Brown must halt new coal power stations, mad scientist tells court

One of the world's leading climate scientists yesterday called for an immediate halt to the building of all coal-fired power stations to prevent catastrophic global warming.

James Hansen, a former White House adviser and Al Gore's science adviser, giving evidence in a British court, said sticking to a "business as usual" approach would see the planet passing its climate change tipping point.

Hansen was giving evidence in the case of six Greenpeace supporters charged with causing £30,000 of criminal damage when scaling the 200-metre Kingsnorth power station chimney in Kent last October.

The group admit causing the damage when painting the name "Gordon" on the chimney but argue that they were acting legitimately to prevent widespread climate change. The prosecution claims the group went beyond the bounds of acceptable protest.

Asked what his message to Gordon Brown would be, Hansen said: "I would ask him to make a clear public statement for a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants that do not capture CO2. There is enough potential in renewables for our energy requirements. The moratorium should be immediate. We do not need new coal-fired power plants. They all need to be phased out over the next 20 years."

Hansen, director of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a professor at Columbia University, said the man-made rate of change of atmospheric CO2 was 10,000 times greater than natural.

He warned that 1m species would be made extinct because of climate change and calculated that Kingsnorth, which emits 20,000 tonnes of CO2 a day, would be responsible for 400 of these. He told the jury that sea levels were rising at a rate of 3cm per decade, twice as much as the rate in the 20th century. "[If nothing is done] we would be handing our children, our grandchildren and the unborn, a situation that would be out of their control".

He said he agreed with Al Gore's statement that more people should be chaining themselves to coal-powered stations.