The Washington Post had an interview with James Lovelock of Gaia fame. That book explained how the Earth works as a self-regulating negative feedback system. He now thinks that Earth is trapped in a number of positive feedback loops, with everything getter warmer at once.
“The nature of Earth’s biosphere is that, under pressure form industrialization, it resists such heating, and then it resists some more.
Then, he says, it adjusts.
Within the next decade or two, Mr. Lovelock forecasts, Gaia will boost her thermostat.
“It is going too fast,” he says softly. “We will burn.”
Why is that?
“Our global furnace is out of control. By 2020, 2050, you will be able to sail a sailboat to the North Pole. The Amazon will be a desert, and the forests of Siberia will burn and release more methane and plagues will return.”
…Today the environmentally conscious seek salvation in solar sells, recycling and tend thousand wind turbines. “It won’t matter a damn,” Mr. Lovelock says. “They make the mistake of thinking we have decades. We don’t.”…
Mr. Lovelock favors genetically modified crops, which require less water, and nuclear energy. Only the atom can produce enough electricity to persuade industrialized nations to abandon fossil fuels…
What of Three Mile Island? Chernobyl? Mr. Lovelock is shaking his head. How many died, he asks. A few hundred? The radiation exclusion zone around Chernobyl is the lushest and most diverse zone of flora and fauna in Eurasia…
“We desperately need a Moses to take us to the Arctic and preserve civilization.”
James Lovelock is currently promoting his new book, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity.
Update: There is a review of the book here, Goodness, Gracious, Great Balls of Gaia! (with thanks to Muck & Mystery).
September 6, 2006 at 10:53 pm |
Misanthropic mutterings are among the things I like the least about certain environmentalists. On the scale of Cassandras, James Lovelock is off the charts. I also am deeply suspicious of those who embrace nukes as the best way to wean us of oil and praise conservation by default in irradiated areas like Chernobyl.
February 12, 2007 at 7:26 am |
Using nukes to try to address global warming seems like a real bad idea to me. There are other options that are far more effective, less risky in terms of global security, and cheaper.
I’m also not sure that we don’t have decades to do something about global warming. I think we need to act now, but that doesn’t mean we should create a solution that is worse than the problem.