Best 71 quotes of James Hansen on MyQuotes

James Hansen

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    James Hansen

    ...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.

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    James Hansen

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

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    James Hansen

    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.

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    James Hansen

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

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    James Hansen

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

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    James Hansen

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

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    James Hansen

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

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    James Hansen

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

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    James Hansen

    '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.

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    James Hansen

    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.

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    James Hansen

    ...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.

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    James Hansen

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

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    James Hansen

    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.

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    James Hansen

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

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    James Hansen

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

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    James Hansen

    '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.

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    James Hansen

    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.

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    James Hansen

    If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO₂ will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm [parts per million] to at most 350 ppm... If the present overshoot of this target CO₂ is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects.

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    James Hansen

    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.

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    James Hansen

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

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    James Hansen

    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.

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    James Hansen

    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.

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    James Hansen

    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.

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    James Hansen

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

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    James Hansen

    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.

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    James Hansen

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

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    James Hansen

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

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    James Hansen

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

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    James Hansen

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

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    James Hansen

    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.

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    James Hansen

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

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    James Hansen

    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.

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    James Hansen

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

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    James Hansen

    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.

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    James Hansen

    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.

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    James Hansen

    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.

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    James Hansen

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

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    James Hansen

    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.

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    James Hansen

    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.

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    James Hansen

    Some Democrats deserve to be criticized.

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    James Hansen

    The 5-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.

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    James Hansen

    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.

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    James Hansen

    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.

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    James Hansen

    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.

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    James Hansen

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

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    James Hansen

    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.

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    James Hansen

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

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    James Hansen

    The evidence for human-made climate change is overwhelming.

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    James Hansen

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

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    James Hansen

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