Plan B: scientists get radical in bid to halt global warming ‘catastrophe’

The Sunday Times
March 15, 2009

Protesters demonstrate against the expansion of Heathrow to not show enlarge option -->
Jonathan Leake

THE director of a Nasa space laboratory will this week lead thousands of climate change campaigners through Coventry in an extraordinary intervention in British politics.
James Hansen plans to use Thursday’s Climate Change Day of Action to put pressure on Gordon Brown to wake up to the threat of climate change - by halting the construction of new power stations and the expansion of airports, with schemes such as the third runway at Heathrow.
The move by a leading American researcher is the highest-profile example to date of the way climate change is politicising scientists.
It follows last week’s climate science summit in Copenhagen where 2,500 leading climate scientists issued a stark warning to politicians that unless they took drastic action to cut carbon emissions, the world would face “irreversible shifts in climate”.

They warned that global temperature increases averaging more than 4C were now possible and that human-generated CO2 could also acidify the world’s oceans, wiping out life-forms ranging from tiny plankton to coral reefs.
Hansen, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said he believed scientists, the people who knew most about climate change, now had a moral obligation to become politically active. He has chosen Coventry to stage Thursday’s protest because it is home to E.ON, the power company that is planning a giant new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth in Kent.
He will lead the demonstrators to a final protest on its doorstep. The protest, being organised by Christian Aid, will involve a New Orleans-style funeral march by “mourners” for future lost generations.
“We can no longer allow politicians and business to twist and ignore science,” said Hansen.
“The scientists can connect the dots and define the implications of different policy choices and we should make clear those implications.”
Hansen also launched a direct attack on the Labour government, criticising its decision to approve a new runway at Heathrow and calling the Kingsnorth proposal a “terrible idea”.
“One power plant with a lifetime of several decades will destroy the efforts of millions of citizens to reduce their emissions,” he said.
Hansen is just one of a number of leading researchers who believe that scientists must get out of their laboratories and campaign on climate change.
They say researchers have spent nearly two decades producing high-quality research demonstrating that the world risks dangerous warming - yet political inaction means CO2 emissions are rising faster than ever. Many also believe the United Nations talks aimed at a global treaty on cutting emissions are likely to fail.
They compare the anger and concern among climate researchers to that felt by physicists as they watched the massive growth in nuclear weapons in the 1950s and 1960s.
Back then, such concerns prompted many leading scientists to become politically active in movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
The leaders of that movement even included Professor Peter Higgs, the theoretical physicist now best known for describing the Higgs Boson particle, which is thought to give matter its mass.
His modern counterparts include scientists such as Dr Simon Lewis, a Royal Society research fellow, at the Earth and Biosphere Institute at Leeds University, whose recent research on the impact of climate change on tropical forests has been published in leading journals such as Nature and Science.
Lewis believes his understanding of climate change means he is morally obliged to become a climate activist. He took part in the recent Climate Camp protests at both Kingsnorth and Heathrow.
He has also joined with other protesters to buy land outside Sipson, the village near Heathrow that would be destroyed by construction of the runway.
“If the government permits the building of new infrastruc-ture which locks us into a future of high CO2 emissions, there is a moral obligation to try to stop them,” he said.
Even the Met Office, which traditionally has been one of the government’s most conservative research institutions, has become quietly radical over climate.
It sent a team of its top climate scientists to the Copenhagen meeting - backing them with a team of publicists who lobbied journalists intensively to maximise coverage of their research.
Others have used scientific publications to make overtly political points. Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre, the government’s leading global warming research centre, recently used the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, one of the world’s most respected academic journals, to call for a “planned global recession” to cut carbon emissions.
“Emissions are rising so fast that we are heading for a world that will be 4C-5C warmer than now by 2100. That would be catastrophic,” he wrote.
“Unless economic growth can be reconciled with unprecedented rates of decarbonisa-tion, it is difficult to foresee anything other than a planned economic recession being compatible with stabilising the climate.”
Even other climate researchers were shocked by such overtly political comments in a pure research paper but Anderson is unrepentant.
Speaking in Copenhagen last week, a meeting he attended by train and ferry to maintain his personal boycott of flights, he said: “Scientists have lost patience with carefully constructed messages being lost in the political noise. We must stand up for what we know.”
Others believe many more scientists will feel obliged to take a similar stand.
Marcus du Sautoy, professor for the public understanding of science and professor of mathematics at Oxford University, said climate change was “galvanising” the scientific community.
“The evidence and data is all there but politicians don’t seem to understand what the science is telling them, so the scientists feel they have to respond,” he said.
John Harris, professor of bioethics at Manchester University, said scientists had become more willing to get politically active after mounting successful campaigns against proposals to put legal restrictions on embryo and stem cell research.
“Scientists are increasingly aware of their public responsibilities and realise there is not much point in doing science unless your findings will be uti-lised. They now realise that if they make themselves heard on climate change then policy makers will react,” he said.
Kathy Sykes, professor of sciences and society at Bristol University, said scientists were increasingly aware that they had a duty to convey their knowledge more effectively - and that meant becoming political.
“Every now and again, when things become absolutely desperate, as it has with climate change, scientists have to become advocates,” she said.
The threat
Copenhagen climate summit - the scientist’s key findings and recommendations:
Humanity is releasing 50 billion tons of CO2 into the air each year - and this is rising by 2%-3% a year, far faster than scientists had predicted
Such emissions are already changing the climate, including an increase in the Earth’s temperature, rising sea levels and a rapid melting of the world’s glaciers
About 40% of humanity’s CO2 emissions are absorbed by the oceans - but these are now acidifying, threatening marine life Global temperature rises could exceed 2C by mid-century, which would cause widespread water shortages and potentially famine
Every year of delay in cutting greenhouse gas emissions makes it much harder to keep the global temperature rise below 2C
Delays also raise the risk of crossing tipping points - changes in the Earth’s dynamics that accelerate the warming effects
Developing countries are least able to cope with climate change, so millions of the world’s poorest people will suffer the worst deprivation as temperatures rise
Humanity would gain many extra benefits from cutting emissions, including new jobs, improved health and preservation of wildlife
Inaction is “inexcusable”. The world has the technology and tools needed to tackle greenhouse gas emissions and rising temperatures