The Long Crisis

Global warming is a topic that many people still believe is a hoax. However, James Lovelock, an accomplished and respected British scientist, says that “Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable”. At some point within the next ten years if you are to save yourself you will have to decide who to believe, a few outspoken scientists like Lovelock, or politicians who will say all will be fine until the bitter end and those who will remain in denial until the very day they perish from the unrelenting march of the four horsemen.

James Lovelock is not a crackpot, his credentials are impressive. In the 1960’s Lovelock invented a device that detected CFCs, which helped detect the growing hole in the ozone layer, and introduced the Gaia hypothesis, a revolutionary theory that the Earth is a self-regulating super-organism. Initially ridiculed by many scientists as new age nonsense, today that theory forms the basis of almost all climate science. Lovelock is also an impressive author.

His latest book, The Revenge of Gaia, predicts that by 2020 extreme weather will be the norm, causing global devastation; that by 2040 much of Europe will be Saharan; and parts of London will be underwater. Certainly he is saying what humans do not want to hear; that it is already too late to prevent climate change disaster. Who wants to believe that nothing can be done? That government can not save them?

According to Lovelock most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, like to stop using plastic shopping bags, but they won’t make any difference.

“It’s just too late for it,”(to prevent disaster) 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.”

This is all delivered with an air of benign wonder at the intractable stupidity of people. “I see it with everybody. People just want to go on doing what they’re doing. They want business as usual. They say, ‘Oh yes, there’s going to be a problem up ahead,’ but they don’t want to change anything.”

This week while in China President Obama spoke to the Chinese leaders about presenting a united positive front at the soon to come climate change conference at Copenhagen, Denmark. However, the discusions so far are all about how to take steps to reduce carbon emissions around the world. Even those negoiations are proving to be difficult as no nation seems to be willing to bear the cost of slower economic development today to try to prevent what might happen in the future.

Then if James Lovelock is correct in his analysis of the state of climate change whatever the nations of the world agree to won’t make any real difference. It is already too late. This presents a tremendous problem for the population of the world as few if any political figures anywhere will state that nothing can be done. They always position themselves as being able to solve any challenge. This means that resources will be wasted on measures that won’t work to prevent disaster rather than on dealing with what can be done so at least a good percentage of the population will survive a climate change disaster. If you are going to be a survivor you had best plan on saving yourself.

As Lovelock says, “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, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and 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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