James Hansen Quotes

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.

The important point there is that when people talk about a mean temperature rise of say two, three or four degrees that's a sort of global average which really is a signature of large scale change in climatic patterns.

As you get more global warming, you should see an increase in the extremes of the hydrological cycle - droughts and floods and heavy precipitation.

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.

A hotter, moister atmosphere is an atmosphere primed to trigger disasters.

In particular, Australia, because of its ancient geography, soil profile and distinctive weather patterns, is more adversely affected by climate variability than some other continents.

The science linking the increased frequency and severity of extreme weather to the climate crisis has matured tremendously in the last couple of years.

I grew up in Texas, but that was 20 years ago. Last year, in Fort Worth, they had hail the size of softballs. We're seeing more and more powerful storms, of all types, almost on a biblical level.

Global warming is actually a misnomer. It should be global extremes and global swings, because you add - as you add more energy into the atmosphere, it sloshes around. Energy doesn't simply uniformly warm up the planet. And that means droughts in one area, enormous snowstorms in another area, 100-year floods here, 100-year forest fires there.

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.

We do know that global warming has led to the increase in number and intensity of weather events.

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.

Climate change brings increasingly frequent and severe weather patterns and this means more floods.

At least 3,527 U.S. monthly records for heat, rain, and snow were broken in 2012. We can't let this continue unchecked, and we don't have to.

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.

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.

Warm air holds more water vapor than cold, and so the atmosphere is about 4% wetter than it was 40 years ago. This loads the dice for flood and drought, and we're seeing both in stunning abundance.

If there's horrible flooding in Pakistan or a horrible heat wave in Texas, we're no longer able to call it an act of God, or a natural disaster, or something like that, the way we could have through all of human history until 35 or 40 years ago.

The most blatant examples are increased power and frequency in hurricanes and the increased depth and frequency of heat waves.

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.

Our climate is changing. The Earth's climate has, in fact, warmed by 1.1 to 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit since the industrial revolution. People look at this and say: Oh, that is not very much. In fact, it is very much, and it changes the dynamic. It impacts species. It kills some. It diminishes the carbon sink of the ocean. It does a number of things.

global warming. every day i leave my house and think, "was it this hot last year?" the heat this summer here in LA and in most of the US has been unbearable. i can't remember another time when it was 105 degrees fahrenheit out here (40.5 celsius), and that's the kind of weather we've been having pretty much every day.

In the last two years 24 countries have set new all-time temperature records. We've seen flooding on an epic scale in every continent .

Global Warming Snowstorm Algore, paralyzing the upper Midwest two weeks before winter. Every time he shows up someplace, every time, it's almost comical, every time Al Gore shows up someplace there's either an outbreak of weather that is the exact opposite of what he's talking about, he never does seem to get embarrassed. That's why they stopped calling it global warming and now call it climate change so that virtually every perceived abnormality can be said to be caused by climate change.

The record rainfall and storm surges that have brought flooding across the UK are a clear sign that we are already experiencing the impacts of climate change.