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Dr. James Hansen

Interview on WHYY Radio

prof-james-hansen-001 Dr. JAMES HANSEN, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and one of the leading voices on global warming, joins Marty to discuss his research, advocacy and his new book, Storms of My Grandchildren. It tells the story of why Hansen boycotted the Copenhagen climate talks and has turned to a new degree of advocacy in the race to alleviate the effects of global climate change. Dr. Hansen will also discuss the new Kerry-Lieberman climate bill and what he thinks it will take for the United States and the world to align our carbon output with the Earth’s ability to absorb it without devastating disruptions. Listen to the interview

Keen on next-generation nuclear power

RENEWABLE energy won't save the planet so it's time to go nuclear, according to one of world's most high-profile climate scientists.

"We should undertake urgent focused research and development programs in next generation nuclear power," said atmospheric physicist James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and adjunct professor at Columbia University's Earth Institute in New York.

While renewable energies such as solar and wind were gaining in economic competition with coal-fired plants, Professor Hansen said they wouldn't be able to provide baseload power for years to come.

The People vs. Cap-and-Tax

An essay delivered to the chairperson of the Carbon Trading Summit in New York on 12 January 2010.

Nuclear options: Nuclear power may be a ‘green’ solution worth using

Houston Chronicle 1/5/2010

NASA climatologist James Hansen's research into global warming has brought him fame — and put him in the big fat middle of controversy on more than one occasion.

The intellectual journey that first led Hansen to warn against the imminent perils to our planet of continuing to burn fossil fuels, particularly coal, began in the 1980s. Over the years it has also led him to another, somewhat surprising conclusion: Nuclear power could offer an environmentally acceptable way out of the problems caused by heavy reliance on coal.

Specifically, Hansen says, the Generation IV nuclear power plants now under development offer an alternative to burning coal that ought to be pursued, in this country and globally.

The Temperature of Science

Background

My experience with global temperature data over 30 years provides insight about how the science and its public perception have changed. In the late 1970s I became curious about well known analyzes of global temperature change published by climatologist J. Murray Mitchell: why were his estimates for large-scale temperature change restricted to northern latitudes? As a planetary scientist, it seemed to me there were enough data points in the Southern Hemisphere to allow useful estimates both for that hemisphere and for the global average. So I requested a tape of meteorological station data from Roy Jenne of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who obtained the data from records of the World Meteorological Organization, and I made my own analysis.

Fast forward to December 2009, when I gave a talk at the Progressive Forum in Houston Texas. The organizers there felt it necessary that I have a police escort between my hotel and the forum where I spoke. Days earlier bloggers reported that I was probably the hacker who broke into East Anglia computers and stole e-mails. Their rationale: I was not implicated in any of the pirated e-mails, so I must have eliminated incriminating messages before releasing the hacked emails. The next day another popular blog concluded that I deserved capital punishment. Web chatter on this topic, including indignation that I was coming to Texas, led to a police escort.

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