British climate change science forecaster James Lovelock believes catastrophe is inevitable, carbon offsetting is a joke and ethical living a scam. What if he is right? What can you do?
Lovelock believes that most of the things we have been told to do to combat climate change might make us feel better, but they won’t make any difference. He believes that global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.
“It’s just too late for it,” he says. “Perhaps if we’d gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don’t have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can’t say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do.”
“You’re never going to get enough energy from wind to run a society such as ours,” he says. “Windmills! Oh no. No way of doing it. You can cover the whole country with the blasted things, millions of them. Waste of time.”
He dismisses eco ideas briskly, one by one. “Carbon offsetting? I wouldn’t dream of it. It’s just a joke. To pay money to plant trees, to think you’re offsetting the carbon? You’re probably making matters worse. You’re far better off giving to the charity Cool Earth, which gives the money to the native peoples to not take down their forests.”
James Lovelock’s dire predictions about our climate change future might be dismissed as the rant of a slightly crazy old man, Lovelock is 86, if he hadn’t been so right about the trend of things related to climate change for so long. He wrote a book in the 1960′s, “The Revenge of Ghia ” in which he visualized the earth as being one big living alive ecosystem. His book was thought to be pretty far out there in the fringes of nutty scientific literature at the time but has since become the bible of modern thought in earth sciences circles. Lovelock’s research and opinions are highly regarded among his peers.
Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible, and that nothing can prevent large parts of the planet from soon becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking underwater, resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics. Due to a change in ocean currents he believes that Britain’s climate may actually improve.
Lovelock believes that Britain is going to become a lifeboat for refugees from mainland Europe, so instead of Brits wasting their time on wind turbines they need to start planning how to survive. Of course, this principal applies to Americans as well as anyone else who hopes to survive drastic changes in earth’s climate.
To Lovelock, the logic is clear. The sustainability brigade are insane to think we can save ourselves by going back to nature; our only chance of survival will come not from less technology, but more. Lovelock forecasts that by the year 2100 the human race will be reduced from current levels by up to 80%. Yet he believes that the survivors will be a better version of humans who through the use of technology have been able to adapt to vastly different living conditions than we have on earth today.
Lovelock says that “There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that’s just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we’ll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That’s the source of my optimism.”
What would Lovelock do now about climate change you may wonder? He says: “Enjoy life while you can. Because if you’re lucky it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan.”
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The Earth has maintained relatively stable conditions (those suitable for complex life forms) for time out of mind. Those who believe puny little human beings are in a position to alter those conditions more than, say, minuscule changes in solar output, appear to misunderstand the meaning of a “buffered solution.”
As a kid I recall all sorts of wild fantasies about how much humanity could screw up the planet. Nuclear winter was the Big Fear then, as though launching every nuke in all the governments’ arsenals would make more of a “bang” than the volcanic eruptions that occur each year and occasionally peak in spectacular shows like the VEI-8 eruption that created the Yellowstone caldera.
As recently as 1991′s eruption of Mt. Pinatubo we see nature outdoes anything man can imagine. Pinatubo’s VEI-6 eruption ejected an estimated 25 cubic km of material.
The climate changes. It has always changed and always will. All this stuff about CO2 being a pollutant has all the hallmarks of a junk science fad, and the fact that it is cited as a rationale for coercive government intervention in people’s lives makes it a political lie for science as Keynesian “theory” is a political lie for economics.
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