James Hansen Quotes

The five-year mean global temperature has been flat for the last decade

There has been no warming over 18 years.

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.

My view is that climate changes have happened in the last 80 years, that is, the world has got a little bit warmer, although not as warm as it has been in Medieval times, or the Bronze Age.

Climate does fluctuate. It goes from hot to cold. We have ice ages.

The fact is the planet is warming right now, and it is easier to blame it on some human activity rather than saying we should better understand the whole problem and recognize there are natural conditions that are impacting this, too.

The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time... it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising - carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that.

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.

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!

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.

The hottest year in global [sic] history was 1934.

In the APS (American Physical Society) it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible? The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this 'warming' period.'

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.

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 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.

When you analyze all the data, there is a warming trend according to science. But the jury is out on the degree of how much is manmade.

My district has been hit with three 500-year floods in the last several years, so either you believe that we had a one-in-over-100-million probability that occurred, or you believe as I do that there's a new normal, and we have changing weather patterns, and we have climate change. This is the science.

The earth's history over the past several million years is that for every 100,000 years, we go through a dramatic climatic cycle where we get 90,000 years of ice age and 10,000 years of a warm period. I think people today just have the expectation that we deserve a perfectly benign climate forever.

My dad joined Langley in 1964 as a co-op student and retired in 2004 an internationally respected climate scientist.

The climate is changing, but the question is how much - and to what extent human factors are contributing to that.

A lot of what is done by the climate lobby is anti-science. But there is some science behind it. Like, there are greenhouse gases, and they do contribute to warming. But if you look at the last, say, 160 years, the first 80 of that period, they went up about four-tenths of a degree. And now, the second 80 that CO2 has increased by, what, 30 percent or something, it's gone up five-tenths of a degree. And there's been in the last 30 or 40 years, there's been no real increase in storms or bad weather.

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.

If I had to predict, the way things are going, I'd say the chances are about 50-50 that humanity will be extinct or nearly extinct within 50 years. Weapons of mass destruction, disease, I mean this global warming is scaring the living daylights out of me.

There is good evidence that last year's European heat wave was influenced by global warming. It resulted in 26,000 premature deaths and cost $13.5bn.

There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global.