See also: Global Warming
Born
on March 29, 1941 in Denison, Iowa, James Hansen earned a B.A. in physics and mathematics in 1963, an M.S. in astronomy in 1965, and a
Ph.D. in physics in 1967—all
at the University of Iowa. In 1967 he took a job with NASA's Goddard
Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which monitors
temperature
fluctuations at thousands of sites worldwide. Hansen became director of GISS in 1981 and has held that position ever
since. He is also an adjunct professor in Columbia University's
Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, and is widely regarded as
the world's leading
promoter of the theory that human industrial activity—particularly the burning of fossil fuels and the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere—is the chief catalyst of a potentially catastrophic global-warming trend. Hansen first predicted such climatic changes in a 1981 article which he co-authored with a team of GISS scientists in the journal Science.
In
a June 23, 1988 speech that was a seminal event in the
movement to focus public attention on global warming, Hansen
addressed
the U.S. Congress and warned that unless the burning of fossil fuels were to be
curtailed quickly and dramatically, the natural world suffer irreparable harm.
Soon
after receiving a $250,000
award from Teresa Heinz Kerry's Heinz
Family Foundation (a major funder of left-wing environmental causes), Hansen, in a move considered highly unusual
for a NASA scientist, endorsed the campaign of Democratic
presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004. He thereafter served as the primary climate advisor
for Al Gore's 2006 documentary film, An
Inconvenient Truth.
In Hansen's calculus,
coal is “the dirtiest fuel” in terms of the “greenhouse gas”
emissions for which it is responsible. As such, he considers coal “the
single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet,”
and has called for a moratorium on the construction of any new
coal-fired power plants. According to Hansen: "the trains carrying coal to power plants
are death trains"; "coal-fired power plants are
factories of death”; and "if we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those
coal trains will be death trains—no less gruesome than if they were
boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable
species."
Warning
further that “our planet is in peril,” Hansen asserts that “if we do
not rapidly slow fossil-fuel emissions over the next few decades,”
“[o]ne ecological
collapse will lead to another.” In particular, he predicts the
mass “extermination of species” and the ultimate disappearance of all
the earth's ice, resulting in a “sea level 75 meters higher.”
On
the twentieth anniversary of his 1988 speech to Congress, Hansen
returned to Capitol Hill to demand
that the chief executives of large fossil-fuel companies be put on
trial for “high crimes against humanity and nature.”
In
a December 29, 2008 letter
addressed to Barack and Michelle Obama, Hansen urged the
president-elect to impose, on carbon emissions, a tax that would not
only “affect all products and activities that use fossil fuels,”
but would also, in the process, help redistribute wealth by “aiding
the disadvantaged.” Hansen explained that while such a tax would
“increase energy prices,” low- and middle-income people would
“come out ahead” because their carbon footprints would generally
be small enough to warrant little or no tax liability, whereas, by contrast,
wealthy people “with large cars and a big house” would pay
“much higher” taxes. The revenues from such taxes, said Hansen,
should be "deposited monthly" into individual Americans' "bank accounts" as dividends
that would disproportionately help low earners.
Lamenting that
the
Bush Administration had refused
to adequately address the threat posed by global warming during the
preceding eight years,
Hansen, with a sense of urgency, said
in January 2009: “We have only four years left for [President] Obama to set an
example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead.”
After the
2009 eruption of the so-called “Climategate”
scandal—wherein many leading American and
British climatologists had intentionally manipulated
scientific evidence in order to “prove” that anthropogenic
global warming was indeed a grave threat—Hansen
remained
resolute
in claiming that “[t]he evidence for human-made climate change is
overwhelming.” Chris
Horner, author of Red
Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and
Deception to Keep You Misinformed,
asserts
that Hansen himself doctored temperature data on two occasions—in
2001
and 2007—in
attempts to show an impending climate catastrophe.
After the House of Representatives in 2009 passed the American Clean Energy and
Security Act, commonly known as a cap-and-trade
bill, Hansen complained
that the legislation (which ultimately died in the Senate) would not lead to sufficient reductions in
fossil-fuel use, and he derided the bill as “less than worthless.”
Hansen advocated instead a
mandatory
flat-rate global tax on the production and consumption of fossil
fuels.
In 2011 it was reported that Hansen, in violation of
ethics laws that regulate government contracts, had failed
to publicly disclose $1.6 million he had earned in outside income, apart from his GISS salary. This included
money to cover the costs associated with Hansen's own transportation to speaking engagements
and awards ceremonies around the world; legal services that were
provided to him free-of-charge; and gifts from various supporters. In
2006, for instance, the World Wildlife Fund gave Hansen an engraved
Montres Rolex watch
worth at least $8,000, which Hansen illegally failed to report as a
“gift” on his SF 278 financial-disclosure form.
In early
2012, Hansen called global warming a “great
moral issue” on a par with slavery.
In an April 2013 Op-Ed, Hansen condemned the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline, lamenting that a final review by "the State Department gave the president [Obama] cover to open a big spigot that will hitch our country to one of the dirtiest fuels on Earth for 40 years or more"—and thereby exacerbate the problem of climate change. Wrote Hansen:
"The science on climate change has been in for a quarter of a century. There are no more mixed messages, just catastrophe after catastrophe. The president stands at a fork in the road: Rejecting the pipeline will show the world we are serious and determined to be on the right side of history. Approving it will signal we are too entrenched with business-as-usual to do what's right by the people, planet and future generations."
For additional information on James Hansen, click here.