James Hansen + Naomi Foner*

Climatologist James Hansen, whose testimony on climate change to congressional committees in 1988 helped raise broad awareness of global warming, assesses the results of the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris and discusses what the future might hold with actor screenwriter Naomi Foner*.

*Note: Naomi Foner is replacing Peter Sarsgaard, who has been delayed in transit

About the Speakers

James E. Hansen is an American physicist known for his research in the field of climatology. Hansen headed the NASA Institute for Space Studies in New York City for forty-six years. He is currently an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University and serves as Al Gore’s science advisor. Hansen was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1996, and he received the Heinz Environment Award for his research on global warming in 2001. He was listed as one of Time Magazine‘s 100 Most Influential People in 2006, and in 2007 he was awarded the Dan David Prize. Since the late 1970s, Hansen has worked on studies and computer simulations of the Earth’s climate for the purpose of understanding the impact of human activity.

Naomi Foner has written the screenplays for several feature films, including Running on Empty (for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay and won a Golden Globe Award for the same category), Losing Isaiah, and most recently Bee Season. She played the character Naomi in the Love of Chair segment of The Electric Company, where she was an associate producer for two seasons. In 2013, she made her directorial debut with Very Good Girls, starring Dakota Fanning and Elizabeth Olsen, which premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival before attaining online and theatrical distribution in the U.S. with Tribeca Film. She is currently collaborating on a script for an American-Chinese co-production titled Moon Flower and the Flying Tigers.