James Hansen Quotes - Page 3

...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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Some Democrats deserve to be criticized.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

'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.

'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.

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

The urgency derives from the nearness of climate tipping points.

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.

It has become very difficult for anyone to argue that observed global warming is natural variability. We have good reason for being able to say that the world will be warmer by about a quarter of a degree in the next decade. It's the same reason we had 10 years ago when we said that the 1990s would be warmer than the 1980s: The planet is out of equilibrium.

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.

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