By Dr. Ludwig De Braeckeleer
Tuesday, September 5, 2006
World-renowned scientist James Lovelock warns that it's already too late to stem climate change
By the end of this century, "billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the arctic, where the climate remains tolerable."
"We have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and realize how little time is left to act, and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilization for as long as they can."
These apocalyptic predictions come from none other than Dr. James Lovelock, the scientist best known for the Gaia theory, according to which the Earth is a super-organism. a highly respected scientist, Lovelock is a fellow of the Royal Society of England.
Lovelock's Web Site is read by millions of people. Influential British citizens have already endorsed his views on global warming. Sir David King, science adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair, considers global warming far more threatening than terrorism. Sir Brian Heap, a past foreign secretary of the Royal Society, has described Lovelock's work as brilliant and well argued.
Lovelock is convinced that the climatic system is out of order. He believes that average temperatures will increase 5C in the tropics and an astounding 8C in the temperate areas. If he is right, vast regions of the planet would become arid. Lands unsuitable for farming would be soon deserted by the population.
"Our global furnace is out of control. By 2020, 2025, you will be able to sail a sailboat to the North Pole. The amazon will become a desert, and the forests of Siberia will burn and release more methane and plagues will return."
Lovelock has little sympathy for environmentalists who hope to fix the problem with the so-called green energies.
"It won't matter a damn. They make the mistake of thinking we have decades. We don't," Lovelock says. "I am a Green, and I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy."
"I have never regarded nuclear radiation or nuclear power as anything other than a normal and inevitable part of the environment. Our prokaryotic forebears evolved on a planet-sized lump of fallout from a star-sized nuclear explosion, a supernova that synthesized the elements that go to make our planet and ourselves," Lovelock wrote in his book The ages Of Gaia.
Of course, Lovelock is not opposed to using renewable energies. He simply disputes whether they can fix the problem of global warming before it gets out of control.
"There's no realization of how quickly and irreversibly the planet is changing. Maybe 200 million people will migrate close to the arctic and survive this. Even if we took extraordinary steps, it would take the world 1,000 years to recover," Lovelock says.
It is not the first time that Lovelock has made a dramatic prediction. In the 1950s, he designed an electron capture device which he eventually used to demonstrate that some chemicals, chlorofluorocarbons (CFC), were burning a hole in the ozone layer above the antarctica.
"If Lovelock hadn't discovered the erosion of the ozone, we'd all be living under the ocean in snorkels and fins to escape that poisonous sun," says Paul Ehrlich, a world-renowned biologist from Stanford University.
almost half a century ago, world leaders listened to his predictions and acted accordingly. The Vienna Convention of 1985 and the Montreal protocol of 1987 have strongly regulated the use of gases responsible for the degradation of the ozone layer.
In a report published on aug. 18, the World Meteorological Organization predicts that the situation will be back to normal by 2060-2075 above the antarctica and a bit sooner for average latitudes and the artic.
Is Lovelock right again? Will the world decision makers pay attention to his new warning?
"I have children, I have grandchildren, I wish none of this. But it's our fate; we need to recognize it's another wartime. We desperately need a Moses to take us to the arctic and preserve civilization. It's too late to turn back."