James E. Hansen

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James E. Hansen (2009)

James E. Hansen ( James Edward "Jim" Hansen; born March 29, 1941 in Denison , Iowa ) is an American climate researcher . From 1981 to 2013 he was Director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) at NASA and Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University . Hansen became known especially in the 1980s as one of the first scientists to warn of the dangers of global warming . He ended his engagement with NASA in April 2013 in order to work primarily at the political and legal level to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He is one of the characters in Nathaniel Rich's non-fiction book Losing Earth (2019) about the climate crisis .

education

Hansen received a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors in physics and mathematics from the University of Iowa under James Van Allen in 1963 . In 1965 he graduated with a Master of Science degree in astronomy , and in 1967 he received his Ph.D. , also from the University of Iowa. From 1962 to 1966, Hansen was a participant in NASA's graduate training , and between 1965 and 1966 he was a visiting student at the Astrophysics Institute at the University of Kyoto .

research

As a college student in Iowa, Hansen was heavily inspired by Van Allen's space exploration. A decade later he focused on planetary research, which included an understanding of the possible climate change caused by human influences on the composition of the earth's atmosphere .

One of Hansen's main focuses was the transfer of radiation in planetary atmospheres and, in particular, the interpretation of satellite data about the terrestrial atmosphere and surface. Such data, when properly analyzed, provide an effective way of observing global environmental change on earth.

Another focus of Hansen was the development and application of numerical climate models for a better understanding of the current climate and the possible effects of global warming.

In 1981, James Hansen published a widely acclaimed study in which he discussed the effects of man-made increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations to be expected in the coming decades. If one compares his previous descriptions with today's observations, the following can be stated: Hansen expected that the global average temperatures would have increased so much in the 1990s that they would stand out clearly from the natural noise of the measurement data. In fact, in the second assessment report of the IPCC from 1995, it was read for the first time that there are clear indications that humans influence the earth's climate ( ... discernable human influence on climate ). He expected a warming between 0.28 and 0.45 degrees in the period from 1980 to 2010, which is slightly below the observed warming of 0.48 degrees. He expected regions in North America and Asia to experience pronounced droughts. In California , an extreme drought was observed from 2011 to 2017, even compared to the previous drought period . He also expected the West Antarctic ice sheet to collapse. In fact, rapid decay of the Larsen Ice Shelf , among others, was observed in the first few years of the 21st century . The opening of the Northwest Passage , which he had also expected , could also be observed, for the first time in 2007.

On June 23 In 1988 Hansen at the request of Democratic Senator Tim Wirth of Energy and Natural Resources Committee of the US Senate and declared that global warming will released with "99 percent chance" not by natural fluctuations, but by man Causes greenhouse gases . To do this, he created three different projections for global temperature development, each based on different scenarios for global carbon dioxide emissions. In addition to a scenario with no climate protection measures, he presented a scenario with very strong climate protection and one that was between the other two. Adjusted for the effects of the Montreal Protocol , which severely restricted the production of strong greenhouse gases that damage the ozone layer , Hansen's mean scenario after 30 years was very close to the real development of the world climate. By contrast, climate deniers often misrepresented or twisted Hansen's statements in 2018. An example of this is a cherry-picking by Patrick Michaels , in which he misrepresented Hansen's original statement before the Senate. Michaels cited only the most extreme of Hansen's projections, ignored the other two completely, and then claimed that Hansen was 300 percent wrong.

In 2008, Hansen published a study stating that the content of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere should not permanently exceed a value of 350 parts per million (ppm) if the 2-degree target is still reached and a tilting of the global climate system with potentially irreversible effects Consequences should be prevented. Therefore, the value from then already approx. 385 ppm had to be reduced to 350 ppm through " negative emissions ". As of 2018, the value is around 410 ppm.

Political activities

Hansen was arrested during a demonstration at the White House in 2011

Hansen repeatedly accused the government of President George W. Bush and the NASA director Sean O'Keefe , who was appointed by it, of attempting to influence its public statements on the causes of global warming. According to Hansen, public relations workers were instructed to review his statements and interviews, and the Bush administration had post-edited climate-related press releases to make global warming less threatening. He is not able to speak “freely” without receiving backlash from other government employees. In one of his public appearances, broadcast by the television station CBS, he said: "In my more than three decades in the civil service, I have never experienced such restrictions on the communication between scientists and the public."

