James Hansen Quotes

We know the surface temperature of the Earth is warming. It has risen by .6 degrees Celsius over the past 100 years. There was a warming trend from the 1890s to the 1940s, cooling from the 1940s to the 1970s, and then sharply rising temperatures from the 1970s to today.

So far the earth has warmed about a degree Fahrenheit globally averaged. That doesn't seem like an enormous amount but it's unlike what we would have expected twenty years ago.

Few scientists now dispute that today's soaring levels of carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere will cause global temperature averages to rise by as much as nine degrees Fahrenheit sometime after the year 2000.

There is no real scientific debate over what is happening; of course there is debate over exactly how it is going to play out in the decades ahead, because this is a large experiment that we haven't done before, and no one knows precisely how one can ever precisely predict what effects this heat will have. But all the science in the last few years, or almost all of it, really serves to show that the effects are larger and more rapid than we had thought even a decade ago.

The models that have been constructed agree that when, as has been predicted, the level of carbon dioxide or its equivalent in other greenhouse gases doubles from pre-Industrial Revolution concentrations, the global average temperature will increase, and that the increase will be 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius or 3 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit... In Dallas, for instance, a doubled level of carbon dioxide and other gases like methane, would increase the number of days a year with temperatures above 100 degrees from 19 to 78 each year.

The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium.

The basic science is very well established; it is well understood that global warming is due to greenhouse gases. What is uncertain is projections about specifics in the next few decades, by how much will the climate change.

Those who deny human-caused climate change offer no compelling evidence to better explain the undeniable rise in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases and global temperature.

Call me a converted skeptic. Prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct … humans are almost entirely the cause.

The average global temperature has increased by about 0.8 degrees Celsius since 1880, with two-thirds of the warming occurring since 1975.

The best scientific evidence suggests temperatures are rising, and the best scientific evidence suggests man-made anthropogenic carbon emissions have some substantial thing to do with that. However, does that mean the trend will continue forever? We don't know.

We are now at the point in the age of global warming hysteria where the IPCC global warming theory has crashed into the hard reality of observations.

Narragansett Bay waters are getting warmer -- 4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer in the winter since the 1960s.

That's when the vast consensus of the world's climatologists, brought together by the UN and The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, really announced that this was going on, and since then the accumulation of data and wickedly hot years has served to only congeal that consensus much more firmly.

Without a doubt, the warming of the past 100 years has been a welcome respite from a long and deadly Little Ice Age. The possibility that humans may have contributed to the recent warming does not make it any less welcome.

The last 15 years, there has been no recorded warming. Contrary to all the theories that they are expounding, there should have been warming over the last 15 years. It hasn't happened.

The only basis for even talking about global warming is the predictions spewed out by computer models. The only quote/unquote "evidence" of global warming is what models are predicting the climate and the weather will be in the next 50 to 100 years. Now, what those models spit out is only as good as the data that's put in, and it's an absolute joke. In terms of science, it's a total joke. There is no warming, global or otherwise!

...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 ten hottest years in the atmospheric record, going back only 160 years, have been in the last eleven years.

I don't think there is any global warming. I don't see the statistical data for that.

When you look at what has happened over the last few decades the natural fluctuations point in the opposite direction of what has actually occurred. When they run the models and plug in the man-made pollution, the correspondence is exact. Beyond that, the scale of natural fluctuations has now been far exceeded by the impact of man-made global warming.

There's a lot of differing data [about global warming], but as far as I can gather, over the last hundred years the temperature on this planet has gone up 1.8 degrees. Am I the only one who finds that amazingly stable? I could go back to my hotel room tonight and futz with the thermostat for three to four hours. I could not detect that difference.

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.

You know, the greatest hoax I think that has been around in many, many years if not hundreds of years has been this hoax on the environment and global warming. You notice they don't call it global warming anymore. It's weather control.

In Australia, average temperatures have risen almost one degree since 1910, and each decade since the 1940s has been warmer than the one before. That warming is real. Its consequences are real. And it will change our lives in real and practical ways.