If James Lovelock is completely wrong then we will have created millions of new jobs in many brand new industries and a lot of improved new high tech products and a massive amount of new clean energy which we can create ourselves (sounds horrifying doesn’t it). If Lovelock is RIGHT then we will have done all that we can at this late stage. This is the basic argument put forward as ‘Pascal’s Wager’

And do bear in mind, you sceptics out there, EVEN George Bush finally accepted that Global Warming was real and a serious threat – do you not think that should be telling you something !

danny

The great thing about Lovelock is that he has a good systems wide knowledge and is able to see the big picture and connect it. This issue, all with the ongoing ecological destruction happening globally is way too important not to consider and take very seriously Lovelock’s and others people’s views on things. For example, the ice-core record does show dramatic melting of the ice-sheets in the past and rapid rises in temperate. This time around, things are truly fecked up in advance with the result that much of the slack or resilence of the system is critically damaged.

I really hate this never ending optimism that people have, especially those critical of Lovelock’s statement that it maybe too late, because in every other debate on everything, from climate, to peak oil, to population, to oceans to ecosystems, we are always told there is just enough time to change. This is simply wrong. There is already huge damage, huge changes, massive deforestation, massive destruction (eg. of global fisheries), widespread pollution and so on. Why can’t people accept this is the case already?

Thus, Lovelock is right, humanity needs to essentially go on a war footing as it were. We must declare a global emergency immediately and do everything in our power to salvage the situation.

I think a few good ideas for things that could be done right away, without inventing anything or selling more product, would be to boost and make public transport in every major town and city in the world, free, immediately. This would allow significant reductions in CO-2 right away. Another idea would be for all countries, to being a national programme to install solar water heaters on every building/house and retrofit for insulation, -well in northern latitude countries anyhow. In terms of the global ecosystem, we would need to halt any further destruction of tropical rainforests and reduce farmland back to wild land. People should be encouraged to eat far less meat, thereby reducing the pressure on the need to grow food, since it tables 10kg of grains to grow 1kg of meat. It doesn’t mean becoming vegetarians, but just reducing the quantity. This would allow more of the marginal farmlands to be returned to forest and so help draw down CO-2, and rebuild the CO-2 sinks. Other simple ideas would be to close down the least efficient power stations in terms of CO-2 output. This would mean closing ones burning peat, brown coal and the like.

These measures would and should only be the start. There are millions of others who I am sure have other good ideas. And lastly we should harness the fact that there are actually billions of people so that they can physically go out and physically do stuff in their environment to repair it and thereby rebuild some of the resilence of the system.

POLAR CITIES, google or wiki it.

http://climatechange3000.blogspot.com

Why isn’t anybody talking about them? Only me?

So I guess I can understand Lovelock’s point of view as coming from more of an objective stance on the whole thing.

I do plan to pick up the book, but like most Americans, this article is the first I ever heard of Lovelock, except for a brief mention in an article a few months back on Gore, also from Rolling stone.

The really difficult thing about this hypothesis is that the average person feels basically helpless. Lovelock isn’t saying that we need to change our ways, he’s saying that we need to batten down the hatches and prepare for retribution. Single-ply toilet paper, hybrids, and light bulbs aren’t gonna do the trick. If a solution comes, it will be on the scale of a giant mirror, or sulfuric airplanes, or cloud yachts, or something along those lines. It’s also unfortunate that Lovelock will inevitably have to deal with being shot as the messenger on this, regardless of how right or wrong he is, even if he is trying to save everybody and not simply to scare everybody. But that’s difficult to understand from the perspective of a layman.

Now I’d love 25 million bucks, and I would especially love to save the world, but sadly I don’t think I got the mustard for this one. My best idea so far involves a big net filled with teeny tiny holes, but that probably isn’t exactly practical.

Thanks for the sites and info, I’ll check them out, and I hope that I’ll stumble on something a bit more hopeful.

