Global warming infects British jury

By Marc Sheppard

Need more proof that climate alarmism breeds insanity? Yesterday, six Greenpeace activists, on trial for criminal damage to a power station, were exonerated by a British jury on the grounds that "the threat of global warming is so great that campaigners were justified in causing more than £35,000 worth of damage." (Source: The Independent.)

Greenpeace's defense was that its members had a "lawful excuse" under Criminal Damage Act 1971 to damage the plant because, in doing so, they were preventing its climate changing pollution from causing far greater damage (like rising sea levels, homeless polar bears and species extinctions) . In fact, the group actually flew in America's most alarming alarmist, NASA's James Hansen, who wants all coal-fired plants decommissioned within the next 20 years, to testify in their defense. Hansen told the court that the new power station would have been responsible for the extinction of no less than "400 species" and then called for Prime Minister Gordon Brown to declare a moratorium on all new coal-fired power plants lacking (currently nonexistent) carbon capture and storage technology.

And the jury thereby bought this utter nonsense that the activists' vandalism represented a "proportionate response" to the hypothetical environmental damage the plant would have inflicted upon the region.

Adding to the sheer insanity of the verdict is the fact that it took place in a country whose citizenry quickly sinks toward poverty, driven by a 25% green tax, while blackouts become more prevalent as nuclear and fossil-fired power stations providing 40% of its power are scheduled to be closed in the next 10 years due to alarmist-driven EU anti-pollution directives.