James Hansen the man who broke news of global warming 34 years ago

James E. Hansen has been called the "father of climate change awareness." Hansen, a former NASA scientist, is a political climate change activist. He has been arrested several times in front of the White House while protesting mining and the Keystone XL pipeline.

Hansen has been described as one of the first scientists to make climate change a major national political issue by appearing before Congress several times in the 1980s. Hansen criticized the Paris Climate Accords, calling them a "fraud" because it was not far enough.

Hansen warned that the planet may be approaching the point of no return if emissions are not reduced by at least 6 percent per year. Hansen has called for a global carbon tax and a shift to renewable energy.

In 1995, Hansen was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He has won numerous awards and medals. Hansen received the Heinz Prize for environmental activism and the Roger Revelle Medal from the American Geophysical Union. Hansen received the World Wildlife Federation Conservation Medal from the Duke of Edinburgh in 2006. In 2006, Hansen was also included in Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

In 2007, Hansen won the Dan David Award in the Quest for Energy category, the Leo Szilard Award from the American Physical Society for the use of physics for the benefit of society, and the Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. to Scientific Freedom and Responsibility.

In 2008, Hansen won the Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service in Science, the Bownocker Medal from The Ohio State University, and the Nevada Medal from the Desert Research Institute. In 2009, Hansen received the Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal from the American Meteorological Society. Hansen received the Sophie Award and the Blue Planet Award in 2010.

In 2011, Hansen received the Klopsteg Memorial Award from the American Association of Physics Teachers for her work in communicating physics to the general public. She also received the Edinburgh Medal from the City of Edinburgh at the Edinburgh Science Festival. In 2012, Hansen received the Steve Schneider Climate Science Communications Award and Foreign Policy's 2012 designation as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers. In 2012, Hansen gave a TED Talk entitled "Why I Should Talk About Climate Change". Hansen received the Ridenhour Courage Award in 2013.

“James Hansen has been a lightning rod for climate change science for the last two decades. As an original, inventive, and outspoken scientist, he has become the center of attention in our national debate on climate change, much like Roger Revelle, who was willing to speak up for the science he believed in and which, to many of us, brought global change to the forefront of our scientific research".

“As a student of James Van Allen in Iowa, Hansen may have drawn his global perspective in part from those early scientific satellite observations of Earth beginning with Explorer 1. His breadth of research includes radiative transfer, the atmosphere of Venus, and the Earth's climate. His publications have been original and lasting.

In the late 1960s, he developed new methods (doubling/adding) and computer codes for calculating the scattering of sunlight in planetary atmospheres that are still in use today. In the 1970s, as principal investigator for the Pioneer Venus mission, James's analysis of the dispersion and polarization of Venusian clouds led him to deduce the shapes, sizes, and refractive index of cloud particles and it allowed others to identify the particles as concentrated sulfuric acid. One of his earliest contributions to climate research, the 1974 paper with Andy Lacis on the atmospheric absorption of sunlight, was used in climate models for more than two decades and still receives more than twenty citations a year.

“James is known for his uncompromising research on climate sensitivity. He has examined natural and human influences, from volcanoes to greenhouse gases, aerosols and dust, leaving no stone unturned. He has welcomed collaborations with the paleoclimate community as a key to understanding climate sensitivity today. Continuing his Iowa tradition, Jim has pushed hard for small satellites to monitor climate change.

He has led and grown the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) into one of the leading climate research laboratories. In the late 1980s, James and others were instrumental in bringing Roger Revelle to a groundbreaking series of seminars on global change at Columbia University that, for many in attendance, placed our own research in the perspective of what would become the US Global Change Research Program.

In 2015, diplomats drafted the Paris Agreement on Climate Change to be strictly voluntary for rich countries so that the Senate would not have to ratify it. (In the final moments, the American delegation had to trade an errant duty for a duty to save him from Senate jurisdiction.) Madeleine Albright once said that the United States was "the indispensable nation." But on climate change, the Senate has been the insurmountable obstacle.

But now, on a scorching August day, 34 years after Hansen spoke, that record has begun to change. After an all-night session that lasted from Saturday night to Sunday afternoon, Democrats voted along party lines to pass the first comprehensive climate law in US history. The bill will affect all sectors of the economy, subsidizing massive new investments in renewable and geothermal energy, as well as nuclear power and carbon capture and removal, and encouraging the development of new clean energy manufacturing industries in the United States.

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