Thanks for your thoughtful comments. A few points, briefly: Lovelock doesn’t believe that the scientific establishment is “wrong” about global warming — it’s just that, in his view, they haven’t grasped the full picture of what’s going on, nor the implications of those changes. He talks often about how compartmentalized modern science has become, about how scientists know more and more about less and less. He also talks frequently about how afraid many scientists are afraid to speak out — say anything too controversial and they fear they’ll be marginalized, lose their jobs, etc. Obviously, there are exceptions to this — Jim Hansen, for example. (a scientist whom Lovelock has much respect for).

As for the lack of substantive analysis of Lovelock’s views, this is a tricky balance to strike. I too would have liked a little more room for more detail, and early drafts indeed included it. If you want to know more, I suggest you read Lovelock’s latest book, The Revenge of Gaia. And there is a good scientific critique of the book on Real Climate (www.realclimate.org) Also, I quote Wally Broecker in the story — a highly respected paleoclimatologist — as saying that Lovelock’s view that it’s too late to cut emissions is “dangerous nonsense.”

Finally, just a word about Lovelock’s sense that this dark future he imagines will be “exciting.” One of the things I may have failed to communicate in the piece is Lovelock’s particularly British wit. I don’t mean to say that he thinks this is all a joke. Far from it. To Lovelock, “exciting” does not mean “fun”; it means something closer to “vividly alive.”

I enjoyed your article. I had to read it twice, as in the beginning I came across this paragraph shift:

“Lovelock knows that predicting the end of civilization is not an exact science. ‘I could be wrong about all this,’ he admits as we stroll around the park in Norway. ‘The trouble is, all those well-intentioned scientists who are arguing that we’re not in any imminent danger are basing their arguments on computer models. I’m basing mine on what’s actually happening.’

When you approach Lovelock’s house in Devon, a rural area in southwestern England, the sign on the metal gate reads …”

I immediately skimmed past a third of the article to the end to find out his qualifications for possibly the most pessimistic, and horror-filled, assertions I have ever read. It was as if I had just read the sentence: “Dr. James Lovelock says we’re all doomed, you, your wives and husbands, your children, and your friends, absolutely doomed. There is no hope, don’t even try. Kill yourselves today.

Dr. Lovelock was born in England in the late twenties …”

I just thought it was an odd time to change the subject of the article to this guy’s life story. But when I finished the article I re-read the earlier sections on his life ad found them interesting.

Over all though, I think that Lovelock is either a brilliant thinker on the level of Einstein or Newton, or as irresponsible a thinker as there has ever been.

To suggest that close to the whole of the leading scientific thinking on a certain subject is wrong is as incredible a moment as Einstein’s first essays on electro-dynamics, or Newton’s first publications on basic physics. For him to be correct, he must be as ahead of his time as they were of theirs.

I was also a little weirded out by his giddiness when discussing this issue, and his suggestion that those who survive this massive death and human immolation will find it “exciting.” Hmmm … well I guess scientists see things differently than the rest of us. I’ve read Night by Elie Wiesel, a holocaust survivor, and I don’t recall him discussing the Holocaust as exciting.

Either way, I would have liked a bit of discussion with this idea. At the end of the article you quote a few sciency people who say that Lovelock is over-estimating, or that he is perhaps a bit off, but no real discussion takes place with his major assertions. You even mention that Gould and Dawkins laughed at the Gaia models decades ago, but don’t discuss any of the alternative models or even the modern scientists who disagree with him. You also fail to mention that he has changed his mind on how horrible it will be for us all a few times, including September of this year …
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/ energyEnvironment/ Lovelock_Respect_the_Earth_060709.shtml

I would have enjoyed some of the dissenting ideas. Because if we are all totally screwed, it would be nice to indulge in some delusions of a future for my unborn children that doesn’t involve igloo building, war-lording, and people eating.

I have a few pictures and recipes and some science but mainly questions on this site.