Environmental Health Sciences

Dr. James Hansen, the director of the Goddard Institute at NASA who is best known for his testimony to congress on global warming in the 1980s, spoke at the Environmental Health Sciences’ annual Sewell lecture on Wednesday April 22nd.

From the decreasing mass of the Greenland ice sheet to climbing global temperatures, Hansen presented the clear evidence that humans are changing the climate by throwing the Earth’s natural carbon cycle off-balance.

As a solution, Dr. Hansen advocates for greater public involvement in reducing consumption, as well as capping carbon dioxide from its source, eventually eliminating our dependence on fossil fuels. Ultimately, Hansen claims climate change is a matter of “intergenerational justice”- we must return the Earth in the same condition that we have borrowed it from our children.