The Long Crisis

Posts Tagged ‘Climate Change’

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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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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While the headline news for the past few months has been about the worldwide economic crisis a crisis of another even more life threatening sort for millions of people is accelerating.

U.S. and British government researchers reported on Friday that one Antarctic ice shelf has quickly vanished, another is disappearing and glaciers are melting faster than anyone thought possible due to climate change.

Scientists say that the Wordie Ice Shelf, which had been disintegrating since the 1960s, is gone and the northern part of the Larsen Ice Shelf no longer exists. More than 3,200 square miles (8,300 square km) have broken off from the Larsen shelf since 1986.

“The rapid retreat of glaciers there demonstrates once again the profound effects our planet is already experiencing — more rapidly than previously known — as a consequence of climate change,” U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement.

“This continued and often significant glacier retreat is a wake up call that change is happening … and we need to be prepared,” USGS glaciologist Jane Ferrigno, who led the Antarctica study, said in a statement.

“Antarctica is of special interest because it holds an estimated 91 percent of the Earth’s glacier volume, and change anywhere in the ice sheet poses significant hazards to society,” she said.

In addition, scientists report that glaciers and ice sheets are melting in the Arctic at an unexpected fast rate. The process of climate change is now thought by some scientists as irreversible. Renowned British scientist James Lovelock states that “The Earth is about to catch a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years”. Lovelock is certain that the positive feedback loop for an acceleration of climate change has already been established.

And what does that mean for you and me? Briefly the world is going to become a good bit warmer over the next 50 years or so. How we will be effected depends greatly upon our age. If you are 60 years old during your lifetime you probably will not notice too much difference except for increased drought in some parts of the world and increased flooding in other regions. If you live in regions that are subject to hurricanes, tornadoes, or typhoons you will probably witness increasingly powerful storms across many areas of the earth.

If you are now 25 years old during your lifetime you will likely witness entire coastal areas being abandoned due to raising sea levels. Low laying coastal areas will disappear beneath the sea. Almost certainly you will witness great increases in disease and starvation in what are now temperate climate zones as a temperature rise of only a degree or two will destroy crop yields and extend the range of tropical diseases.

As grim as the current financial crisis is and may become another challenge faces all of mankind that must be soon confronted with massive action if several billions of humans are going to avoid mass extinction. President Obama is most certainly right about one thing. He as well as the rest of us will have to be able to multi task and learn to deal with converging crisis or not many humans will be on this earth even one hundred years from now.

The long crisis is more than just a crisis in financial engineering. The sooner we realize this fact and start planning for ways to cope with climate change the better chance we and especially future generations will have for survival..

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