Quotes from James Hansen

The evidence for human-made climate change is overwhelming.

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.

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.

Imagine a giant asteroid on a direct collision course with Earth. That is the equivalent of what we face now [with climate change], yet we dither.

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

Consider the perverse effect cap and trade has on altruistic actions. Say you decide to buy a small, high-efficiency car. That reduces your emissions, but not your country's. Instead it allows somebody else to buy a bigger S.U.V. - because the total emissions are set by the cap.

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

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

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

With a fourth generation of nuclear power, you can have a technology that will burn more than 99 percent of the energy in the fuel. It would mean that you don't need to mine uranium for the next thousand years.

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

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

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.

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.

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

The democratic process is supposed to be one person one vote, but it turns out that money is talking louder than the votes.

It would be immoral to leave young people with a climate system spiraling out of control.

Politicians think that if matters look difficult, compromise is a good approach. Unfortunately, nature and the laws of physics cannot compromise - they are what they are.

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.

I tend to be naive and gullible, I guess, but I try to believe that governments believe what they say.

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

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

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.

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