Top NASA climatologist James Hansen endorses eco-vandalism.

Prominent NASA climatologist James Hansen, a close ally of global-warming activist Al Gore and one of the world’s leading scientific voices warning of a global climate crisis, has endorsed eco-vandalism.

Hansen’s controversial turn stems from testimony he gave this month in a London criminal trial against Greenpeace supporters who were accused of defacing — at a cost of $60,000 in property damage — Kingsnorth, an English coal plant. Hansen testified in support of the defense’s assertion that the Greenpeace members had a “lawful excuse” because they were acting to protect property around the world “in immediate need of protection” from the impacts of global warming — caused in part, they allege, by coal burning.

By crossing the line to the side of destructive violence, Hansen — often hailed as the “the world’s leading climate scientist” by green organizations and praised by Time magazine as one of the world’s “100 Most Influential People” — has seriously damaged the credibility of a movement that has struggled to separate its apocalyptic rhetoric from more extreme environmentalists who demand violent action to match that rhetoric.

It is as if Dr. C. Everett Koop, a prominent anti-abortion physician, had testified in favor of vandalizing abortion clinics.

The Sierra Club — one of the world’s leading green organizations and which just last year teamed with Hansen and the American Solar Energy Society on a new report laying out a plan for dramatically reducing the nation’s greehouse-gas emissions — would not comment on Hansen but distanced itself from eco-vandalism. Said a Sierra Club spokesperson: “We don’t advocate destruction of property.”

According to The Independent newspaper in London, Hansen “asserted that emissions of carbon dioxide from Kingsnorth (power station) would damage property through the effects of the climate change they would help to cause.” But, although “there’s just barely still time,” said Hansen, mankind needs an immediate moratorium on the construction of all new coal fired power plants. Somebody, he concluded to the jury, needs “to stand up.”

The jury ruled in favor of the defendants, the so-called Kingsnorth Six. The Independent reported the news under the headline: “Jury decides that threat of global warming justifies breaking the law.”

The ruling shocked British industry, set a precedent for more eco-vandalism, and will likely complicate Hansen’s tenure at NASA.

Hansen’s endorsement is likely to embolden radicals in the United Kingdom and possibly in the U.S., where members of the Earth Liberation Front have torched suburban homes, SUVs, logging trucks, ranger stations, and a ski resort in Vail, Colo., causing many millions of dollars in damage.

“The ramifications are huge,” writes Iain Murray, an environmental-science expert with the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “Operators of coal-fired power stations in the U. K. have just been stripped of legal protection from the criminal actions of the environmental lobby.”

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