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
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.
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.
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.
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 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 can see this train coming down the track,
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.
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.