 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,

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.

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 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.

The five-year mean global temperature has been flat for the last decade

Because cap and trade is enforced through the selling and trading of permits, it actually perpetuates the pollution it is supposed to eliminate.

Injection of environmental and political perspectives in midstream of the science discussion cannot help the process of inquiry. I believe that persons with relevant scientific expertise should concentrate, with pride, on cool objective analysis, providing information to the public and decision-makers when it is found, but leaving the moral implications for later common consideration, or at most for summary inferential discussion.

Well, you know what happens to crime when the heat goes up.

The most difficult task, phase-out over the next 20-25 years of coal use that does not capture CO₂, is Herculean, yet feasible when compared with the efforts that went into World War II. The stakes, for all life on the planet, surpass those of any previous crisis. The greatest danger is continued ignorance and denial, which could make tragic consequences unavoidable.

Our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change. The deadly European heat wave of 2003, the fiery Russian heat wave of 2010 and catastrophic droughts in Texas and Oklahoma last year [2011] can each be attributed to climate change. The odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small. To count on those odds would be like quitting your job and playing the lottery every morning to pay the bills.

The carbon emissions from tar shale and tar sands would initiate a continual unfolding of climate disasters over the course of this century. We would be miserable stewards of creation. We would rob our own children and grandchildren.

The democratic process is supposed to be one person one vote, but it turns out that money is talking louder than the votes.

Until the public demands otherwise, the policy makers will continue to serve their financiers.

The five-year mean global temperature has been flat for the last decade, which we interpret as a combination of natural variability and a slow down in the growth rate of net climate forcing.

The scientific excitement in comparing theory with data, and developing some understanding of global changes that are occurring, is what makes all the other stuff worth it.

The greatest danger hanging over our children and grandchildren is initiation of changes that will be irreversible on any time scale that humans can imagine.

Burning all the fossil fuels will destroy the planet we know, Creation, the planet of stable climate in which civilization developed.

Global warming isn't a prediction. It is happening.

Several times in Earth's history, rapid global warming occurred, apparently spurred by amplifying feedbacks. In each case, more than half of plant and animal species became extinct. New species came into being over tens and hundreds of thousands of years. But these are time scales and generations that we cannot imagine.

Rising carbon price is essential to 'decarbonize' the economy - to remove the nation towards the era beyond fossil fuels.

Cap and trade generates special interests, lobbyists, and trading schemes, yielding non-productive millionaires, all at public expense. The public is fed up with such business. Tax with 100% dividend, in contrast, would spur our economy, while aiding the disadvantaged, the climate, and our national security.

Coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet.

Goals and caps on carbon emissions are practically worthless, if coal emissions continue, because of the exceedingly long lifetime of carbon dioxide in the air.

I think we have a very brief window of opportunity to deal with climate change... no longer than a decade, at the most.

The danger is that the compromises and special interests inherent in Kyoto-style targets and cap-and-trade will be accepted because of bureaucratic momentum.

We have at most ten years - not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions... We are near a tipping point, a point of no return, beyond which the built in momentum and feedbacks will carry us to levels of climate change with staggering consequences for humanity and all of the residents of this planet.

The climate is nearing tipping points. Changes are beginning to appear and there is a potential for explosive changes, effects that would be irreversible, if we do not rapidly slow fossil-fuel emissions over the next few decades.

Adding CO2 to the air is like throwing another blanket on the bed.

I tend to be naive and gullible, I guess, but I try to believe that governments believe what they say.

If we drive our fellow species to extinction, we will leave a far more desolate planet for our descendants than the world we inherited from our elders.

The question is not whether to close the parks, but how to accomplish this goal.

Talking nice about sun and wind and green jobs is just greenwash.

As you get more global warming, you should see an increase in the extremes of the hydrological cycle - droughts and floods and heavy precipitation.

It has become very difficult for anyone to argue that observed global warming is natural variability. We have good reason for being able to say that the world will be warmer by about a quarter of a degree in the next decade. It's the same reason we had 10 years ago when we said that the 1990s would be warmer than the 1980s: The planet is out of equilibrium.

As species are exterminated by shifting climate zones, ecosystems can collapse, destroying more species.

If we fail to act, we will end up with a different planet.

The urgency derives from the nearness of climate tipping points.

A level of no more than 350 ppm is still feasible, with the help of reforestation and improved agricultural practices, but just barely - time is running out.

We have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.

Some Democrats deserve to be criticized.

We have known since the 1800s that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere. The right amount keeps the climate conducive to human life.

We have to, in the next ten years, begin to decrease the rate of carbon dioxide emissions and then flatten it out. If that doesn't happen in ten years, we're going to be passing certain tipping points. If the ice sheets begin to disintegrate, what can you do about it? You can't tie a rope around an ice sheet.

What has become clear from the science is that we cannot burn all of the fossil fuels without creating a very different planet.

The forcings that drive long-term climate change are not known with an accuracy sufficient to define future climate change.

I was lucky to grow up at a time when it was not difficult for the child of a tenant farmer to make his way to the state university.

The fact is fossil fuel carbon will stay in the surface climate system for millennia.

I've tried to be a straight scientist doing the science and reporting it as best I can.

...99 percent confident that the world really was getting warmer and that there was a high degree of probability that it was due to human-made greenhouse gases.

It's as certain that as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, we will just keep burning them.

We're handing them [young people & future generations] a climate system which is potentially out of their control. We're in an emergency: you can see what's on the horizon over the next few decades with the effects it will have on ecosystems, sea level and species extinction

The United States did not sign Kyoto, yet its emissions are not that different from the countries that did sign it.

I have been described as the grandfather of climate change. In fact, I am just a grandfather and I do not want my grandchildren to say that grandpa understood what was happening but didn't make it clear.

We cannot afford to put off change any longer. We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead.

Policy decisions on climate change are being deliberated every day by those without full knowledge of the science, and often with intentional misinformation spawned by special interests.

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.

...chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to [should] be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature; [Hansen] accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.

Coral reefs, the rain forest of the ocean, are home for one-third of the species of the sea. Coral reefs are under stress for several reasons, including warming of the ocean, but especially because of ocean acidification, a direct effect of added carbon dioxide. Ocean life dependent on carbonate shells and skeletons is threatened by dissolution as the ocean becomes more acid.