James Hansen Biography
Climate Scientist, Environmental Justice Activist (1941 - )
"…. Coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet. …the dirtiest trick that governments play on their citizens is that they are working for “clean coal.”
"The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.”
Dr. James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, has studied the atmosphere of the Earth for years, and is referred to as the ‘father of global warming’ because of his early warning in the 1980’s on the subject. His is a scientific and impassioned voice in the fight to combat climate change and the negative impact we humans are having on the environment.
Hansen received his degrees in physics, astronomy and mathematics at the University of Iowa. He studied in Dr. James Van Allen’s space science program, initially doing his research on the composition of the atmosphere of Venus. Later, Hansen switched his research focus to the Earth’s climate. Using climate models built on information from satellites all over the globe, Hansen studies the changes in our atmosphere, and consequently on the effects the changes have on the environment.
Hansen analyzes the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere, comparing it year by year, going back as far as 1880, when instruments began being used to record temperature data. He also measures carbon dioxide ( CO2) emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, primarily that of coal, dating to the advent of the Industrial Revolution. It is in this research that Hansen found and continues to find evidence of global warming, which, if left unchecked, will lead to climate change so irreparable that eventually our lives and the lives of millions of species will be destroyed, and his latest climate models reveal that the dangerous level has already been reached, and we are in an emergency situation. Hansen puts it bluntly, saying, “Several times in Earth’s long history rapid global warming of several degrees occurred, apparently spurred by amplifying feedbacks. In each case more than half of plant and animal species went 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. If we drive our fellow species to extinction we will leave a far more desolate planet for our descendants than the world that we inherited from our elders.”
Hansen continues about the dangers of fossil fuels, saying, “If we burn all the fossil fuels and put all that CO2 into the atmosphere, we will be sending the planet back to the ice-free state. It will take a while to get there – ice sheets don’t melt instantaneously – but that’s what we will be doing. And if you melt all the ice, sea levels will go up two hundred and fifty feet…producing a different planet.” The worst offender? Coal. According to Hansen, burning coal creates as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as all of the other fossil fuels combined. Hansen wants coal mining and use stopped altogether, and other energy options (solar, wind) developed to replace coal. The worst form of coal mining for Hansen is mountaintop removal (MTR). The practice of blasting off the tops of mountains in Appalachia to mine the coal seams is incredibly destructive. The dust and toxic pollutants from both the blasting and the processing settle through the communities and sicken the people who still live there. The rivers are filled with the waste products from MTR, poisoning the water. The Appalachian Mountains contain some of America’s most ecologically diverse areas, and the barren landscape created in a few minutes of blasting will never be able to recover. Because of this, Hansen attended a protest on June 23, 2009 and was arrested for trespassing on Massey Energy’s property. Massey is a coal giant against whom the Appalachian communities have been fighting for years.
After the protest, Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy, offered to debate global warming with Hansen. Hansen agreed to hold a discussion where he would make a presentation about the science, giving Blankenship equal time to speak either before or after he did, and then including audience participation. Mountain State University offered their auditorium, but then Blankenship decided he would only hold the debate in a TV studio with a moderator of his choice. The university withdrew the offer of their auditorium, and Hansen reports that “I turned on the television news and heard: Blankenship offered to have a discussion with me, but ‘Dr. Hansen was still trying to check his schedule’ – this was a television station that knew exactly what had actually happened. It seems that even the media is owned by coal.”
James Hansen won’t give up, though. His commitment to studying the atmosphere, the overall warming that is taking place and our part in causing it, and fighting to stop the destruction before it is too late is total. He wants people to understand the facts and the urgency of our climate problems, and demand immediate change.
