141 Quotes by James Hansen

We have known since the 1800s that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere. The right amount keeps the climate conducive to human life.

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.

What has become clear from the science is that we cannot burn all of the fossil fuels without creating a very different planet.

The forcings that drive long-term climate change are not known with an accuracy sufficient to define future climate change.

I was lucky to grow up at a time when it was not difficult for the child of a tenant farmer to make his way to the state university.

The fact is fossil fuel carbon will stay in the surface climate system for millennia.

I've tried to be a straight scientist doing the science and reporting it as best I can.

...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.

It's as certain that as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, we will just keep burning them.