James Hansen is once again in the news for his advocacy efforts. This time he is in the UK to help lead a political protest against coal. The Guardian quotes Hansen as saying that:

The democratic process isn’t working

What he means by this is unclear. It could mean that he thinks that the process needs to be fixed, or that democracy itself is flawed. He further states:

Speaking on the eve of joining a protest against the headquarters of power firm E.ON in Coventry, Hansen said: “The first action that people should take is to use the democratic process. What is frustrating people, me included, is that democratic action affects elections but what we get then from political leaders is greenwash.

“The democratic process is supposed to be one person one vote, but it turns out that money is talking louder than the votes. So, I’m not surprised that people are getting frustrated. I think that peaceful demonstration is not out of order, because we’re running out of time.”

Hansen said he was taking part in the Coventry demonstration tomorrow because he wants a worldwide moratorium on new coal power stations. E.ON wants to build such a station at Kingsnorth in Kent, an application that energy and the climate change minister Ed Miliband recently delayed. “I think that peaceful actions that attempt to draw society’s attention to the issue are not inappropriate,” Hansen said.

I wonder what the second and third actions are? We’ll have to wait and see I guess.

In the Times, Hansen is quoted as well as a number of other scientists discussing their turn to political advocacy, but explicit and implicit. Here is a long excerpt from this very interesting article:

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.