Top climate scientist calls Obama's Copenhagen climate proposal a 'disaster track'

President Barack Obama is scheduled to travel next week to Copenhagen, Denmark to participate in international talks on a new climate agreement, where he's expected to offer a goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions 17% by 2020.



But one of the leading U.S. climate scientists says that he thinks it would be better if the Copenhagen talks were to collapse as the proposal under consideration is a "disaster track."

James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, made his comment in an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian:

In Hansen's view, dealing with climate change allows no room for the compromises that rule the world of elected politics. "This is analogous to the issue of slavery faced by Abraham Lincoln or the issue of Nazism faced by Winston Churchill," he said. "On those kind of issues you cannot compromise. You can't say let's reduce slavery, let's find a compromise and reduce it 50% or reduce it 40%."

A leading campaigner against coal power, Hansen was arrested this past summer at a protest against mountaintop removal mining in West Virginia.

Hansen, who supports a direct tax on carbon with 100% of the dividend returned to the public, criticizes the complicated and loophole-ridden cap-and-trade approach supported by President Obama and currently being debated in Congress:

"This is analagous to the indulgences that the Catholic church sold in the middle ages. The bishops collected lots of money and the sinners got redemption. Both parties liked that arrangement despite its absurdity. That is exactly what's happening," he said. "We've got the developed countries who want to continue more or less business as usual and then these developing countries who want money and that is what they can get through offsets [sold through the carbon markets]."

Hansen's remarks come amid controversy over hacked e-mails sent by respected climate researchers at the University of East Anglia. Climate change deniers have said the e-mails show scientists engaged in a conspiracy to claim that global warming is due to human activity.

Hansen told Newsweek magazine that the e-mails "indicate poor judgment in specific cases" and said the data behind any analysis should be publicly available. However, he said the e-mails have no effect on the science, which shows that evidence for human-made climate change is "overwhelming."

"The 'contrarians' or 'deniers' do not have a scientific leg to stand on," Hansen said. "Their aim is to win a public relations battle, or at least get a draw, which may be enough to stymie the actions that are needed to stabilize climate."

(Photo of James Hansen from Goddard Institute for Space Studies' website.)