James Hansen Quotes

#1. 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.

James Hansen

#2. 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.

James Hansen

#3. The five warmest years over the last century occurred in the last eight years.

James Hansen

#4. 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.

James Hansen

#5. Planet Earth, creation, the world in which civilization developed, the world with climate patterns that we know and stable shorelines, is in imminent peril.

James Hansen

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

James Hansen

#7. 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.

James Hansen

#8. The evidence for human-made climate change is overwhelming.

James Hansen

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

James Hansen

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

James Hansen

#11. Interference with communications of science to the public has been greater during the current administration than at any time in my career,

James Hansen

#12. 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.

James Hansen

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

James Hansen

#14. 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.

James Hansen

#15. It would be immoral to leave young people with a climate system spiraling out of control.

James Hansen

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

James Hansen

#17. The climate system is being pushed hard enough that change will become obvious to the man in the street in the next decade.

James Hansen

#18. 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.

James Hansen

#19. What we are doing to the future of our children, and the other species on the planet, is a clear moral issue.

James Hansen

#20. 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.

James Hansen

#21. Recent warming coincides with rapid growth of human-made greenhouse gases. The observed rapid warming gives urgency to discussions about how to slow greenhouse gas emissions.

James Hansen

#22. We're running out of time.

James Hansen

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

James Hansen

#24. 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.

James Hansen

#25. 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.

James Hansen

#26. What is frustrating people, me included, is that democratic action affects elections but what we get then from political leaders is greenwash.

James Hansen

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

James Hansen

#28. The urgency derives from the nearness of climate tipping points.

James Hansen

#29. Climate change is analogous to Lincoln and slavery or Churchill and Nazism: it's not the kind of thing where you can compromise.

James Hansen

#30. 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.

James Hansen

#31. The last time the world was three degrees warmer than today-which is what we expect later this century-sea levels were 25m higher. So that is what we can look forward to if we don't act soon.

James Hansen

#32. Money has too big an influence on our politics in Washington and somehow we need to do something about that.

James Hansen

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

James Hansen

#34. Some Democrats deserve to be criticized.

James Hansen

#35. 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.

James Hansen

#36. There is still time to act and avoid a worsening climate, but we are wasting precious time,

James Hansen

#37. 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.

James Hansen

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

James Hansen

#39. 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.

James Hansen

#40. 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.

James Hansen

#41. Only in the last few years did the science crystallize, revealing the urgency - our planet really is in peril. If we do not change course soon, we will hand our children a situation that is out of their control.

James Hansen

#42. Jail threats did not dissuade Martin Luther King - and intergenerational justice is a moral issue of comparable magnitude to civil rights.

James Hansen

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

James Hansen

#44. 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.

James Hansen

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

James Hansen

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

James Hansen

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

James Hansen

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

James Hansen

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

James Hansen

#50. Global warming has already triggered a sea level rise that could reach from 6 metres (19.69 ft) to 25 metres (27.34 yards).

James Hansen

#51. As a government employee, you can't testify against the government.

James Hansen

#52. Scientists will say we can't blame global warming for any single event. In a sense that's right, but the fact that the frequency and intensity of these events is increasing you can blame on global warming.

James Hansen

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

James Hansen

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

James Hansen

#55. 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.

James Hansen

#56. 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.

James Hansen

#57. We are on the precipice of climate system tipping points beyond which there is no redemption.

James Hansen

#58. 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.

James Hansen

#59. The global surface albedo [surface whiteness] and greenhouse gas changes account for practically the entire global climate change.

James Hansen

#60. 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.

James Hansen

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

James Hansen

#62. 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

James Hansen

#63. The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.

James Hansen

#64. 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.

James Hansen

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

James Hansen

#66. 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.

James Hansen

#67. 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.

James Hansen

#68. 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.

James Hansen

#69. 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.

James Hansen

#70. 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.

James Hansen

#71. 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.

James Hansen

#72. You can't tie a rope around the ice sheet. You can't build a wall around the ice sheets.

James Hansen

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

James Hansen

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

James Hansen

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

James Hansen

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

James Hansen

#77. 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.

James Hansen

#78. 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.

James Hansen

#79. 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.

James Hansen

#80. 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.

James Hansen