Words matter. These are the best James Hansen Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
Jail threats did not dissuade Martin Luther King – and intergenerational justice is a moral issue of comparable magnitude to civil rights.
You can’t tie a rope around the ice sheet. You can’t build a wall around the ice sheets.
As species are exterminated by shifting climate zones, ecosystems can collapse, destroying more species.
It’s as certain that as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, we will just keep burning them.
Climate change is analogous to Lincoln and slavery or Churchill and Nazism: it’s not the kind of thing where you can compromise.
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.
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.
What has become clear from the science is that we cannot burn all of the fossil fuels without creating a very different planet.
I tend to be naive and gullible, I guess, but I try to believe that governments believe what they say.
Talking nice about sun and wind and green jobs is just greenwash.
The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.
Adding CO2 to the air is like throwing another blanket on the bed.
The fact is fossil fuel carbon will stay in the surface climate system for millennia.
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.
What we are doing to the future of our children, and the other species on the planet, is a clear moral issue.
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.
Until the public demands otherwise, the policy makers will continue to serve their financiers.
We have known since the 1800s that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere. The right amount keeps the climate conducive to human life.
The United States did not sign Kyoto, yet its emissions are not that different from the countries that did sign it.
As a government employee, you can’t testify against the government.
Because cap and trade is enforced through the selling and trading of permits, it actually perpetuates the pollution it is supposed to eliminate.
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.
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.
Global warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening.
The five warmest years over the last century occurred in the last eight years.
You have no time to do the science if you’re talking to the media.
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 democratic process is supposed to be one person one vote, but it turns out that money is talking louder than the votes.
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.
Some Democrats deserve to be criticized.
I’ve tried to be a straight scientist doing the science and reporting it as best I can.
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.
