For nearly 40 years, Hansen has been warning the world of the dangers of global warming. His testimony at a groundbreaking 1988 Senate hearing on the greenhouse effect helped inject the coming climate crisis into the public consciousness. And it helped make him one of the most influential climate scientists in the world.
Hansen has spent several decades as director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and now at 82, he directs Columbia University’s Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions program.
In the years since his seminal testimony, many of Hansen’s basic scientific predictions about the Earth’s climate future have come true. Greenhouse gas emissions have grown, and global temperatures have continued to rise. The world’s glaciers and ice sheets are melting and sea level rise is accelerating.
But Hansen has been disappointed with the scientific community’s response to some of his more recent projections about the future of the warming Earth, which some researchers have characterized as unrealistically dire. READ FULL ARTICLE
