Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [107]
Hansen has pointed out that, although general funding for tackling climate change has increased dramatically in recent years, the lion’s share has gone to those who are the most cautious. ‘It seems to me that scientists downplaying the dangers of climate change fare better when it comes to getting funding,’ he says. He has personal experience of this. In 1981, the US Department of Energy reversed a decision to award his research group a grant. They explicitly told him that it was because they didn’t like a paper he had published on the likely effects of continued fossil fuel use.
The trouble is, if a body such as the IPCC plays down the likely impact of global warming, how can anyone decide on the most appropriate response to the real situation? As Carl Sagan pointed out when considering the likely effects of a nuclear winter, if scientists don’t make the objective view available, how will anyone know what it looks like and understand what to do? Hansen’s response to the conservatism of the IPCC is straightforward: ‘Do we not know enough to say more?’ he asks. In 2004, he broke a fifteen-year ‘self-imposed effort to stay out of the media’ and began to speak up.
In 2006, the New York Times reported on NASA’s attempt to silence Hansen. His call for immediate cuts to carbon emissions, made at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, led to NASA insisting that Hansen’s supervisors stand in for him in any future media interviews. His response was to shrug his shoulders and carry on; to Hansen, this is a moral issue that has as much social import as civil rights or fascism.
When governments drag their feet over such issues, civil disobedience becomes the only option for citizens, Hansen says. That is why, in March 2009, he joined a protest against coal-burning power stations held at the Capitol Power Plant in Washington, DC. The organisers celebrated the event as ‘the biggest act of civil disobedience against global warming in American history’, and it was there that Hansen first declared his willingness to be arrested for the cause.
He didn’t have long to wait. On 23 June, West Virginia State Police arrested Hansen and dozens of other demonstrators, including the actress Daryl Hannah, for trespassing on the property of a coal-mining company. Massey Energy were planning to blow the top off a Raleigh County mountain to get at the coal seams beneath, a practice that has been widely condemned for the environmental havoc it wreaks. In September 2010 Hansen was arrested again, this time during a protest – against the same practice – held outside the White House.
Hansen is always careful to make it very clear that in participating in these protests he is acting in a personal capacity, and not as a NASA representative. But, that done, he shows no sign of toning it down. These days he is advocating putting legal pressure on governments who, he says, have a ‘responsibility to protect the rights of young people and future generations’.
Unlike Rachel Carson, James Hansen is not a particularly gifted communicator. His writing is plain, sometimes clunky, and almost entirely untroubled by poetic flourishes. It is quite the kind of writing one would expect of a self-declared ‘slow-paced taciturn scientist from the Midwest’. One thing Hansen does have, and what seems to have set him on the same path as Carson, is grandchildren. His biggest fear, as a climate scientist with all the facts before him, is that his grandchildren will one day look back and justly accuse him of understanding exactly what