James Hansen
9 quotes
Biography
James Edward Hansen is an American climatologist. He is an adjunct professor directing the Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions at Columbia University.
"We have known since the 1800s that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere. The right amount keeps the climate conducive to human life."
"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."
"Money has too big an influence on our politics in Washington and somehow we need to do something about that."
"I've tried to be a straight scientist doing the science and reporting it as best I can."
"You have no time to do the science if you're talking to the media."
"What has become clear from the science is that we cannot burn all of the fossil fuels without creating a very different planet."
"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."
"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."
"What we are doing to the future of our children, and the other species on the planet, is a clear moral issue."