LONDON – A top Nasa scientist said Tuesday that he would rather see no agreement at the Copenhagen climate conference because the whole approach to climate change is so deeply flawed that it would be better to start from scratch.

James Hansen told Britain’s The Guardian newspaper he believed that any agreement that may emerge from the upcoming conference will be deeply flawed.

“I would rather it not happen if people accept that as being the right track because it’s a disaster track,” Hansen said in an interview with the newspaper.

He added: “The whole approach is so fundamentally wrong that it is better to reassess the situation. If it is going to be the Kyoto-type thing then (people) will spend years trying to determine exactly what that means.”

Hansen, who heads the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, is sometimes called the godfather of global warming science. He sounded the alarm bell about global warming in June 1988 during a Washington heat wave, telling a Senate hearing that global warming was already here.

He spoke with The Guardian a few days before the 192-nation conference in Copenhagen, which aims to set parameters for a new climate change agreement to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. That agreement required 37 wealthy nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 2012, but made no demands from rapidly emerging economies like China and India.

Hansen said no political leader can grasp the importance of the issue.

“We don’t have a leader who is able to grasp it and say what is really needed. Instead we are trying to continue business as usual,” he said.

Hansen said dealing with climate change allows no room for political compromises.

“This is analogous to the issue of slavery faced by Abraham Lincoln or the issue of Nazism faced by Winston Churchill,” he said. “On those kind of issues you cannot compromise. You can’t say let’s reduce slavery, let’s find a compromise and reduce it 50 per cent or reduce it 40 per cent.”

– AP, NZHERALD.CO.NZ