In the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, there is a short sequence about a hearing Hansen by Al Gore on May 8, 1989. Gore criticizes Hansen for an obvious contradiction in his statements, whereupon Hansen states that the last paragraph in one of his texts was not his but was added by someone else.

Hansen is also active against mountain top removal mining in Raleigh County in West Virginia and was arrested several times, as in other actions.

In 2008 he called for executives of oil and mining companies including the CEOs of ExxonMobil and Peabody Coal to be charged with "high treason against man and nature". They would have resisted the doctrine of global warming in the same way that the tobacco industry tried to cover up the relationship between smoking and cancer .

In February 2012 he gave a speech at the TED conference .

Hansen is an ambassador for the climate protection organization 350.org , whose name goes back to his study on the “safe limit” of CO 2 levels in the atmosphere. To achieve this, he calls for the introduction of a fee and dividend system to reduce CO 2 .

In 2013, Hansen and his colleagues Ken Caldeira , Kerry Emanuel and Tom Wigley called for a "return to nuclear power" in an open letter , as the resistance to nuclear power plants would endanger the fight against climate change. The scientists appealed to politicians and environmental organizations around the world to advocate the development of safe nuclear power plants. "There is no realistic way to stabilize the climate that does without a substantial amount of nuclear energy," the scientists write in their letter. However, the risks of nuclear energy are "orders of magnitude smaller" than the dangers posed by the use of fossil fuels. In the debate about future energy policy , facts should decide, not emotions, demanded Hansen and colleagues. In a study published in 2013, he compared the risks of nuclear and fossil fuels and advocated nuclear energy as a technology with significantly lower risk and lower emissions than the use of fossil fuels.

James Hansen appears as a joint plaintiff in a climate change court case against the United States , represented by its President, which brought a group of 21 children and young people in 2015, including his granddaughter Sophie (colloquially Climate-Kids ). The group is represented by Julia Olson, co-founder of the non-governmental organization Our Children's Trust . In November 2016, the Eugene District Court (Oregon) confirmed that the youth had a constitutionally guaranteed right to a stable climate system with a healthy, free, and prosperous life for them and their descendants, officially allowing the lawsuit; the start of the main hearing was initially set for February 5, 2018, but was postponed due to an appeal by the Trump administration in the US Federal Court of Appeals. On March 7, 2018, the appellate court also ruled that the lawsuit was admissible; on April 12, 2018, the Oregon District Court rescheduled the hearing to October 29 of that year.

honors and awards

Hansen was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1996 ; In 2001 he won the prestigious Heinz Environment Award for his research on climate change and was honored with the Roger Revelle Medal by the American Geophysical Union in the same year ; In 2007 he was awarded the one million US dollars doped Dan David Prize and the Leo Szilard Lectureship Award of the American Physical Society (APS). Since 1999 he has been an external member of the Academia Europaea .

In 2013, Hansen was awarded the Ridenhour Courage Prize in recognition of “courageously speaking the truth about climate change, and even doing so when the Bush administration tried to silence him as director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies bring and punish. ”For 2016 he was awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award .

For 2018, Hansen was awarded the Tang Prize for Sustainable Development.

