James Hansen

Jail threats did not dissuade Martin Luther King - and intergenerational justice is a moral issue of comparable magnitude to civil rights.

Until the public demands otherwise, the policy makers will continue to serve their financiers.

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

The United States did not sign Kyoto, yet its emissions are not that different from the countries that did sign it.

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

Money has too big an influence on our politics in Washington and somehow we need to do something about that.

What is frustrating people, me included, is that democratic action affects elections but what we get then from political leaders is greenwash.

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.

Global warming isn't a prediction. It is happening.

You can't turn on your television without seeing these advertisements about clean coal, clean tar sands and the claim that there's more jobs associated with fossil fuels than other industries. That's of course not true. But they're hammering that into the voters' heads.

If your child gets asthma, the fossil fuel industry doesn't pay. Or if there's a natural disaster, the bill is paid by the taxpayer, not the fossil fuel company.

Being at NASA and having the access to both computing capability and satellite observation capability is kind of the ideal research situation to try to understand global climate change.