Johann Hari: We're witnessing the birth of a new protest movement to force action on global warming

Exactly a year ago today, the US National Association of Insurance Commissioners was due to hold a conference about the consequences of global warming. A slew of experts was primed to present the scientific evidence that it has caused hurricanes to double in intensity since 1975, along with a report from the hard-headed Association of British Insurers showing that storm damage and deaths are going to increase by 60 per cent before I hit middle age. The meeting was cancelled. The venue - New Orleans - had been wrecked.

As Al Gore, the elected 43rd President of the United States, explained to me in Edinburgh last week: "When Katrina hit Florida, it was only a category one hurricane. Then it passed over the unusually warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico and by the time it hit New Orleans, it was a category four." This may be just one small suggestive part, he said, of a global warming-based "collision between our civilisation and the earth". The stakes couldn't be higher: they are "our ability to live on this planet - to have a future as a civilisation". He added with a sad sigh: "I look around for really meaningful signs that we're going to change, and I don't see them."

So I headed for the environmentalist protest camp pitched outside a coal-fuelled power station in Selby, North Yorkshire, in search of such signs. In the shadow of the great cooling towers of Drax - which belch more global-warming gases into the atmosphere than any other single source in western Europe - there was a slew of white tents and the whirr of wind turbines.

Inside I found a blend of Glastonbury and open-air science seminar, where 600 protesters discussed climate chaos with a level of knowledge that would shame our news broadcasters. They discussed the six degrees Celsius of separation that stand between us and global crop failure, the melting of 40 per cent of the Arctic ice shelf in the past 40 years, and the evacuation of the world's low-lying islands (which has already begun).

They planned to shut down Drax for a day, "to stop the vandalism of the climate for just a moment, and to send out a message", as one put it. These protesters were tired of praying the world's scientists have made some unprecedented collective error, or waiting for a political Messiah to solve the problem.

A typical participant was Simon Lewis, a PhD in environmental science from Cambridge University. He explained: "The climate is now almost certainly changing faster than at any point in the earth's history. The ecosystems we all depend on for food are vulnerable to collapse. We are potentially going to unravel the very fabric of life. I know it sounds over the top, but the more you study the science and look at the clear rational evidence, the more terrified you become." He added, plainly: "People are here because they are refusing to witness a crime without doing something."

In open, democratic meetings, they talked about how two-thirds of Britain's CO2 emissions come from coal-powered fire stations - dwarfing all the SUVs and easyJets - and how Drax is currently suing the EU for the right to emit even more warming gases. This camp, they pledged, is only the beginning of a new movement determined to take direct action against the ongoing violence of polluters who knowingly unleash Weather of Mass Destruction across the world. Any violence the protesters might commit - limited strictly to property - will only ever be a tiny fraction of the violence they are combating.

This phenomenon is genuinely new under the sun: riots for restraint. The protest pattern since 1968 has been of young people demanding an abandonment of limits and restraints, and a sober older generation lecturing them on the need for responsibility. Last week saw precisely the opposite. These protesters came here to protest against the disinhibited vandalism of their parents' generation, and to call for a massive slash in carbon emissions now, before the climate starts to hit tipping points beyond which it spirals away from habitability.

The Sun newspaper predictably called the camp "naive beyond belief", but isn't the real naivety coming from people like them who say we should just sit back, ignore the warnings of virtually all the world's scientists, and continue to drastically change the chemical composition of the atmosphere?

The protesters are moving beyond a shallow Cameron-style lifestyle environmentalism that focuses solely on your own personal emissions in a way that teeters close to moral masturbation. They point out that you can spend a lifetime fretting about recycling every piece of paper you use, changing every light bulb in your home and composting every scrap of food, and it is all undone by one fool taking one unnecessary flight to Miami. It is far more effective to use all this energy on political activity that will impose legal restraints on us all.

As one protester, Joss Garman, explained: "It's not enough to burn fewer fossil fuels yourself. The science shows that to survive, we are going to have to force other people to burn fewer fossil fuels too." Normally, the language of forcing people would offend my libertarian instincts. But libertarians do not defend the right of people to smash holes in the hull of a crowded ship, or to let off bombs in city centres. Freedom does not include the freedom to trash the habitat we all depend on for survival.

The Selby climate camp was just a start. For too long, we have allowed the people who want to burn more fossil fuels to set the agenda. Look at the fuel protests. We allowed a small group of anti-greens to bring the country to a halt demanding lower petrol prices without challenge. Garman says now: "If that happens again, people like us will blockade the blockaders, demanding higher petrol prices, and we will stay longer and fight harder than them. Then we can see which side the Government is on."

As the protesters tried - and failed - to force their way into Drax, I couldn't stop thinking about the words of the Canadian conservationist Farley Mowat. Ten years ago, he wrote: "The last three decades of this century have witnessed the ignition of the most significant internal conflict ever to engage the human species.

"It is not the struggle between capitalism and communism or between any other set of 'isms'. It is the conflict between those who possess the means and will to exploit the living world to destruction, and those who are banding together in a desperate and last-ditch attempt to prevent the New Juggernaut from trashing our small planet."

To find out how to support this small band of the sane, go to www.climatecamp.org.uk now. If we don't act to stop this planetary frenzy of self-harm now, there will be more cancelled global warming conferences in more drowned cities.

j.hari@independent.co.uk