Dr. James Hansen announced on April 1 that he will retire from NASA this week, thus ending a 46-year-long career at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan.
Hansen plans to spend his retirement fighting federal and state governments over their failure to limit emissions and otherwise prevent or slow down climate change. He has already become an activist, taking vacation time to appear at climate protests, to the displeasure of some of his colleagues. "It was becoming clear that there were people in NASA who would be much happier if the 'sideshow' would exit," Hansen said in an e-mail.
Hansen plans to continue publishing scientific papers. He also plans to lobby European leaders to impose a tax on oil derived from tar sands, since its extraction causes more greenhouse emissions than does that of conventional oil. Hansen favors a carbon fee, which would be based on the amount of carbon in a fossil fuel. The fees would be collected and divided up between all citizens equally. Nothing would go back to the government.
Hansen joined Goddard Institute as a post-doctoral scholar in 1967 and became a federal employee in 1972. In 1981, he became director, and was the longest-serving director in the institute's history. He became known as the "grandfather of global warming," on account of his many contributions to climate science. He pushed NASA for more and better Earth observations to improve climate models. He was also one of the first scientists to realize that even a slight temperature rise, as little 1° C (1.8° F), could affect the environment.
Now 72, Hansen began his career studying Venus, not Earth. But he switched gears in the 1970's amidst growing concerns about the effects of human emissions on greenhouse gases. While his earliest estimates of the earth's sensitivity to greenhouse gases were later proven to be on the high end, he was one of the first scientists to correctly identify the many ways Earth is likely to respond to rising temperatures. He also demonstrated how those effects would reinforce each other to drastically change the climate and the environment. One such change would be a rising sea level that could flood many of the world's cities.
In 1988, Hansen was called before a Congressional committee and testified that anthropogenic global warming had begun. Later, he told reporters, "It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect his here."
By this time, global temperatures had been rising for about a decade. They are still rising; the last colder-than-average month was February, 1985. Worldwide temperature records going back to 1880 show that the 19 hottest years all occurred after his testimony.
In 2005, the Bush administration tried to censor Hansen for speaking out on his concerns about climate change. He took the fight public, causing the administration to back down. Far from silencing him, the episode caused him to intensify his activism. In 2009, he was arrested for the first time for his part in a coal protest. His most recent arrest occurred in February, 2013, when he was arrested for taking part in a protest outside the White House against the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. There, Hansen said that Obama's talking about promoting both renewable energy and oil and gas production “shows he doesn’t get it.”
“We have reached a fork in the road,” Hansen said, “and the politicians have to understand we either go down this road of exploiting every fossil fuel we have — tar sands, tar shale, off-shore drilling in the Arctic — but the science tells us we can’t do that without creating a situation where our children and grandchildren will have no control over, which is the climate system.”
Hansen has described the pipeline as "game over" for the climate. A willingness to build the pipeline would indicate a willingness to exploit other such fossil fuel extraction methods as fracking, mountain-top removal, and off-shore mining-- all of which have severe environmental consequences.
NASA is looking for a successor at GISS, which Michael Oppenheimer, an environmental scientist at Princeton, describes as a "difficult task." “We can’t look for an individual to replace him. Hansen is just one of a handful of people who built the whole foundation of current climate science,” Oppenheimer says. “What we should really be looking to replace is his willingness to speak out against those who tried to silence him; that was heroic and not everyone can do it.”
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