Publications

literature

Web links

Commons : James Hansen  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Justin Gillis: Climate Maverick to Quit NASA. In: The New York Times . April 1, 2013, accessed May 20, 2013 .
  2. ↑ Christoph Seidler: Climatologist James Hansen: The pain in the ass . In: Spiegel Online . May 19, 2013
  3. ↑ J. Hansen, D. Johnson, A. Lacis, S. Lebedeff, P. Lee, D. Rind, G. Russell: Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Archived from the original on January 3, 2017. Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet tested. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Science . 213, No. 4511, August 28, 1981, p. 957. doi : 10.1126 / science.213.4511.957 . Retrieved August 17, 2016. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.atmos.washington.edu
  4. ↑ Stefan Rahmstorf, Grant Foster, Anny Cazenave : Comparing climate projections to observations up to 2011 . In: Environmental Research Letters . 7, No. 4, December 1, 2012, p. 044035. doi : 10.1088 / 1748-9326 / 7/4/044035 .
  5. ↑ NASA larsen b ice shelf nearing its final act
  6. ↑ Christian Stöcker: 30 Years of the Climate Debate: The False Fear . In: Spiegel Online . July 1, 2018 ( spiegel.de [accessed July 1, 2018]).
  7. ↑ Michael Weisskopf: SCIENTIST SAYS GREENHOUSE EFFECT IS SETTING IN . In: Washington Post . June 24, 1988, ISSN  0190-8286 ( washingtonpost.com [accessed July 1, 2018]).
  8. ^ Philip Shabecoff: Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate . In: The New York Times , June 24, 1988
  9. ^ Ed Pilkington: Put oil firm chiefs on trial, says leading climate change scientist. In: The Guardian . June 23, 2008, accessed on May 20, 2013 (with facsimile of Hansen's statement as PDF; 4.038 MB).
  10. ↑ 30 years later, deniers are still lying about Hansen's amazing global warming prediction . In: The Guardian , June 25, 2018. Retrieved June 30, 2018.
  11. ↑ James Lawrence Powell: The Inquisition of Climate Science. New York 2012, p. 171 f.
  12. ↑ Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim? - Dr. James Hansen et al. February 2008 (PDF file; 4.2 MB)
  13. ↑ “ Fact sheet: The need for mitigation. (PDF; 409 kB) ” United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change . June 2009.
  14. ↑ Juliet Eilperin: Putting Some Heat on Bush . In: The Washington Post . January 19, 2005
  15. ^ Andrew C. Revkin: Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him . In: The New York Times . January 29, 2006
  16. ↑ Climate change: US government is said to have censored NASA experts . In: Spiegel Online . January 29, 2006
  17. ↑ a b Rewriting The Science . In: 60 Minutes ( CBS News ). July 30, 2006
  18. ^ Scott Finn: Hannah, Hansen arrested in mountaintop removal protest. In: West Virginia Public Broadcasting. June 23, 2009, accessed May 20, 2013 .
  19. ↑ James Hansen: Twenty years later: tipping points near on global warming. In: The Guardian . June 23, 2008, accessed on May 20, 2013 : "In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature."
  20. ^ Clayton Sandell: Global Warming 20 Years Later. In: ABC News . June 23, 2008, accessed on May 20, 2013 (video; 2:18 min).
  21. ↑ James Hansen: Why I must speak out about climate change (Why I must speak out about climate change) . In: TED.com. March 2012 (video; 17:51 min; with German subtitles)
  22. ↑ Ben Lillie: Why I must speak out on climate change: James Hansen at TED2012 . In: TED Blog. February 29, 2012
  23. ↑ The 350 Climate Ambassadors ( Memento of the original dated December 8, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. from 350.org @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / archive.350.org
  24. ↑ James Hansen rails against cap-and-trade plan in open letter . In: The Guardian , Jan. 12, 2010. 
  25. ↑ Der Spiegel: Global warming: Renowned climate researchers call for the renaissance of nuclear power , November 4, 2013.
  26. ↑ Pushker A. Kharecha & James Hansen: Prevented mortality and greenhouse gas emissions from historical and projected nuclear power . In: Environmental Science & Technology . tape 47 , no. 9 , 2013, p. 4889-4895 , doi : 10.1021 / es3051197 .
  27. ↑ ourchildrenstrust.org (September 28, 2017)
  28. ↑ ourchildrenstrust.org. Retrieved February 4, 2018 (American English).
  29. ↑ deutschlandfunk.de , Das Feature , September 28, 2017, Harald Brandt: The Oil Industry in the Dock: Smoke and Fumes ( Manuscript, PDF 192 kB , September 28, 2017)
  30. ↑ Trump administration files Hail Mary appeal to derail youth climate lawsuit . ( thinkprogress.org [accessed February 7, 2018]).
  31. ↑ Young people suing the Trump administration over climate change won't stop until they get a trial . ( thinkprogress.org [accessed February 7, 2018]).
  32. ↑ ourchildrenstrust.org (PDF, March 7, 2018)
  33. ^ Directory of members: James Hansen. Academia Europaea, accessed January 17, 2018 .
  34. ↑ The Ridenhour Prizes: The Ridenhour Courage Prize 2013 - James Hansen. Retrieved on May 20, 2013 : “Dr. James Hansen, the 2013 recipient of The Ridenhour Courage Prize, was recognized for bravely and urgently telling the truth about climate change, even when the Bush administration tried to silence and penalize him as director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "
personal data
SURNAME Hansen, James E.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hansen, James Edward (full name); Hansen Jim
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American climate researcher
DATE OF BIRTH March 29, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH Denison, Iowa