This man is dangerous....

James Hansen is dangerous and wants to take us back to the 11th century.....

Two events in recent days shed light on a battle at the heart of government over what threatens to be as serious a crisis as Britain has ever faced.

The first was at Maidstone Crown Court, where six Greenpeace activists face charges of criminal damage at Kingsnorth power station. In protest at a plan by E.On to build a 1,600 megawatt coal-fired plant on the site, the demonstrators had tried to paint the slogan "Gordon bin it" on a 630-foot chimney. They were interrupted by a court injunction after painting the Prime Minister's Christian name, which it then cost E.On £35,000 to remove.

What elevated this case into more than just a local incident was the presence, as Greenpeace's chief witness, of Al Gore's friend James Hansen, head of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who has done more than any other scientist in the past 20 years to promote alarm over global warming.

Greenpeace's case is that its members had a "lawful excuse" to damage the power station because they were only seeking to prevent it causing much greater damage through rising sea levels and extinctions brought about by climate change.

Mr Hansen told the court that the new power station alone would be responsible for the extinction of "400 species".

It might seem odd that a senior US public official should fly the Atlantic to support the defendants in a criminal trial, but Mr Hansen regards it as a test case in the campaign by greens on both sides of the Atlantic to close down all coal-fired power stations in the next 20 years.