NASA climate expert hopes that Copenhagen summit fails

LONDON – A leading scientist who helped alert the entire world to the dangers of global warming said on Thursday that climate talks in Copenhagen next week were based on such flawed proposals that he hoped they failed.

James Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies from 1981, said attempts to forge a global deal on cutting emissions later than the Kyoto treaty expires were based on a "fundamentally wrong" approach.

"I would rather it not happen if people accept that as being the right track because it is a disaster track," he told Britain's Guardian newspaper ahead of the December 7 to18 summit.

James Hansen is highly sceptical about a favoured measure of cutting greenhouse gas emissions, a cap-and-trade system in which a progressively stricter 'right to pollute' is exchanged in a carbon market.

As an alternative, he has previously argued for a direct tax on fossil fuels as the only realistic way to attain the necessary cuts.

"The approach that has been talked about is so fundamentally wrong that it is better to reassess the situation," James Hansen told the paper.

"I think it's just as well that we don’t not have a substantive treaty, because if it is going to be the Kyoto-type thing, and people agree to that, then they will spend years trying to find out exactly what that means and what is a commitment and what are the mechanisms.

"The entire idea that you have goals which you're supposed to meet and that you have outs, with offsets (sold through the carbon market), means you know it is an attempt to continue business as usual."

James Hansen, who made headlines worldwide in the year 1988 with his US Congress testimony that climate change was already well under way, compared the recent approach to the Catholic Church's use of indulgences in the Middle Ages.

Sinners paid the bishops to give them redemption, a system that was patently ridiculous but suited both sides.

"We have got the developed countries who want to continue more or less business as usual and then these developing countries who want money and that are what they can get through offsets," James Hansen said.

Yet, he insisted there was still hope, telling the Guardian: "I find it screwy that people say you passed a tipping point so it is too late.

"In that case what are you thinking: that we’re going to abandon the planet? You want to minimize the damage."