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'Goals' and 'caps' on carbon emissions are practically worthless, if coal emissions continue, because of the exceedingly long lifetime of carbon dioxide in the air.

James Hansen

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James Hansen
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 29
Astrophysicist
Environmentalist
Physicist
Professor
University Teacher
Denison
Iowa
James Hansen
James E. Hansen
James E Hansen
J. E. Hansen
J E Hansen
J. Hansen
J Hansen
Hansen
Hansen J
Hansen J.
Hansen J. E.
Hansen JE
Jim Hansen
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More quotes by James Hansen

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The fact is fossil fuel carbon will stay in the surface climate system for millennia.
James Hansen
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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.
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The greatest danger hanging over our children and grandchildren is initiation of changes that will be irreversible on any time scale that humans can imagine.
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'Cap and trade' generates special interests, lobbyists, and trading schemes, yielding non-productive millionaires, all at public expense. The public is fed up with such business. Tax with 100% dividend, in contrast, would spur our economy, while aiding the disadvantaged, the climate, and our national security.
James Hansen
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In view of the immense power of natural weather and climate fluctuations and the great buffering capacity of the Earth, especially the ocean, it is easy to be skeptical about whether small anthropogenic changes of atmospheric composition can have important practical impacts.
James Hansen
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If we drive our fellow species to extinction, we will leave a far more desolate planet for our descendants than the world we inherited from our elders.
James Hansen
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What we are doing to the future of our children, and the other species on the planet, is a clear moral issue.
James Hansen
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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.
James Hansen
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The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.
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The five-year mean global temperature has been flat for the last decade
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The evidence for human-made climate change is overwhelming.
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Money has too big an influence on our politics in Washington and somehow we need to do something about that.
James Hansen
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Recent warming coincides with rapid growth of human-made greenhouse gases. The observed rapid warming gives urgency to discussions about how to slow greenhouse gas emissions.
James Hansen
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The carbon emissions from tar shale and tar sands would initiate a continual unfolding of climate disasters over the course of this century. We would be miserable stewards of creation. We would rob our own children and grandchildren.
James Hansen
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As you get more global warming, you should see an increase in the extremes of the hydrological cycle - droughts and floods and heavy precipitation.
James Hansen
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A level of no more than 350 ppm is still feasible, with the help of reforestation and improved agricultural practices, but just barely - time is running out.
James Hansen
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Planet Earth, creation, the world in which civilization developed, the world with climate patterns that we know and stable shorelines, is in imminent peril.
James Hansen
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If we fail to act, we will end up with a different planet.
James Hansen
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...chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to [should] be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature [Hansen] accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.
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We have known since the 1800s that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere. The right amount keeps the climate conducive to human life.
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