By Gregory Childress

gchildress@heraldsun.com; 419-6645

CHAPEL HILL — There is no getting around the irony of James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and a leading authority on climate change, standing on a slab of ice left over from a winter storm talking about global warming.

So, there he was Tuesday, in front of UNC’s coal-fired steam and power plant, preaching the good word to about 15 sign-carrying disciples who want to see the university move toward becoming a coal-free institution.

“I’m very heartened by young people standing up and asking for proper attention to this issue,” said Hansen, who also spoke in some classes this week. “I’m also heartened about the university responding in a positive way.”

Hansen, who made it clear that he was speaking as a private citizen, was talking about UNC Chancellor Holden Thorp’s decision last week to create a new Energy Task Force to study the university’s carbon reduction effort and to review what other universities are doing in that area.

UNC has set as a goal to be carbon-free by 2050, but one campus organization, Coal-Free UNC — one of the event’s sponsors along with the Sierra Club Coal-Free Campus Campaign — wants the university to move that date up to 2015.

The university burns more than 100,000 tons of coal each year.

“This is a great first step in the right direction that we hope will allow UNC to open up the space for research and innovation to find ways to move Carolina away from coal as quickly as possible because coal is the dirtiest possible energy source we could be using today,” said Stewart Boss, a UNC freshman who is the media outreach coordinator for the Sierra Club’s Coal-Free UNC Campaign.

Hansen urged UNC and other universities to take the lead in doing away with coal.

“If we phase out coal over the next 20 years, we can solve the problem,” Hansen said.

Hansen was joined at the press conference by José Rial, a glaciologist and member of the Geological Sciences faculty at UNC, and Patricia Leighten, a Chapel Hill resident and neighbor to the plant.

“This plant behind us is the single largest source of air pollution in Orange County,” Leighten said. “This is jeopardizing the health of me and my neighbors and is a major public health issue in the town and county.”

Hansen said the bill for health issues caused by the burning of coal will be picked up by the public instead of companies and institutions that insist on using it for energy.

“The costs are going to be humongous,” Hansen said.

Rial said the world is quickly running out of time to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

“In my fieldwork I see Greenland’s ice cap melting and breaking apart every year, inducing sea level rise at rates faster than the best models have predicted,” Rial said. “If we stop burning coal on campus we will set a great example for the state and the country that will help globally to address the impacts of climate change, and regionally to stop the environmental degradation that coal mining is causing, especially in Appalachia.”

Hansen has been outspoken against the Obama Administration’s cap and trade proposals, contending that developed nations favor such a system because it would allow them to continue to do business as usual.

One of the first to sound the alarm about global warming in the 1980s, Hansen was named by Time magazine in 2006 as one of the world’s most influential people.

Hansen last year published his first book, titled “Storms of my Grandchildren.” In it, he writes about his realization that his grandchildren might ask him why he didn’t do more to stop global warming, the government’s lack of action on climate change and recent changes in his own understanding of climate change.