CPR Initiative Board of Advisors
Director of Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions
Dr. James E. Hansen, PhD, is the former Director of the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies and current Director of Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions. CSAS is a program of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York City. Dr. Hansen is the author of the books Storms of My Grandchildren and the forthcoming Sophie’s Planet, and the principal author or co-author of numerous papers on the subject of climate change and Earth’s energy imbalance. He is best known for his testimony on climate change to congressional committees in the 1980s that helped raise broad awareness of the global warming issue. Dr. Hansen’s recent research establishes that fossil fuel GHG emissions have already raised Earth’s temperature well beyond the Holocene range, potentially imposing an increasingly untenable burden on young people to undertake or pay for exceedingly expensive CO2 extraction to limit climate change and its consequences. His research also raises the prospect that continued high fossil fuel emissions will melt the planet’s major ice sheets at a non-linear rate. On the other hand, in his work Dr. Hansen has helped specify the magnitude and rate of decarbonization required to preserve a habitable climate, and he has highlighted the potential utility of select methods and policies for deep decarbonization and large-scale CO2 removal with lasting co-benefits.