James Hansen Quotes

If left unchecked, global change will create violent conflict, torrential storms, shrinking coastlines, and irreversible catastrophe.

The science tells us that if we fail to reduce global warming pollution, global temperatures will rise to dangerous levels and unleash devastating extreme weather events and accelerate destructive sea level rise.

I once saw a lump of Greenland breaking off into the sea and moving south, which of course will affect the atmosphere and us generally, and it'll happen more and more.

Al Gore is not just whistling in the wind. Global warming is for real. Every scientist knows that now, and we are on our way to the destruction of every species on earth, if we don't pay attention and reverse our course.

We tend to describe climate change in terms that are abstract—a one degree rise in temperature, an increase in green house gasses—but when waves wash away a village, that’s concrete and very emotional.

We are on the precipice of climate system tipping points beyond which there is no redemption.

For me the most important issue is climate change because it in some ways trumps every other issue. Everything else we care about falls by the wayside if the Greenland ice shelf falls into the sea. And if suddenly sea levels rise 21 feet, everything we hold near and dear ceases to exist.

We have to, in the next ten years, begin to decrease the rate of carbon dioxide emissions and then flatten it out. If that doesn't happen in ten years, we're going to be passing certain tipping points. If the ice sheets begin to disintegrate, what can you do about it? You can't tie a rope around an ice sheet.

According to a new UN report, the global warming outlook is much worse than originally predicted. Which is pretty bad, when they originally predicted it would destroy the planet.

We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.

All the modelling we do shows that the climate is poised on the jump up to a new hot state. It is accelerating so fast that you could say that we are already in it.

Some people call it global warming; some people call it climate change. What is the difference?

The idea that human beings have taken a few steps closer toward asserting control over the Earth's climate is likely to strike you as a really bad idea.

Just because you see pictures of glaciers falling into the ocean doesn't mean anything bad is happening. This is something that happens all the time. It's part of the natural cycle of things. We know from measurements that glaciers have been melting for 200 years at least.

Climate change is not a discrete issue; it's a symptom of larger problems. Fundamentally, our society as currently designed has no future. We're chewing up the planet so fast, in so many different ways, that we could solve the climate problem tomorrow and still find that environmental collapse is imminent.

By the time we see that climate change is really bad, your ability to fix it is extremely limited... The carbon gets up there, but the heating effect is delayed. And then the effect of that heat on the species and ecosystem is delayed. That means that even when you turn virtuous, things are actually going to get worse for quite a while.

To be clear, climate change is a true 800 pound gorilla in the room. The effects of global warming threaten global environmental upheaval over the coming century. But for South Florida and the Everglades, it could be our death knell if urgent action is not taken.

Global warming has melted the polar ice caps, raised the levels of the oceans and flooded the earth's great cities. Despite its evident prosperity, New Jersey is scarcely Utopia.

Earth might one day soon resemble the planet Venus.

The entire North Polar ice cap is disappearing before our very eyes. It's been the size of the continental United States for the last 3 million years and now 40 percent is gone and the rest of it is going.

The prediction that glaciers will be gone from Glacier National Park has been moved up by 10 years to 2020, the same year it's predicted the Arctic Sea will be ice-free in the summer.

The damage that climate change is causing and that will get worse if we fail to act goes beyond the hundreds of thousands of lives, homes and businesses lost, ecosystems destroyed, species driven to extinction, infrastructure smashed and people inconvenienced.

I take no pleasure in the fact that the scientific predictions I've relayed to popular audiences turn out to be true.

Ultimately, here is the choice we face: we can either make the solution to the climate crisis the central organizing principle of civilization–or the hostile conditions we are creating will grow rapidly worse, thickening the smothering blanket of global warming pollution surrounding our planet and destroy the viability of civilization as we know it.

Climate change had arrived a century sooner than expected, and future generations were no longer the only victims.