We need to send a message to Congress and the president that we want them to take the actions that are needed to preserve climate for young people and future generations and all life on the planet.
James HansenRead
...99 percent confident that the world really was getting warmer and that there was a high degree of probability that it was due to human-made greenhouse gases.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a strong belief in the reality of climate change and its human causes.
James Hansen's quote underscores the significant confidence he has in the scientific consensus surrounding climate change, specifically attributing it to human activities that produce greenhouse gases. He emphasizes the importance of acknowledging this reality to motivate action against climate change and its consequences.
In practice
In a conference on climate action, I would quote Hansen to emphasize the urgent need for sustainability measures.
We need to send a message to Congress and the president that we want them to take the actions that are needed to preserve climate for young people and future generations and all life on the planet.
Coral reefs, the rain forest of the ocean, are home for one-third of the species of the sea. Coral reefs are under stress for several reasons, including warming of the ocean, but especially because of ocean acidification, a direct effect of added carbon dioxide. Ocean life dependent on carbonate shells and skeletons is threatened by dissolution as the ocean becomes more acid.
Rising carbon price is essential to 'decarbonize' the economy - to remove the nation towards the era beyond fossil fuels.
We have at most ten years - not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions... We are near a tipping point, a point of no return, beyond which the built in momentum and feedbacks will carry us to levels of climate change with staggering consequences for humanity and all of the residents of this planet.
'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.
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.
Nothing great in science has ever been done by men, whatever their powers, in whom the divine afflatus of the truth-seeker was wanting.
Given her deafness, the auditory part of the brain, deprived of its usual input, had started to generate a spontaneous activity of its own, and this took the form of musical hallucinations, mostly musical memories from her earlier life. The brain needed to stay incessantly active, and if it was not getting its usual stimulation..., it would create its own stimulation in the form of hallucinations.
We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.
The future belongs to Science. More and more she will control the destinies of the nations. Already she has them in her crucible and on her balances.
We're going to find Marses and maybe Earths out in the solar system's attic of the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt.
I have oft-times been besought, by divers gentlemen, to set down on paper what I have beheld through my newly invented microscopia, but I have generally declined.
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