James Hansen Quotes

Remember, the Arctic didn't have any ice. And the Northwest Passage was wide open. They were raising grapes in Scotland for God sakes, had a huge winery. Iceland was a farming community. As some of the glaciers retreated they found villages that were covered with ice.

The North Pole will be ice-free during summer in years to come, and that itself will put the Arctic Sea basin on a very high risk of... environmental disasters that might be there.

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.

Global warming and climate change is a big problem. It requires a big solution.

The ice doesn't care who's in the White House. It doesn't care which party controls your congress. It doesn't care which party controls your parliament. It just melts.

You want calamities? What about the Ice Age?

I don't like the term 'global warming,' because it's misleading. It implies something that's mainly about temperature, that's gradual, and that's uniform across the planet. And in fact, temperature is only one of the things that's changing.

The Arctic is a place that historically, during all preceding human history, has largely been an icy realm with an impact on ocean currents. That, in turn, influences the temperature of the planet. The Arctic is now vulnerable because of the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, with a rate of melting that is stunning.

You could engineer a human to survive the greenhouse effect because you think that's what's going to happen, and then all of a sudden the glaciers are creeping down on you.

If you think of the ice caps as the fridge of our planet, if your fridge at home died, the food you eat would go rotten, and you'd starve.

Global warming is my personal experience.

The world cannot live without the Arctic; it affects every living thing on Earth and acts as a virtual thermostat, reflecting sunlight and cooling the planet.

I do believe in the Bible as the final word of God. And I do believe that God said the Earth would not be destroyed by a flood. Now, do I believe in climate change? In my trip to Greenland, the answer is yes. The climate is changing.

The 'New Yorker' asked me to shoot a story on climate change in 2005, and I wound up going to Iceland to shoot a glacier. The real story wasn't the beautiful white top. It ended up being at the terminus of the glacier where it's dying.

What people don't understand about the Arctic is that this isn't just about those other people, those Eskimos that have nothing to do with us. The Arctic drives the climate of the whole globe.

In the Arctic, things are already getting freaky. Temperatures have warmed three times faster than the global average.

For us to try and step in and say we have got to do all these global things to prevent the earth from getting any warmer in my opinion is absolute nonsense. It’s not going to happen

The bearded iceberg

We have hysteria over climate change. Powers bigger than us have already figured out how to save the earth.

The American people know that climate change is the kind of problem only America can solve.

On climate change, we are told that there will be a civilization-ending development in the form of massive sea level rise as soon as 2050. Anybody plan to be here in 2050? I think a few of us do, myself included.

We need to be realistic. There is very little we can do now to stop the ice from disappearing from the North Pole in the summer. And we probably cannot prevent the melting of the permafrost and the resulting release of methane. In addition, I fear that we may be too late to help the oceans maintain their ability to absorb carbon dioxide.

Global warming is a real threat to our communities, to everybody, to everything.

We have no choice: we must protect Arctic ice, enable it to continue to act as an essential temperature regulator for the planet, avoid the catastrophic rise in sea levels that would result from the ice melt, and stop the disappearance of permafrost releasing irreversible quantities of greenhouse gases back into the atmosphere.

Climate change is not a theoretical question for the people of the Caribbean.