James Hansen, New york City, October 2006 Credit: Mark Mahaney
"They would have been better off if they'd just ignored me, rather than trying to shut me up. They brought the publicity about themselves."
James Hansen is sitting in his cluttered corner office on the seventh floor of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, just blocks from the Columbia University campus in upper Manhattan, and upstairs from Tom's Restaurant (of Seinfeld fame). A wiry scientist who looks young for his 65 years, Hansen speaks with a distinct Midwestern accent; as he talks, he gazes off into space, as if scrutinizing an invisible PowerPoint presentation. If he has a lot on his mind, it's no surprise: Hansen is the number one scientist in America—and perhaps the world—who has been publicly speaking out about our looming climate catastrophe. And in so doing, he has shattered some long-held convictions in the scientific community, ones overdue for a challenge.
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Hansen believes, as did Albert Einstein, that speaking out politically at key moments is part of a scientist's responsibility. He also rejects the idea that scientists should pose as completely objective fact machines that refrain from offering opinions that aren't purely scientific in nature (even about subjects that they know better anyone else). What's refreshing is that he makes no apologies for that. "There's a big gap between what is understood by the scientists at the forefront of the research, and what is known by the people who need to know," he says. "And that's partly because of this technical language, and limitations on what scientists are willing to say." In an essay for the New York Review of Books, Hansen put it bluntly: "Scientists present the facts about climate change clinically, failing to stress that business-as-usual will transform the planet."
Ironically, if he weren't a government employee and didn't have to fend off political obstacles to his research, the media might not have handed him a megaphone. In particular, if Hansen hadn't garnered the attention of 24-year-old George Deutsch—a NASA public affairs appointee who rejected an NPR request to interview Hansen—he might have been freer to speak, but also less heard. As it turned out, plenty of people wound up hearing from Hansen in the wake of the Deutsch incident—first, via a front-page New York Times story, then through a visit with CNN's Lou Dobbs. Every flack's nightmare, Hansen single-handedly forced NASA to review its public affairs policy and drew attention to the conjoined issues of global warming and political interference with science.
Wherever James Hansen learned his media savvy, it probably wasn't in Iowa, where he spent his first 25 years. He was born "literally in a farmhouse" in Charter Oak township in 1941; his parents served food and liquor for a living. A fellow Midwestern climate scientist, former Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory Director Jerry Mahlman (who grew up in Nebraska), says of himself and Hansen: "We shoot pool better than scientists are supposed to."
Hansen attended the University of Iowa, where he studied with professor James Van Allen in the physics and astronomy department, later earning his Ph.D. for a dissertation on the atmosphere of Venus (which may have experienced a "runaway" greenhouse effect). Hansen moved to NASA and began running one of the earliest global-climate models, competing with colleagues at the Princeton-based Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory to see who could best simulate the Earth's response to increased greenhouse-gas emissions. Hansen became the director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in 1981 and, after publishing a paper in Science that used the term "global warming," watched as the Reagan administration cut funding for his lab. It was an early brush with politics, and it prefigured what came later.