James Hansen

“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.”

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

“The five warmest years over the last century occurred in the last eight years.”

“You have no time to do the science if you're talking to the media.”

“Coal is responsible for as much atmospheric carbon dioxide as other fossil fuels combined and it still has far greater reserves. We must stop using it.”

“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.”

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

“As a government employee, you can't testify against the government.”

“What we are doing to the future of our children, and the other species on the planet, is a clear moral issue.”

“On a per capita basis, Britain is responsible for more of the carbon dioxide now in the atmosphere than any other nation on Earth because it has been burning it from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.”

“What makes tar sands particularly odious is that the energy you get out in the end, per unit carbon dioxide, is poor. It's equivalent to burning coal in your automobile.”

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

“After spending three or four years interacting with the Bush administration, I realized they were not taking any actions to deal with climate change. So, I decided to give one talk, and then it snowballed into another talk and eventually to even protesting and getting arrested.”

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

“Several times in Earth's history, rapid global warming occurred, apparently spurred by amplifying feedbacks. In each case, more than half of plant and animal species became extinct. New species came into being over tens and hundreds of thousands of years. But these are time scales and generations that we cannot imagine.”

“The evidence for human-made climate change is overwhelming.”

“The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.”

“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.”

“Climate change is analogous to Lincoln and slavery or Churchill and Nazism: it's not the kind of thing where you can compromise.”

“You can't tie a rope around the ice sheet. You can't build a wall around the ice sheets.”